Persistent in Efforts, Modest in Expectations
"A crisis is a productive state. You simply have to eliminate its aftertaste of catastrophe." (Max Frisch)
The yearning for a new and better form of cooperation where we can create value not just despite but because of valuing people is greater than ever. Taylorism and industrialization have degraded people to resources. Back then, only the labor of the unskilled worker was in demand, and Henry Ford once complained that he always got a brain when asking just for a pair of hands. In our age of knowledge work, people's roles, qualifications, and demands have differentiated in many ways. However, the basic principle of viewing and running organizations as machines and treating employees as cogwheels has remained unchanged.1
I Have a Dream
I have this dream of a new and better working world.
I have the dream that the economy will someday serve people and life and vice versa.
I have the dream that people are seen as the ends of economic activity, not just the means of it.
I have a dream that we put the miserably failed attempt to motivate people with incentives on the shelf and instead build organizations that do not demotivate people to the extent that they need external motivation.
I have a dream that people will no longer be used as resources but that the development of individual potential will be seen as a decisive competitive factor.
I have this dream every day.
Let's dream together. Let's create a new and better world of work step by step. And let's build humane organizations for the age of digitalization. "Persistent in our efforts, modest in our expectation of success," quoting the wise life motto of Götz W. Werner, founder of the German dm drugstore chain.2
Enabling Self-Leadership
In a world in which it is "normal that many things have become different and are becoming more different faster and faster," as the business education teacher and time researcher Karlheinz A. Geißler aptly put it3, the role of leadership is, at the very least, up for discussion.
Leadership is not about you and your ego but making others successful. For Götz W. Werner, leadership was only legitimate in enabling self-leadership4. Leadership is an attitude, not a position. This book describes this attitude and the principles of new, agile, digital, and, above all, humane leadership.
As mentioned in the introduction, I created the six theses forming the core of this Manifesto for Humane Leadership in 2018 during BMW Group IT's agile transformation. They were my first attempt to answer how leadership needs to change to enable empowerment and self-organization as the foundational elements of true agility.
However, in hindsight, this transformation journey was just a welcome opportunity to breathe new life into long-standing concepts of servant leadership. Over time, this book became my idealistic and perhaps naïve attempt to create organizations and working environments that are more "species-appropriate" for knowledge workers.
The starting point amid BMW Group IT's agile transformation also explains the specific form of my Manifesto for Humane Leadership, which is deliberately based on the seminal "Manifesto for Agile Software Development"5. The goal of this format is to avoid black-and-white thinking in favor of areas of tension and growth, such as "Individuals and interactions over process and tools," where both sides are valuable, but the first mentioned should be given more weight here and now.
This Manifesto for Humane Leadership draws from Peter Drucker's groundbreaking contributions on the nature of knowledge work and the leadership of knowledge workers, as well as on the positive human image in Theory Y from Douglas McGregor's much-neglected book "The Human Side of Enterprise"6. Therefore, the title can and should be understood as an allusion to this human side of organizations and collaboration.
Species-Appropriate Keeping of Knowledge Workers
More than half a century has passed since Peter Drucker coined the term knowledge work in 19597. Knowledge work means to think up and create something new. Knowledge workers use their knowledge, experience, and creativity to generate new insights. They carry their means of production in their heads and are, therefore, much more independent than the workers on the assembly line in the days of Frederick Winslow Taylor.
Back then, the manager was the expert whose task was to use unskilled workers' labor as productively as possible. That dehumanized the workers into interchangeable cogs in a gigantic machine and made them dependent on their workplace on the assembly line. They required the factory owner's means of production to trade in their labor for money. With knowledge work, things have been turned upside down. Now the organization depends on knowledge workers, who can easily take their means of production with them.
