CHANGING THE ROLE OF TOP MANAGEMENT - BEYOND SYSTEMS TO PEOPLE

In the postwar years, planning and control systems were the tools that enabled companies to grow and helped managers deal with sprawling ent erprises. Yet many of the problems companies experience today are inhe rent in the strategy-structure-systems doctrine that produced those to ols. The systems that allowed managers to control employees also inhib ited creativity and initiative. Today the challenge for top-level mana gers is to engage the knowledge and skills of each person in the organ ization in order to create what the authors call an individualized cor poration. In this kind of company, managers personally develop up-and- coming leaders and deploy them strategically within the organization; executives may spend half or more of their time coaching their managem ent teams. The direct personal contact that top-level managers maintai n with others not only keeps those at the top apprised of the real iss ues and challenges their businesses face but also gives them the oppor tunity to shape frontline managers' responses to those issues. In the individualized corporation, top-level managers don't direct and correc t middle and frontline managers; they create an environment in which i ndividuals monitor themselves. The assumption is that given the same i nformation, incentives, and authority to act, frontline managers will reach the same decisions that top-level managers would have reached. T he authors have conducted research on 20 high-performing corporations. They have concluded that systems, no matter how sophisticated, can ne ver replace the richness of close personal communication and contact b etween top-level and frontline managers.