The Next Next Common Sense
summarize these contrasting contexts. The context of the old common sense is marked by 10 points:
1. Capital, technology, and labor are interchangeable and can be managed. 2. Items are discrete and rational analysis can be applied. 3. Business is separate from the rest of life; leave your home at home. 4. Profit is the ultimate measure of business performance. 5. Chains of command, spans of control, centralization and decen- tralization are the key dimensions of organizing. 6. Focusing on bottom-line results is far more important than pay- ing attention to process. 7. Organizations are the personification of their leaders: Jack Welch (GE), Ace Greenberg (Bear Stearns), and Bill Gates are role models. 8. Compensation systems should reward top executives at dramat- ically higher rates than other employees. 9. There is a consistent tendency to see alternatives as binary choices such that “either/or” dominates lines of thought (as contrasted to “and/also”). 10. The language of management sounds like war, sports, the Wild West, sex, chess, a board game, mountain climbing, and Newtonian physics. These can be contrasted to the guiding principles of Dentsu, the larg- est ad agency in the world. Dentsu’s ten principles were articulated by its first Chairman, Hideo Yoshida, who titled them “The Ten Rules of the Demon”: 1. Initiate projects on your own instead of waiting for work to be as- signed. Take an active role in all your endeavors, not a passive one. 2. Search for large and complex challenges.
103
Made with FlippingBook. PDF to flipbook with ease