Reinventing Management Thinking: Using Science To Liberate The Human Spirit

This book is for anyone who wants to transform organisational effectiveness. Advances in the scientific understanding of how the brain works and how people function well in groups is forcing a profound disconnection between what science understands and what managers actually do to run things. In particular, a lot of what management does unwittingly violates key emotional needs and so triggers the stress response in their employees. The result is inhospitable working environments that generate massive costs in terms of waste, low productivity and poor performance. Stress is the root cause of many organisational and social problems. At strategic level stress contributes to poor judgement, insatiable greed and power lust, destructive competitive rivalry and incompetent, reckless and unethical decision-making. At management level stress drives rushed and inadequate operational planning, corrosive 'impression management', defective analysis, flawed problem solving, faulty decision-making, unethical and controlling behaviour, weak relationship building and de-motivating leadership. At operational level stress provokes employee disengagement, inauthentic working relationships, personal conflicts, poor communication, compassion fatigue, insensitivity to customers' and other colleagues needs, accidents, costly mistakes and rework, lethargy, low creativity, waste, resistance to change and incoherent teamwork. Jeremy Old draws on twenty-five years experience as a turnaround specialist and psychotherapist to write a highly practical book that any conscientious manager or owner-manager can use. He advocates that leading high performance organisations requires the removal of thirty 'organisational stressors' that prevent people meeting their emotional needs and holds them back from expressing superb innate survival skills. Reinventing management thinking is about designing stress out of the system in a way that empowers people to drive performance improvements and organisational excellence as a means to get their own emotional needs met. He suggests that, to improve effectiveness, organisations need to urgently adopt one key lesson from modern science and that is that humans have survived as a species by evolving to become highly socialised, collaborative problem-solving mammals. This innate talent is hardwired into our DNA and if we are prevented from utilising it we become stressed. Changing management thinking and organisational design to enable greater bottom-up collaboration, reduces endemic organisational stress and dramatically frees-up information flows as well as mobilising the intelligence, energy and problem-solving ability of the entire organisation."

• | Author: Jeremy Old
• | Publisher: Team Business Development Ltd
• | Publication Date: Oct 26, 2015
• | Number of Pages: 326 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 0992910439
• | ISBN-13: 9780992910433