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Under New Management. Interview With David Burkus

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NewManagement_3DDavid Burkus is a best-selling author, an award-winning podcaster, management professor, and TEDxUniversityofNevada 2016 speaker. In 2015, he was named one of the emerging thought leaders most likely to shape the future of business by Thinkers50, the world’s premier ranking of management thinkers. His latest book, Under New Management, challenges the traditional and widely accepted principles of business management and proves that they are outdated, outmoded, or simply don’t work — and reveals what does.

David’s first book, The Myths of Creativity, was very well written. I’m still reading his new book and will post my review soon. Below you will find my interview with David about the new book, Under New Management.

How’d you come up with the idea for Under New Management?

After I wrote my first book, The Myths of Creativity, in which I talked a bit about practices like hackathons and 20% time that spurred innovation, I started to get even more curious about the things innovative companies were doing that seemed unusual or opposite of “best practices.” As I travelled down that rabbit hole I found lots of people writing about why the ideas were unique and appealing, but no one was making the case for why these practices work so well. Since organizational psychology is my background, I started to look at these ideas through the lens of human behavior and found compelling reasons for why they might be better than best practices.

What were some of your favorite places to visit and people to meet?

Two companies I really enjoyed getting to know were Eden McCallum in the United Kingdom and SumAll in the United States. Eden McCallum is a consulting firm that operates on a network model. Instead of keeping a bloated roster of junior, mid-level, and senior consultants who all need to both consult and find new business, Eden McCallum’s full-time partners find new projects and then go to their database of hundreds of freelance consultants. They then build a team based on what the client’s project demands, instead of just who is available at the time, and because of this they are able to construct teams with the right level of new and old consultants, old colleagues keep the project on track and new colleagues provide fresh thinking. What started as an experimental business model revealed some shocking findings in their ability to come up with outstandingly innovative solutions for clients.

SumAll is a social media analytics company here in the United States, its founder Dane Atkinson was one of the more interesting entrepreneurs I’ve ever met. He’s committed to building a workplace where the management practices and company policies consider employees first, and what will empower those employees to do their best work. I initially reached out to Dane about SumAll’s policy of salary transparency, but found that SumAll is actually practicing a LOT of the ideas I found in my research, and he was hungry to learn more and find out new ways to engage his people. In my interview with Dane, he said what became my favorite single sentence in the book: “Great leaders don’t reinvent the product; they reinvent the factory.”

How can a leader identify what parts of the factory need innovating?

What is holding your people back? When Netflix made the revolutionary decision to remove its vacation policy and make vacation days unlimited, they did so because an employee asked founder Reed Hastings a simple question. Netflix had never asked employees to track the days they worked, the employee pointed out, so why was it now asking them to track the days they did not work? Hastings didn’t have a good answer, and realized the bureaucratic task of tracking and calculating vacation days was annoying his people and limiting their potential, so he eliminated it. In fact, most of the practices discussed in Under New Management arose more from elimination (eliminate the hierarchy, eliminate pay secrecy, eliminate bureaucratic performance reviews) than from addition. It’s not about breaking rules, per se, it’s about finding the rules that are limiting your employees’ potential and eliminating them.

What do you think will be the next big change?

I’m not totally sure what the next change will be, but I think I know where it will come from. As the “gig economy” continues to build steam and attract attention, one aspect few people are talking about is that those who drive for Uber or put their house for rent on Arbnb are similar to employees in some ways and similar to entrepreneurs in others. This is going to lead to a lot of questions about how do you manage a fleet of what are essentially volunteers? The answers to those questions, are probably going to sound like a lot of the ideas in Under New Management.

Please watch David’s TEDxUniversityofNevada 2016 talk below, and please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

Related Posts:

Myths of Creativity: My Interview With David Burkus

Leader Lab: My Interview With David Burkus

The Warning Rocks Leadership!

 

The post Under New Management. Interview With David Burkus appeared first on Bret L. Simmons - Positive Organizational Behavior.


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