Refresh your management

THE audacious title to today's article does not mean that I will cover every aspect of management. Nobody could in a few hundred words. I aim to deal with the most critical aspects of organisation control that are changing and hope to stimulate some thoughts for shaping the future management genre. The pandemic, with its concomitant redundancies, WFH (work from home) and supply chain shake-up, has precipitated the fastest and most gruelling management upheaval in a long time.

As always when we rummage through the dustbins of history, we learn that not all that we did in the past was useless. Indeed, the work of the last 50 years has provided a good foundation for experiment and exploration. However, the changes that have taken place so far are only an inkling of what is to come.

One of the profound messages is that virtually all calculations required by businesses are already being done automatically, the only specification needed being what the manager wants to see. This requires managers to think through what data determines their actions rather more deeply than simply receiving the monthly sales figures.