Mistakes of Mainstream Management - Chapter 1

In my 23 years of corporate experience, I committed so many mistakes and category errors just by embracing the prevalent management practices without thinking. But, this is not surprising!

It took us over 5000 years to apply the concept of ‘wheels’ to luggage. This underscores our human tendency to be ‘domain dependent’. We often struggle to transfer insights and solutions across different disciplines, even if the application seems obvious in retrospect.

The field of management is inherently multidisciplinary, and integrating ideas & insights from other fields has the potential to profoundly transform it.

With today’s post, I will start cataloguing my scar tissues and kick-off a new series called Mistakes of Mainstream Management (MMM) and start with the concept of ‘planning’ and look at it from the lens of another field, complexity.

Table of Contents

• Corporate Planning

• Preparation over Planning

• Quote Bouquet

• Mini Startups

• Real-world experiments

Corporate Planning

Many of the mistakes of mainstream management are fundamental and the remedies I suggest are as nuanced as the topic itself. To set the record straight, I’m not saying don’t do any planning. For example, I planned to write this post today.

But, the pitfalls lie in how we approach planning… For example: Central Planning - the segregation of “planners” and “doers”, the bureaucracy & ceremonies that lead to wasted energy and time, coercing employees to conform to “the plan”, etc.

We continue to do very detailed long-range planning and get surprised when the conditions around us rapidly change. We lived through a global pandemic and yet fail to learn lessons from it.

Today's post is dedicated to the Systems Thinker Russell Ackoff, whose insights I have generously applied in this post. Ackoff's teachings have given me so many ‘Aha!’ moments over the years... Ackoff elegantly articulated the situation that most of Corporate America finds itself in...

Taking Ackoff’s advice, this post will NOT help you get better in doing any of the following theatrics of Corporate America:

• Quarterly Business Plan

• Annual Financial Plan

• 3-Year Roadmap Plan

• 5-Year Strategic Plan

But, it is intended to help you get better at actually getting stuff done. More importantly, if you are thinking about jumping into entrepreneurship from a corporate job, it will help you avoid taking the mistakes of mainstream practices with you.

With that context, let's talk about ‘planning’. As Russel Ackoff put it,

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