Best Buy: collective wisdom in decision making

For me, this issue about reinventing management comes down to a very simple concept. There are some people who would argue that management is the way it has always been, management will never change. I don't buy that argument. There are some who would argue that management should be radically invented in ways that we can't even perceive today. I don't buy that argument either. What I believe, is that we need to try to reinvent management, but we can do it within a framework of understood options. That is to say, a smart company is a company that makes an explicit set of choices about the way that they manage objectives, motivate individuals, coordinate activities, and make decisions; And that those choices are consciously made within a set of understood boundaries. What this picture here is an attempt to do, is to give you a framework for making those choices. So, I know companies who have used this framework as a way of saying, "How can we start a conversation in our company about our management model, so that we can be more conscious of the implicit choices we've made over the years, so that we can help to reevaluate whether that we're making right choices or wrong choices?" Essentially what I've done, is I've divided the management model into two pairs. The top two pairs are the ends, the objectives. The first set of objectives are corporate objectives - the objectives we set as a corporation. The second line is about our individual objectives - what we want to do as individuals. The latter two categories, are the means by which we achieve those aims. How we coordinate on activities and how we make decisions. Now, as you look at the words on that framework, you will recognise that some of these are well-known words and some of them are particularly unusual words. I'm going to step through what those means. For the moment, the important points to bear in mind is, that on the left-hand side of this framework we have a bunch of what you might call very traditional words about the way that management gets done, and on the right-hand side, we have a bunch of rather unusual words about the way that management work gets done. What I'm going to argue, is in each case, we need to understand the left-hand side AND the right-hand side, we need to understand the pros and cons of managing according to the left-side, managing according to the right side, and on the basis of that understanding, we can then make more sensible explicit choices on each dimension.