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Mobilizing Minds: Creating Wealth From Talent in the 21st Century Organization

Mobilizing Minds: Creating Wealth From Talent in the 21st Century Organization

by Claudia L. Joyce (Author), Lowell L. Bryan (Author)

  • Used

    Illustrated 2007

    $3.28
Synopsis

Based on a decade of exclusive research, Lowell Bryan and Claudia Joyce of McKinsey & Company have come up with a simple yet revolutionary conclusion: Your workforce is the key to growth in the 21st century. By tapping into their underutilized talents, knowledge, and skills you can earn tens of thousands of additional dollars per employee, and manage the interdepartmental complexities and barriers that prevent real achievements and profits.

This can only be accomplished through organizational design and redesign. That's the new model for survival in the modern, digital, global economy. With the right design, your organization will have the capabilities to pursue whatever strategy is necessary to compete on any scale, react to any market change, leverage any opportunity, and sail past the competition.

In Mobilizing Minds, the authors distill their research into seven strategic ideas that shatter the complexity frontiers, have the potential to unleash enormous profits, and enable long-term success for every company. Bryan and Joyce outline innovative principles that enable corporations to:

  • Manage complexity, bureaucracy, and redundancy
  • Use hierarchical authority to strengthen the authority of key managers and drive performance
  • Deliver operating earnings while implementing wealth-creation strategies
  • Allow formal networks, talent, and knowledge marketplaces to work in a large company
  • Motivate and reward wealth-creating behavior
  • Pursue organizational design as a corporate strategy
  • Increase worker satisfaction

It is imperative for corporations to put the same energy used for new products and processes into organizational design. That's where the money is. That's where the opportunities lie. That's the key to surviving and prospering in the 21st century.

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More Information

Format: Illustrated
 Pages: 300
 Edition: Illustrated
 Publisher: McGraw Hill
Published: 01 Jun 2007
ISBN 10: 0071490825
ISBN 13: 9780071490825

Media Reviews
Considering so many of us are supposed to be working in something called the knowledge economy , it is absurd how stupidly designed so many businesses and organisations actually are. Matrix structures are piled on ad hoc reorganisations, divisions are divided, parcelled up and then redivided all over again. No wonder accountabilities get blurred, employees are confused and performance suffers. A key problem in this digital age has been the failure to adapt the way businesses are organised. Few leaders see their company as a complete system. Instead, they try to carry out partial running repairs, leaving a fundamentally outdated structure in place. This is the argument put forward by McKinsey's Lowell Bryan and Claudia Joyce in their ambitious new book, Mobilizing Minds. The authors believe that the great majority of businesses are underperforming precisely because their most important intangible assets - the ideas and creativity of their knowledge workers - are unwittingly suppressed by the way in which these businesses are set up to operate. Trying to run a company in the 21st century with an organising model designed for the 20th century places limits on how well a company performs, they write. The plagues of the modern company are hard-to-manage workforce structures, thick silo walls, confusing matrix structures, e-mail overload and 'undoable jobs'. Having studied the performance of the most successful businesses, Bryan and Joyce conclude that thinking-intensive companies do best when they unleash talent rather than constrain it. And looking at a new measure, profitability per employee, is a useful discipline towards raising overall levels of performance. Profit per employee is a good proxy for earnings on intangibles, the authors say. It should become the most important measure of success, ahead even of returns on capital. That should be looked at just to ensure that they are sufficient to cover the costs of capital, Bryan and Joyce say. The authors know what success looks like. It involves a virtuous circle of productive activity: knowledge being exchanged, reputations being built, relationships being established and developed, competencies growing stronger. And, all the while, profits per employee climb. The numbers involved are not trivial. If a company with 300,000 employees can add $13,333 of rents per employee (that is, earnings requiring no additional employment of capital or labour), by reducing unproductive complexity, it can add $4bn in additional earnings, the authors argue. They estimate that this could add as much as $40bn in market capitalisation. Leaders have failed to grasp the possibilities of the digital era. The trial-and-error period of discovery has been under way for over a decade now, Bryan and Joyce say. (At which point you have to ask: so what have the strategy consultants been doing all this time?) Business has botched the introduction of new technology. In cities the problem is congestion. In companies, the problem is unproductive complexity. So much for the - extremely good - diagnosis. What about the cure? Bryan and Joyce advocate a radical overhaul of the way organisations are designed. For example, even the largest organisations need no more than four layers of management from top to bottom. Front-line managers, like military captains, should be free to make tactical decisions close to the front line , within the context of a strategy set by top management. There should be one company governance and culture , supported by a partnership ethos at the top. And a portfolio of initiatives approach would lead to more dynamic management, while maintaining the discipline of meeting earnings targets. There are other, more radical suggestions for practical steps here concerning the management of people. Formal networks will help spread good ideas. There should be talent marketplaces , with capable employees free to plot their own career path internally. New performance measurement is required to reward people's contribution to team as well as individual success. This is a densely written, powerfully argued book. Cynics will interpret the call for organisational redesign as a make-work scheme for management consultants. But even they would have to concede that this critique of organisational stasis is very well done indeed. Financial Times 20070712
Author Bio

Harvard MBA Lowell L. Bryan is a Director (Senior Partner) at McKinsey & Company. Over the past 30 years, he has spoken and written extensively on strategy, organization, and financial services. Bryan has been a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal editorial page, has had articles published in numerous periodicals, including the Harvard Business Review and the McKinsey Quarterly, and has authored or coauthored several other books.

Claudia I. Joyce is a Principal at McKinsey & Company and a core member of the Financial Services and Strategy Practices. Her work has been published on McKinsey's Knowledge Web and in the McKinsey Quarterly. She is a graduate of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University (MBA) and of the University of Chicago (B.A. in Economics).