Management hack against bureaucracy

I had been consistent in hitting the bed early and rising early to do more work. But not this time. For three consecutive nights, I stayed till about three in the morning attending WOBI New York Webinar, listening and learning with fascination to the ideas and principles presented by Gary Hamel.

Hamel is on the London Business School faculty for more than 30 years and is the Management Innovation Exchange Director. The Wall Street Journal has ranked Gary as the world’s most influential business thinker, and Fortune magazine has called him the world’s leading expert on business strategy. Suppose I can define Hamel in just one sentence. In that case, Hamel is a full-fledged, card-carrying anti-bureaucracy warrior who has spent years fighting the crusade of wasteful management bloat that has hindered innovation and initiative and decreased business productivity and profitability. Now I know that it is a long sentence, but watching him has grown better and more affluent over the years in terms of experience and ideas. His astute observation of his huge corporate clientele indicates that even with modern-day digital tools, the bureaucracy level continues to bloat and has wasted resources that would have been of better use towards innovation and productivity.

An emphatic point Hamel pounds is that more so in a pandemic environment is the need for innovation and initiative required and bureaucracy in organizations restrict this from happening. Hamel presents a case on how innovation and initiative can happen when the organization allows the people to do “management hacks.” To build a little experiment that doesn’t blow anything up that doesn’t require a big budget.

An example given by Hamel involves his big European pharmaceutical company. And this is his story: A group of senior leaders was very frustrated by the company’s travel policies. They have stringent rules such that even a senior leader had to be governed by what airline you could fly, what hotels you could stay in, and how much you can spend every day per diem. One senior executive says: “I may have $70 million in sales. I’m still thinking, like, do I get reimbursed for a $3 cup of coffee.” This group of disgruntled executives said that was their kind travel policy bureaucratic stupid. So now how do you change?

Hamel says they ran a little experiment. Being a pharma company, they certainly know how to run experiments. They set up two treatment groups and two control groups and ran the experiment. For each of the treatment groups, they announced the following for the next 30 days: “You travel anytime you like, anywhere you like, no budget, no permissions, just go do it. Suppose you want to travel first class on airlines. Go ahead. You want to stay at the Four Seasons, no problem. Oh, by the way, when you come back from your trip, we’re going to take all of your receipts, NO AUDIT, you can do whatever you like, but we are going to put all of those online so everybody in the organization can see exactly what you spent and how you spent it.”

They ran the experiment for 30 days, and guess what they found in the treatment groups. There was a measurable increase in engagement from that one change. One executive says, “They are no longer treating us as children.” Travel costs went down, and the treatment groups people were more careful. And they got rid of all of the bureaucratic bs around travel. This management hack driven by innovation and initiative worked brilliantly. It also shows how traditional, outmoded, bureaucratic structures and practice have continued to limit and restrict business organizations’ progress.

There is a load of ideas and principle Hamel presented that space would not allow me to provide. Perhaps you can catch Hamel with his new book released in August last year entitled: “Humanocracy.” I would recommend that decision-makers follow the program offerings of WOBI as they feature world-class speakers, authors, and practitioners who share principles and ideas on how we can improve our leadership skills and improve our business. Three nights of attending the webinar from midnight to 2:30 in the early morning, that is a low price to pay in exchange for learning how we can increase innovation, initiative, and productivity.

(Connect with Francis Kong at www.facebook.com/franciskong2. Or listen to “Business Matters” Monday to Friday at 8 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. over 98.7 dzFE-FM ‘The Master’s Touch,’ the classical music station.)