I just finished reading "New Business Order", a German book about a change in what employee value, how they want to live their professional lives and careers, and how companies will need to change their management practices to attract these people, and by doing so gain the agility they need to survive the upcoming wave of disruptive innovations that will sweep through traditional industries. I liked the topic, but I wish this book was better. It tells a really important story, and one very important to me, but in my opinion it tells it poorly. So poorly so that for the majority of the book I felt repelled by the content or its presentation, even though I agree with the core of the message. I care about it enough to have written a long-ish review.
One of the key statements of the book is that the "typical employee" is changing, or at least that a significant new group is emerging. This employee likes to "do" and "build" things, he enjoys being "creative". Building/Shaping things and creativity are not limited to "artists" (painters, writers, etc.), but could be anything, from designing new user interfaces for electric cars, to building software that solves interesting problems, to building physical places of social interaction, building groups and their interactions, or building physical things, either by hand or with 3D printers. This employee has a different attitude towards hierarchy, organizational structure and authority than previous generations. He is self driven, doesn't need nor want to be told what to do, wants room to be creative, and in general doesn't need or want a "boss". He is looking for "mentors" and "leaders", both within the company and more and more in external (online or hybrid) communities, which help him achieve his goals, without limiting him by subjecting him to bureaucracy or process. This I couldn't agree more with, as this is who I am, how I define myself. What irritated me was that the book talks about "us" like we are unicorns, magical creatures that most readers (audience is German managers across all industries and levels of management) have never seen, and definitely not understand. I guess starting my professional career in Silicon Valley spoiled me, and maybe they are right in that managers in a typical German company have no idea who we are.
To me, the most fascinating aspect of this type of employee is how he needs to be "managed". The book feels the need to go to tiny startups (called "lean start ups", those who have almost no funding), co-working spaces, and such "niches" to try to explain how these new employees work, how they think and how one can build companies around them. The book implies that "management" as a discipline, the way it was taught until now, is unprepared for this new type of employee, so the book describes all kinds of extreme examples, taken from a diverse set of industries, to show radically different management styles that can cope with these new employees. Having read a spread of management and leadership books myself, the books leaves me puzzled. Granted, the books I read were American ones, but are German management practices really 20 years behind the US? The book didn't seem familiar with basic principles, like the fact that "management" and "leadership" are not the same. Even the one paragraph I found that kind of went in the right direction, still got it wrong: It read [translation by me] "depending on the task the requirements for technical and leadership skills are drifting further and further apart". They were essentially calling for a "technical" and a "management" career ladder, as is common in Silicon Valley, without really explicitly saying that. But instead of realizing that senior roles in both ladders require quite a bit of "leadership", they wrongly referred to the "management" track as the "leadership" track. That is ironic and funny because they had explained earlier how these new types of employees are quite self-driven, self-managed and need less management and more mentoring and still need leadership, but also want to contribute more leadership themselves. As many text books I read point out, an organization can only have so many managers, but you can have many more leaders.
And the list goes on. Long accepted management truths around diversity of teams, empowerment of strong teams and individuals, the needs of employees to feel part of a larger mission and to have a significant and understood contribution, and the constant struggle of process/standardization vs. agility/self-empowerment/engagement, all come out in the book as if they were new found management revelations that still need to prove themselves. Rather than citing the "Innovators dilemma" as a well known reference, the book tried to rediscover the same issues, yet wasn't able to express them as clearly as the landmark book on why well run big companies struggle to innovate and catch on to disruptions. Then again, when I listen to my friends who work at German companies, maybe this is all news to German managers. In Silicon Valley I learned that a manager is not a boss, but rather a helping hand, who's task it is to further your personal and career development (aka "mentor"), help you navigate difficult cross-team relationships, and help the project via project management. Yes, he also gives you your bonus and your raises, but a good manager understands that in a lot of cases he needs to get out of the way to let his employees be creative and empowered. So to me, this is reality, not a possible vision of the future.
