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      • 🧠The Ideal Executive: Why You Cannot Be One and What To Do About It
        • Introduction
          • Organization of the book
        • 1. Barking Up The Wrong Tree
          • A Corporate Fairy Tale (The Outdated Paradigm)
          • What is "Management"?
          • The Fallacy
        • 2. The Functionalist View
          • The Tasks of Management
          • The (PAEI) Code
          • The (P)roducer – (Paei) style
          • The (A)dministrator - (pAei) style
          • The (E)ntrepreneur – (PaEi) style
          • The Integrator – (paeI) style
          • Summing up the Functionalist View
        • 3. What Causes Mismanagement?
          • The Myth Of The Perfect Manager
          • (PAEI) Incompatibilities
          • The impossible dream
        • 4. Mismanagement Styles
          • Confronting the Inevitable
          • The Lone Ranger (P---)
          • The Bureaucrat (-A--)
          • The Arsonist (--E-)
          • The SuperFollower (---I)
          • The Common Denominator
        • 5. Working Together
          • A complementary team
          • The Bad News
        • 6. Can We Talk?
          • A Window on Managerial Styles
          • The Inevitability of Miscommunication
          • Translator Needed
        • 7. Constructive Conflict
          • Good Conflict, Bad Conflict
          • Honoring Diversity
          • Back to the Paradigm
        • 8. Structuring Responsibilities Right
          • Organizational Ecology
          • Why Structure Matters
          • Structuring for Accountability
          • Back to the Functionalist View
          • A template for Good Structure
        • 9. Matching Style to Task
          • Diagnosing a Type
          • Coding Jobs: A Basic Template
          • The Complementary Team Jigsaw Puzzle
        • 10. The Right Process: the Dialogue
          • The Managerial Tower of Babel
          • Dealing with a (P) – A (P)roducer or Lone Ranger
          • Dealing With an (A) – An (A)dministrator or Bureaucrat
          • Dealing With an (E) – An (E)ntrepreneur or Arsonist
          • Dealing With an (I) - an (I)ntegrator or Superfollower
          • Keeping Your Styles Straight: A Cautionary Tale
        • 11. Converting Management by Committee into Teamwork
          • The Communication Blues
          • Questions, Doubts, and Disagreements
        • 12. The Right People and Shared Vision and Values
          • The Role of Leadership
          • Sharing Vision and Values
          • The Visioning Process
        • 13. Nurturing the Wrong Tree?
          • The Wrong Tree
          • Traditional management Squashes Potential
          • The Management Training Gap
        • 14. The Mission of Management and Leadership Education
          • Decision-Making Programmability
          • The Effectiveness of Training
          • Delegation and Decentralization
          • What Organizations Can Do Themselves
          • The Dark Side of Formal Education
      • 📈Mastering Change: Introduction to Organizational Therapy
        • Acknowledgments
        • Introduction to the new edition
        • Management, Executives, Leadership…
        • Conversation 1: Change and Its Repercussions
        • Conversation 2: On Parenting, Management, or Leadership
        • Conversation 3: Predicting the Quality of Decisions
        • Conversation 4: Efficiency and Effectiveness
        • Conversation 5: The Incompatibility of Roles
        • Conversation 6: Management, Leadership, and Mismanagement Styles
        • Conversation 7: What to Do About Change
        • Conversation 8: Responsibility, Authority, Power, and Influence
        • Conversation 9: Predicting the Efficiency of Implementing Decisions
        • Conversation 10: What Makes the Wheels Turn
        • Conversation 11: How to Communicate with People
        • Conversation 12: Perceiving Reality
        • Conversation 13: Quality of People
        • Conversation 14: How to Convert Committee Work into Teamwork
        • Conversation 15: The Adizes Program for Organizational Transformation
      • 🔄Managing Corporate Lifecycles
        • Introduction
        • Chapter 1. Change and Its Repercussions
        • Chapter 2. Courtship
        • Chapter 3. Infancy
        • Chapter 4. The Wild Years: Go-Go
        • Chapter 5. The Second Birth and the Coming of Age: Adolescence
        • Chapter 6: PRIME
        • Chapter 7: The Signs of Aging n
        • Chapter 8: The Aging Organizations: Aristocracy
        • Chapter 9: The Final Decay: Salem City, Bureaucracy, And Death
        • Chapter 10: Tools For Analysis
        • Chapter 11: Predicting The Lifecycle: A Metaphorical Dance
        • Chapter 12: PAEI And The Lifecycle: Stage By Stage
        • Chapter 13: Predicting The Capability To Solve Problems
        • Chapter 14: The Causes Of Organizational Aging
        • Chapter 15: Structural Causes Of Aging
        • Chapter 16: Organizational Therapy
        • Chapter 17: Treating Organizations On The Typical Path: A Contingency Approach
        • Chapter 18: The Optimal Path
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  1. Library
  2. Books by Dr. Ichak Adizes
  3. The Ideal Executive: Why You Cannot Be One and What To Do About It
  4. 1. Barking Up The Wrong Tree

