Lead people, Manage process. Superperformance Proverb

The organization is an organism. Peter Senge

A Great Wind is Blowing

Knowledge and human capital are making a dramatic debut here at the onset of the new decade. Together they signal a critical shift in organizational life to something new and different, especially when it comes to dealing with people. The best of a company’s knowledge and human capital walks out the door everyday at 5:00PM. These two forms of capital are intangible; they have not been a part of the traditional balance sheet. Capturing and increasing the value of these capital assets requires a new set of skills. As many have noted, in the Internet age “knowledge workers” have the leverage. And they carry their means of production with them wherever they go.

The result is that management as a professional discipline is on the verge on a major transformation. While management’s famous guru Peter Drucker insisted that management is the organization’s single most important “organ,” he also declared it is not possible to do it to people. Rather, he stated, “the task is to lead.” Lloyd Provost and his Quality colleagues at API propose that it is only processes that can be managed, and only then through the purposeful application of continual testing and learning, aided by the use of statistical control methods. Esther Dyson drew from the new science of complexity, in particular complex adaptive systems or “CAS” to characterize this impending transformation through a different lens. From this view the new management acts in a distributed way, akin to an “immunity,” a capacity that everyone can and should participate in and practice.

Superperforming management and leadership co-joins improvement and complexity science to create a new approach that leverages both process and culture together. This incredible new “biophysics of optimization” signals a fundamental shift away from a mechanistic view and toward a view of organizations as living organisms.

Only a view of organizations as organic systems can accommodate the discovery of complementarity that is the source of Superperformance. Only a life science can explain it. Organisms and ecosystems evolve, self-organize, and emerge, machines do not. Superperforming Management and Leadership is about the productivity of knowledge, especially as it pertains to increasing customer value and driving unprecedented performance levels. Productivity of knowledge is driven by the inspiration and motivation of people. And people are inspired and motivated by the opportunity to contribute, the chance for personal growth and challenging work, relationships, real involvement in a shared vision, servant leadership, and much, much more.

Unless organizations can encourage intrinsic motivation and affirm these needs, they will not realize their full potential, and the promise of knowledge productivity will elude them. Human and knowledge capital are interdependent, they reinforce and amplify each other.

Nature shows us that as with any major evolutionary change, some learn and develop new capabilities while others resist and eventually die out. Some will achieve the high peaks of the new “fitness landscape” while others will sink into a deep valley where the old industrial age command-and-control methods simply do not work anymore.

The Revolution is here.