The Role of Management – shapers of context

I am reading a really challenging book: “The Individualized Corporation” by Sumantra Ghoshal and Christopher Bartlett. (Buy it at Amazon.com or Kalahari.net)

They have a radical view on the role of management (well, not so much radical, as just bold and clear). Take this great quote for example:

“It has, by now, become a cliché to claim that people are the key source of a company’s competitive advantage. But, in a literal sense, this cannot be true in the long-term — at least not since slavery was abolished. The only way people can directly serve as the source of a company’s competitive advantage is if they are exploited — in prison factories or sweatshops. In companies that pay a fair wage commensurate with the individual competencies of their employees, the real source of competitive advantage lies in the context — in the Intel environment that allows people to individually and collectively create far more value than they could if they were employed elsewhere. If, as is often asserted, the key function of management is to help ordinary people produced extraordinary results and if [the] behaviours of people in the company can be so radically changed by changing the internal behavioural context, then shaping that context is undeniably the principal task of managers and the best measure of the firm’s quality of management.” (pg 176f)

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