There are a few things I wish the booked had looked into, because I think they are quite important in the context of Germany, and they are topics I struggle with in Germany. One of them is the study of medium to big sized companies in Silicon Valley, and the other is the study of unions and their active attempts to protect the employee, who in my mind is a different employee than the one the book describes. I think the study of a typical medium to large Silicon Valley company would have been very interesting. They are neither the "lean", super small, struggling start-up that needs to be inventive to survive at all, nor are they the well funded start-up trying to conquer the world (although I find those very interesting!). They are big organizations that have to deal with all the management and organizational challenges of such size. They are in the business of building really big products, where a single product requires hundreds to thousands of individuals to pull together to create one large product. So they face a lot of the same issues that traditional German companies face. They are clearly past the start-up stage and the extreme positions taken by start-ups or by the examples in the book don't make sense for them. They are by all means the "normal", or close to "best practice" of how to run businesses of that size. Yet, in my opinion they are drastically different from the "normal" German companies described in the book. They understand these new types of employees, as they have many of them, and as they are the "normal" employees. Yet, they also struggle with size and coordinating such a large organization. So they try to solve exactly the problems a German company would have if it tried to apply these "start-up ideas" to their business and size. A year before I joined VMware, we had between 2000-3000 employees. When I joined we were at 5500 and now, 6.5 years later we are at 13000. That's massive growth and massive scale, and it was a really educational experience to both observe, but also actively get involved in updating processes, org structure and culture to the changes in scale and market conditions. Building the VSAN product, I was involved in doing a very aggressive, very ambitious 20-30 developer project (plus at least as many folks in other roles), within an organization that had matured into the cash cow business that valued stability over the room and freedom needed by such an aggressive and big project. So I experienced first hand the struggles of making that happen. I would have loved to read more stories about real companies, real challenges, in the main-stream, not the extreme.
The other topic is unions and what they do "for" employees. The book correctly describes the new type of employee as having blurred the line between work and private life. An example they give is how people contribute to open source projects or other crowd sourcing activities in their "free time". That is real work that they do, and it often goes unpaid. Yet it doesn't feel like "work" to the person, and he or she is not upset about not getting paid, or even feels being taken advantage of. And in fact, the reputation and real learnings from those activities have direct and positive impact on future or current jobs. Similarly, the wish to create and build, be creative, usually doesn't run on a 9-5 schedule. These new employees are self-driven, self-managed, they don't want to be told what to do, or "work for the guys up there", and instead take responsibilities to "get something done" in a self-empowered way. So if they have their own goals, their own agendas, which fit into the companies vision and mission, but are not dictated by it, how does this fit with all the standardization and bureaucracy introduced by unions in Germany in the name of employee protection? If I am emancipated, and my manager is not my boss, but my mentor, and if I am self-managed, why do I need the union to mandate and enforce that I don't work more than 40 hours? That's the opposite of self-empowerment. If I am emancipated, self-driven and empowered, why do I need unions to negotiate for me whether or not I am allowed to receive emails on the weekend? When I was talking to German HR for the first time 2 months ago when I was preparing my move, every question I had that sounded like I "wanted" something that was "good" for me, the recruiter started talking about the "Betriebsrat" (employee representation). So suddenly, now that I am "protected" from my employer, I am pushed into the role of someone who fills out a request form, and have some bureaucracy fight for my right to have the employer grant my wish? When previously I would just sit down with my manager and talk it through, trying to find a solution that was good for me, the team and the company? What I am trying to say is this: If I am a manager in a German company who believes in empowering employees in the ways I would love and the book describes, and how these new employees demand, how does this work with the unions and the rules they place on big companies in Germany? Sheryll Sandberg in "Lean In" and Jack Welch in "Winning" both advocate that you have to ignore some rules to make things better, when you know you have the right intentions. At the same time, some of these big companies, with these very unattractive union negotiated strait-jackets, get excellent employee satisfaction ratings. I wished the book had discussed this topic.
If this is the state of thinking, Germany has a long way ahead of itself and I am really glad I started my career in Silicon Valley. But it was also encouraging to read this book, because the book wasn't about software at all. So in a way, I look at this like I look at PCs and smart phones/tablets. The software industry in Silicon Valley may have understood (and fostered) these trends many years ahead of other industries and locations, but just like we are seeing smart phones and tablets making computer and internet technologies accessible and useful to the masses and physical/real world consumer applications, the book is an indication that this management innovation, that is the "normal way" for me, will conquer many more industries and locations in the years and decades to come. And that is the world I want to live in!