Management theories abound. For example, open-plan offices may foster the exchange of ideas, but they also create distractions and make it difficult for workers to concentrate. The author explores the merits and drawbacks of a liberal approach compared with a more regimented approach.
What’s Inside?
The author provides an overview of the Montessori approach to company management—an approach that seems to evoke the progressive movement in education that was underway in the 1960s. But the methodology has its drawbacks.
How Is This Article Useful to Practitioners?
Effective company management is a constant challenge. Finding the right mixture of unstructured creativity and a driven, results-oriented operation is both an art and a science. The author considers examples of firms’ implementation of various progressive strategies in the pursuit of excellence. The technology industry has been at the forefront of such activity. Indeed, some of its leaders attribute their success to a Montessori education. Moreover, the approach has gained popularity on a global scale.
The author considers whether this methodology has gone too far. At what point is a flattened hierarchy too flat? As with their counterparts in education, some traditionalist management pundits rail against what they perceive to be an amorphous tack that companies are taking, a trend they think can lead to counterproductive outcomes. Excessive collaboration begets groupthink and an inability to make decisions. Open-plan offices may foster the exchange of ideas, but they also create distractions and make it difficult for workers to concentrate. Perhaps it is time to revert to a more hierarchical and segmented approach that reflects the clean lines of discipline.
Investment management leaders should ponder these arguments carefully. Applauded for their discipline and results in a variety of situations, high-conviction managers would not earn that title were they to succumb to excessive dialogue and consensus. Successful value managers in particular often make decisions that anger investors at the time. Sitting on a mound of cash in a rising market is a common example. But the give and take among analysts and money managers is crucial to a well-informed decision-making process.
Abstractor’s Viewpoint
Company management techniques are as varied as the companies that adopt them. The author considers the possible outcomes of a more liberal approach and argues in favor of a partial, rather than wholesale, reversion to a more regimented plan. The experience of educationalists in the past half-century should be fodder enough for students of management theory to consider what could work. Extremes in either direction are typically fraught with undesirable outcomes.