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The End of Management

Have More Time, Make More Money, and Have More Fun by Creating a Company That Runs Itself 

The End of Management book image

The discipline of management is a given, right? It’s always been there, always will be.


Wrong.
 

Management as a discipline was a product of the industrial revolution that hit the US about 150 years ago. It was a brilliant innovation for its time because of a specific problem.
 

Millions were coming to the US off the boats from Ireland, Italy, Eastern Europe, and other places. Additionally, millions were moving off the small farms that could no longer support them and into the cities in search of the good production jobs that were exploding due. to the Industrial Revolution.
 

Only one problem, however. Virtually none of these potential workers had any industrial production skills. 
 

Frederick Winslow Taylor and others saw the solution. Break production work down into such small increments, that a worker could get up to speed quickly. This worked very well. It did, however, reduce the humans involved to the status of human machines.
 

In fact, in his book, The Principles of Scientific Management, Taylor states plainly that…”Under our system, a worker is told just what he is to do and how he is to do it. Any improvement on the orders given to him is fatal to his success.” (Emphasis mine.)
 

This is the legacy of management, minimizing employee contribution.


Ever wonder why the conventional wisdom of entrepreneurship means 60-80 hour weeks? I call it reverse delegation. Because the employees have not been trained, guided, mentored, and trusted, decisions get delegated upward to the leader. 
 

Given that labor is today neither plentiful nor cheap, how can it be that we continue to run our companies minimizing return on the investment we make into payroll?
 

This makes no sense.
 

In the ‘90s consultant Lanny Goodman started reading about complexity and chaos (and yes, there are theories for both) but the underlying presumption of these theories is that the universe is self-organizing. Humans pride ourselves on our cleverness and yes, we have accomplished amazing things, including bringing ourselves to the brink of extinction.


We continue to run our companies with 150-year-old technology that is not only hopelessly obsolete, it forces us to minimize the opportunities to support and facilitate the growth and development of the people who make our companies what they are.
 

How employees behave is a function of the ecosystem in which they find themselves. Think back to your first job. The odds are good that you spent the first year with your head down trying to figure out how this “job” thing got played. 
 

There were the written rules, then the unwritten rules. You had to know whose star was on the rise in the company and whose was on the wane. You had to learn who you could trust and who you couldn’t. A new employee has to learn to read these tea leaves if they are to survive and prosper.
 

The ecosystem is shaped by the systems and processes designed into the company, mostly by tradition.
 

Goodman was able to get a number of his clients to appreciate that they had been pushing a rock uphill for years and that there was a better way. He redesigned the systems and processes and provided the employees with lots of help and support to learn and get comfortable in the new ecosystem. 
 

Not everyone was comfortable with the new regimes and left. When the leader went out into the marketplace for replacement talent, he or she had a powerful new story to tell and attracted the best and brightest talent.
 

It generally took the companies 2-3 years to fully transform but the results exceeded all expectations. The CEOs were working fewer hours and making more money than ever before. The employees were astonished at being treated like functioning adults and were benefitting from quantitative rewards as well as qualitative.
 

One Friday night after dinner and a glass of wine with his wife, Goodman opened his laptop to get a few thoughts down that had been rattling around in his mind. When he closed his laptop at 8 PM Sunday, he had written this book. 
 

It came out as a novel, like Eliyahu Goldratt’s The Goal, the classic story on the theory of constraints. The End of Management takes the reader on a journey in the back pocket of a young entrepreneur as he reinvents his company with guidance from an older mentor. 
 

As a reader, you will come away with a dramatically different paradigm about how a company can be designed. Yes, every organization is a product of a design process, usually a poorly done one in Goodman's experience.
 

The End of Management leaves you with an important question: Do you own your company or does your company own you?

 

If you own or run an organization and these ideas appeal to you, help is available through Goodman's  workshops, masterminds, and consultations. There is a better way.
 

The End of Management

by Lanny Goodman

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Available in August, 2024.

Feedback on The End of Management

Morris Grand

I started my earliest career in the financial sector and dove straight into the corporate world. Unfortunately, it was exactly the corporate work culture that drove me away from that career and made me want to work for myself.

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Ever since I set out on my own, I was convinced that a big company or organization was not for me. That's also why I wanted to have a small business and be the stereotypical solopreneur.

That was until I read 'The End of Management' by Lanny Goodman. The book has given me an entirely new perspective on what a business, company, or organization can do for all parties involved: founders, owners, employees, and partners.

 

The book has taught me a new way to run a business, which has radically changed what I believe about myself and about companies. I am now more motivated than ever to have a business of my own one day and implement the lessons learned from this book into my organization.

 

Morris Grand
Marketing Consultant

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