The Fallacy

PreviousWhat is "Management"?Next2. The Functionalist View

Last updated 2 years ago

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There is a big confusion in the field regarding what management is granted. But one thing we do know is what mismanagement is and it is a subject of books, articles and gossip at cocktail parties.

But how successful have we been? In spite of the thousands of books written, and the millions if not billions of dollars spent on training managers and consulting services, we have not yet produced a viable, consistent theory and practice of management that is robust, repeatable, universal and holistic. In order to fix mismanagement we need to correctly define it.

A proof of this failure is our inability not only to define the process adequately, but even to name it. We are continually creating new words to label new processes that we hope will achieve the desired results.

The word that was originally used to describe the process was “administration.” That is why business schools used to be and some still are called Graduate Schools of Business Administration, and those that are in the profession of managing and have the diploma to prove that they have been professionally trained are Masters of Business Administration and the first journal in the field was the Administrative Science Quarterly. But since administrators failed to produce the desired results, the word “administrator” is now used mostly as a synonym for “bureaucrat.”

So a new word came into use: “Management.” Educational institutions became Graduate Schools of Management instead of Administration. But when the desired outcomes were still not achieved, the word “management” came to denote only the middle level of the hierarchy – and the need for a new word emerged.

That word was “executive”; thus we began to hear the terms “executive training,” “executive action” and “Chief Executive Officer.” When even this did not work, the word “leadership” evolved to replace “executive,” and this is where we are today (2004).

Although there are plenty of books that will tell you how leadership is different from administration, which is different from executive action, which is itself different from management, I suggest that this new fad will not work either. In fact, I would not be surprised if in the next few years yet another new word is coined to define the process, while the word “leadership” is redefined to mean some piece of the managerial process or hierarchy – exactly what happened to the words “administration” and “management.”

The root problem is that the paradigm has remained the same; it is the same woman in a new dress. The paradigm that has not changed is that the entire managerial process is always personified in a single individual, whether we call him administrator, manager, executive, leader, tsar or sultan, who should do this and should do that. This is a manifestation of the American culture of individualism.

The paradigm of the “lone leader”– all-wise and all-powerful – has never worked – and as the rate of change keeps accelerating, increasing the level of uncertainty that needs to be dealt with, and as businesses become global instead of local, a paradigm shift is now more necessary than ever.

What is needed then?

So, then, how should we define “managing,” if in some countries management is prohibited, in others it’s socially discouraged, in some organizations it is shared with those who are not even considered to be managers – and in some countries the word doesn’t even exist?

What is needed, first, is to recognize reality, and second, to deal with it – which involves finding a definition of the process that is value free, universal, applies to any industry – both for- or not-forprofit – and that works in the marketplace; in other words, produces the desired behavior and results.

As a faculty member at UCLA, and while teaching at Stanford, the Columbia University Executive Programs, and Tel Aviv and Hebrew Universities, I have observed that management theory and texts deal with what should happen, while organizational development (OD), Organizational Behavior, people focus on how things are – on the dynamics of the system. OD is more descriptive/analytical, while the management theory and the strategy group is more analytical/prescriptive. The Org Beh group is phenomenological in its approach while the management theory group (which practically disappeared over the years in most universities that teach MBAs) are structuralists as a school of thought. And there is no love lost between the two groups of thought. But the reality is that both approaches are necessary for good management. The question is how does one integrate the behavioral thinking with the prescriptive structuralist thinking.

A workable, robust system of management must be descriptive analytical and prescriptive and be based on an honest reflection of reality. And that is what I am trying to do in this series of three books, starting with this one.

Please note that this first book in the series is only an introduction, which defines and analyzes what we are doing wrong and what we should be doing differently. The second through the third books in the series will address how to develop good managers based on this paradigm shift.

Even these three books could be considered as an introduction. At the , we offer many courses, manuals, workshops and exercises aimed at deepening one’s knowledge and capability to develop and practice good management, using the new paradigm of working in complementary teams to co-lead organizations.

Discover the best of both worlds! Get the of this book to adorn your bookshelf and a for on-the-go reading.

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