The Ideal Executive: Why You Cannot Be One and What To Do About It
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Change is constant. The process has been going on since the beginning of time and will continue forever. The world is changing physically, socially, and economically. Change is here to stay.
And change creates problems. In fact, the greater the quantity and velocity of the changes, the greater the quantity and complexity of the problems we will have.
Why does change create problems? Because everything – everything – is a system, whether we are talking about a human being or the solar system. And every system is by definition composed of subsystems. When change occurs, the subsystems do not change synchronously. Some subsystems change faster than others. The result is disintegration, and problems are the manifestation of that disintegration. Any problem you might have – with your car, your marriage, at work – analyze it and you will find that something has fallen apart, and it has fallen apart because of change.
These manifestations of disintegration caused by change, which we call problems, require solutions. And whatever decisions organizational leaders make about how to deal with those problems will create new changes, and those changes will create new discontinuities and thus tomorrow’s problems. The purpose of management, leadership, parenting, or governing – any form of organizational leadership – is to solve today’s problems and get ready to deal with tomorrow’s problems. And that means managing change.
How should it be done?
In one of my early books, How to Solve the Mismanagement Crisis (first published by Dow Jones Irwin in 1979 and subsequently reprinted several times by Adizes Institute), I introduced my theory of management: How to manage change, how to solve problems caused by change. The book, which presented a new approach to manage-16 Ichak Adizes, The Ideal Executive ment, was translated into 22 languages and in several countries it became a bestseller. It is taught in nearly every school of social sciences at universities in Israel, Denmark, Sweden, and Yugoslavia, among other nations, and is still in print in the United States, despite being published almost 25 years ago.
As my knowledge of the subject increased with the experience of working with hundreds of companies in 48 countries, I expanded each chapter of that book into a book of its own. The chapter on corporate lifecycles became Corporate Lifecycles: Why Organizations Grow and Die and What to Do About It (Paramus, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1989). A new and enlarged third edition of this book has been published in 2004 as a series of three books by Adizes Institute: Corporate Lifecycles: HOW Organizations Grow Age and Die; Volume 2: WHY Organizations Grow Age and Die, and Volume 3: HOW to Manage Balanced Growth and Rejuvenate Organizations.
The chapter on how to bring and keep an organization in its Prime condition of vitality became The Pursuit of Prime (Santa Monica: Knowledge Exchange, 1996, also reprinted by Adizes Institute), and the chapter on how to manage change grew into a book titled Mastering Change (Santa Barbara: Adizes Institute, 1992). The parts of that introductory book that did not get expanded are being elaborated now in a set of three books, of which this is the first: The Ideal Executive: Why You Cannot Be One and What to Do About It (A New Paradigm for Management). In this book, I discuss why management education is barking up the wrong tree and why no one can be the perfect, textbook executive that management education is trying to develop.
The section on management and mismanagement styles – not collages of perfect traits that no one actually possesses, but the real styles of normal people – are covered in the second book, Management and Mismanagement Styles. In the third book of the new series I address the issue of how to deal with each management and mismanagement style: how to communicate, co-decide, implement, reward, manage change, etc.
It is not necessary to read the entire series in order to understand the principles discussed in these books; each book in the series can stand alone. That necessitates, however, that some concepts will be summarized or repeated from one book to another, in order to show the continuity of the logic: I cannot present point B unless the reader understands point A. In addition, because much has been learned during the past thirty years, a great deal of the information published in earlier books has been updated and corrected. Thus, for example, each book reviews the roles of management, and the ways in which those roles are incompatible. Even if you are already knowledgeable about those roles, I recommend that you reinforce your grasp of the material by reading the chapters that explain them.
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