Around the same time when Peter Drucker introduced knowledge work, Douglas McGregor questioned Taylorism's negative view of people and called for a much more positive one. He recognized that the assumption of the prevailing Theory X, i.e., that people are lazy and need to be motivated to perform, is detrimental to knowledge work. Theory Y, which sees people as motivated and willing to perform, is much more helpful.8 If people are unwilling to perform in the organization, this is often a systemic problem, not a human one. We need to fix the system, not the people.
Peter Drucker postulated that knowledge workers must be led at eye level long before this term became fashionable. To him, leadership is an equally important function necessary for making a group of people or an entire organization successful. In knowledge work, the relationship between worker and manager is no longer characterized by subordination but is transformed into a relationship of cooperation--very much like in an orchestra9:
Their relationship, in other words, is far more like that between the conductor of an orchestra and the instrumentalist than it is like the traditional superior-subordinate relationship. The superior in an organization employing knowledge workers cannot, as a rule, do the work of the supposed subordinate any more than the conductor of an orchestra can play the tuba. In turn, the knowledge worker is dependent on the superior to give direction and, above all, to define what the score is for the entire organization--that is, what are the standards and values, performance and results. And just as an orchestra can sabotage even the ablest conductor--and certainly even the most autocratic one--a knowledge organization can easily sabotage even the ablest, let alone the most autocratic, superior.
Accordingly, Peter Drucker concluded that knowledge workers should be managed like volunteers as if they were here in the organization purely out of conviction and for a higher common cause10 :
Altogether, an increasing number of people who are full-time employees have to be managed as if they were volunteers. They are paid, to be sure. But knowledge workers have mobility. They can leave. They own their means of production, which is their knowledge. What motivates--and especially what motivates knowledge workers--is what motivates volunteers. Volunteers, we know, have to get more satisfaction from their work than paid employees, precisely because they do not get a paycheck. They need, above all, challenge. They need to know the organization's mission and to believe in it. They need continuous training. They need to see results.
As correct as these findings were and still are in theory, practical implementation has been lagging for over six decades. Hierarchical structures are still the measure of all things, and eye level remains mostly lip service. It came as no surprise that managers would be reluctant to give up their position of power. However, it was expected that knowledge workers would become increasingly aware of their new power, thus driving this management revolution forward. In some sectors, this is true, and the saying "War for talent is over--talent has won!" is a painful truth for many companies, but the broad mass of knowledge workers still fit in the antiquated structures.
Last week I published the first chapter of my book; check it out here:
Pain of Adaptation
In mid-2010, I started as a Senior Partner at esc Solutions, a newly founded start-up in IT project management with all gradations between classic and agile. There were three of us, full of drive and idealism. Although we didn't yet know exactly what we stood for and what we would offer in concrete terms apart from our workforce and time, we knew for su…
The next chapter will follow next Friday. In case you want to read on as soon as possible, the book is available on Amazon in many countries as hardcover, paperback, and for your Kindle. (also on Leanpub). And all my German readers can get the German edition in every book store.
Frédéric Laloux and Ken Wilber, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the next Stage of Human Consciousness, First edition (Brussels: Nelson Parker, 2014).
Götz W. Werner, Womit ich nie gerechnet habe: die Autobiographie, 5. Auflage, List-Taschenbuch 61254 (Berlin: List Taschenbuch, 2019).
Karlheinz A. Geißler, Alles hat seine Zeit, nur ich hab keine Wege in eine neue Zeitkultur (München: Oekom Verlag, 2014), 232.
Werner, Womit ich nie gerechnet habe, 173.
Kent Beck et al., "Manifesto for Agile Software Development," 2001, https://agilemanifesto.org/
Douglas McGregor and Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, The Human Side of Enterprise, Annotated ed (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2006).
Peter F. Drucker, Landmarks of Tomorrow, Harper Colophon Books (Harper, 1959).
McGregor and Cutcher-Gershenfeld, The Human Side of Enterprise.
Peter F. Drucker and Joseph A. Maciariello, Management, Rev. ed (New York, NY: Collins, 2008), 72.
Drucker and Maciariello, 72.