The Book of Dangerous Words in Management

Disruption? New Work? Agility? Executives are supposed to be charismatic and visionary while staff are expected to be motivated and enthusiastic. Such talk comes easily - and indeed incessantly - to managers. But how much to these all-too-familiar clichés really have to tell us? Fredmund Malik reveals the muddled thinking underlying large parts of the vocabulary of management. His new book cuts through the babble and makes a stand for clear thinking and straight talking. 'Not only skeptics will find Malik a pleasure to read. He is skilled at picking apart the fashionable verbiage of management with often sarcastic glee.' Süddeutsche Zeitung (Munich)

Professor Fredmund Malik ranks among the foremost thinkers on management. A best-selling author, he is Professor of Corporate Management at the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland) as well as founder and chairman of the leading institute for the Management of Complex Systems, with branches in St. Gallen, Zurich, Vienna, Berlin, London, Toronto, Beijing and Shanghai.

INTRODUCTION In the world of information technology, every effort is made to keep computer systems free of viruses and malware. Their dangers are obvious, which is why systems and networks must be secured. The best way to do so is by continual updates, allowing computers to correct themselves, repair damage, and learn to deal with threats. But how to prevent viruses from infesting the thoughts and ideas of human beings? How to prevent malware in the form of misguided ideas and dangerous misconceptions from entering our heads - and particularly the heads of executives in societies countless organizations? How can we prevent the functioning of our organizations being hacked? A still more important question is: How can the thinking of executives be provided with the right updates, containing the concepts that point the future? Whats new doesnt have a name yet These questions are important because we are witnesses to the emergence of a New World. Economy and society are undergoing one of the greatest transformations in history. The Old World, as we knew it, is turning into a New World, which we still can know only in outline, and in some of its rudiments. We can conjecture a little more, from which we can infer that in this New World, nearly everything will be unlike it is today. The greatest challenge is to move from the Old World to the New, for in the period of transition, the Old World will keep functioning less and less, while the New World is not yet up and running. Since 1997, I have been referring to this process of profound change as The Great Transformation21 and offered a detailed discussion of it in my books. In order to describe it, I needed a largely new language - that of cybernetics, from which the term governance is borrowed. The language of the Old World masks and distorts nearly all the New Worlds important traits, precisely because they are new. In fact, we probably do not yet even have words for what may turn out to be the crucial properties of the New World. In times of transition, we are in particular danger of failing to notice such properties until we are suddenly confronted with them. Such was also the case with earlier transitions. What was new did not have a name. After all, what to call an apparatus able to do something that, according to the laws of nature, was not even possible? The Germans came upon the imaginative idea of calling it Flugzeug or flying-tool. The English word aeroplane (or, in American usage, airplane), derived from the French aéro and the Greek planos, wandering, seems more lyrical, but similarly baffled by the sheer novelty of what it seeks to describe. If we tried to describe todays computerized world in terms of the mechanized office of the 1960s, we would struggle to understand computers. Nearly everything is going to change Many of the terms used today are dangerous because they describe the new wrongly, because they prevent its understanding and thus impede progress. For nearly everything will change in the course of the Great Transformation21: what we do, why we do it, and how we do it - and consequently also who we are. One day, we may look back on it as the most profound transformation in history, greater that the Industrial Revolution, than the Renaissance and Reformation, and the earlier transformations of the thirteenth century. The Great Transformation21 is taking place all over the world and affects all areas of society, above all its millions of organizations. The Great Transformation21 is driven by four principal forces, which join to form a new reality. The most important drivers are technology, particularly digitalization and biotechnologies, the profound changes in the demographic makeup of most modern states, the global ecological challenges as well as the global economy and above all its debt. These four forces are closely interconnected. They influence, reinforce, modify, and hasten each other. From their interconnection, a new, all-encompassing reality emerges: exponentially growing, dynamic, and self-reinforcing complexity on a scale hitherto unknown. The more complex the world becomes and the more it changes, the clearer our thinking needs to be if it is to help us find our way. And the clearer must also be the language and terminology that enable us to communicate effectively. What we already know What can we already know about the Great Transformation21 today? After all, it is not beginning only now, nor did it begin only with the iPhone. A more useful date might be 1994, when Netscape released the first web browser accessible to non-specialists and inaugurated the internet as we know it - the General Public Internet, as it were. Previously, only specialists or enthusiastic hobbyists had used it. The scientific foundations for the Great Transformation21 were already laid in the late 1940s by Cybernetics, which studied natures third fundamental entity: information. We know that the new society is at once a knowledge society, an organization society, and a complexity society. We know that it needs to be an effectively functioning society and that, in order to be so, it needs effectively functioning organizations. And thus, we also know that it will be a society in which management will be the key function, and that such management must be of the systems-cybernetic kind, based on sciences of complexity - on systems theory, cybernetics, and bionics. On account of their inherent risks, some types of organization began early on to work systematically to achieve ever better functioning, among them airports and hospitals. In a world of functioning, the previous ideologies will be of little significance, for they are typically Old World modes of thought. Just as the natural sciences were never socialist, capitalist, or imperialist - or Catholic, or Buddhist -, the functioning of organizations, too, will come to be considered outside any ideological framework. Yet perhaps it will bring forth a meta-philosophy of applied functionism, as I have suggested in several of my books: by functioning management for functioning organizations. Only thus will true leadership be possible for the first time. Effective communication will be decisive for functioning societies in the New World, at the level of computer networks, and of organizations and the people working in them. A functioning language may thus turn out to be crucial to the New World and its functioning. This does not pose much of a problem for computer networks, which have always made use of the cybernetic properties of feedback networks to correct themselves, have long worked with Double Loop Feedback and, in doing so, became self-teaching systems. Much greater difficulties are faced by people - not people taken by themselves, but people in organizations. More than the finer points of language Language exerts a decisive influence on perception, thought, communication, and action. Language is the foundation of right leadership, and language is the tool of those who use it to mislead. My concern in this book is with neither the finer points of usage nor questions of style or preference, but with right thinking and effective communication in management. But this is not an issue just of lucidity and concision. It is easy to put the greatest nonsense in clear and simple terms. All some people need is 280 characters and a few hashtags. Clarity has nothing to do with a statements inherent accuracy. At stake are clarity, accuracy, and professional precision. Dangerous words are sources of misunderstanding. They impede accurate understanding and sensible communication. They lead to misguided expectations and wrong behavior in people and organizations. A clear and precise terminology is the hallmark of developed sciences and disciples. Professionalism and competence depend on a command of the core concepts. Nobody in a scientific or technical discipline could expect to be taken seriously without grasping the distinctio...