Why Some "Next Big Things" Stand the Test of Time

Posted by Tom Davenport on March 27, 2008 5:03 PM

Almost a year ago I wrote a post about the Bain list of management tools. Today I saw a list from a CIO Insight survey, described by my friend Allan Alter and based on a survey of 188 IT executives. The two lists had something in common: the same stuff keeps coming up.

Business process reengineering was the most commonly-used management tool in the CIO Insight list, and in the top ten for Bain. I don’t quite get this one, since the companies I work with are not doing business process reengineering they way I understand it. The respondents must be using a very broad definition of business process management (although they presumably don’t include Six Sigma and TQM, which were other tools explicitly listed further down in popularity).

The process-oriented tools weren’t the only persistent ones in both lists. Benchmarking, balanced scorecards, core competency analysis, and scenario planning were also pretty popular in both surveys. I suspect that if the CIO Insight folks had asked about more of the tools that Bain had surveyed for, they would have had even more old chestnut tools in common.

This persistence could be viewed as either negative or positive. The negative view (which Allan Alter primarily takes) is that there is nothing new under the sun, and that the same old ideas keep coming up. The positive view, which I will advocate here, is that these tools did not turn out to be fads at all, contrary to the oft-stated criticism of management trends. They have become embedded into day-to-day business practice, and successful companies need to keep doing them all the time.

How can you succeed without, for example, constantly improving how you do your work with some form of process management? Benchmarking is undeniably helpful if you want to have the best possible processes, customer service, etc. It’s generally useful to have an idea of what your core competencies or capabilities are when you’re deliberating on strategy. These are no-brainers.

Some of these ideas have become so commonly-held that they don’t seem like new management ideas at all—but they were at one time. So I say more power to the management thinkers and the companies who adopted their ideas—it shows success, not stagnation.

The only downside I see is that companies adopt too many of these ideas to do any of them particularly well. In the Bain survey, the average company was making use of 15.3 management tools. I don’t know what the right number is, but that’s too many. GE—particularly in Jack Welch’s heyday when management ideas were heartily embraced—believed that 5 or 6 management tools was the right number. They religiously held back on adding to the total, and if they did add one, they tried to drop another. They realized that management attention was the limiting factor to the successful implementation of these ideas, and there is only so much of that to go around.

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Comments

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- Posted by kent nderson
March 28, 2008 9:46 PM

- Posted by kent nderson
March 28, 2008 9:47 PM