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Visionary Leaders and Thinkers Recomment AdoptingA New Managerial Paradigm
 Now companies like AT&tT, Procter & Gamble, and Dupont are offering employees personal-growth experiences of their own, hoping to spur creativity, encourage learning,and promote “ownership” of the company’s results. A handful of visionary leader-GeneralElectric Chairman Jack Welch chief among them –are going beyond training seminars toa fundamental reordering of managerial priorities. Meanwhile, a small network of consultants, thinkers, and academics are working to transform business. Propelled by a belief that the world is undergoing major change, they call for a new paradigm-a wholenew framework for seeing and understanding business-that will carry humankind beyondthe industrial age.The result is a curious convergence; executives seeking ways to reverse America’s fallfrom dominance sharing common ground with freethinkers drawn to business as the most powerful institution in a global society.The new paradigm might be described as New Age without the glazed eyes the word“Paradigm” comes from the Greek for pattern, and the new paradigm is just that: a new pattern of behavior that stems from a new way of looking at the world. The old worldview-Newtonian, mechanistic, and analytical- is present in everything from theConstitution with its clockwork system of checks and balances, to the rectilinear street plans of Washington, D.C and San Francisco, to the assembly lines devised by HenryFord. The new paradigm ideas from quantum physics, cybernetics, chaos theory,cognitive science, and Eastern and western spiritual traditions to from a world view inwhich everything is interconnected, in which reality is not absolute but a by-product of human consciousness. Nobody is promising universal enlightenment next week, however.“What we’re talking about here is not a search for nirvana,” says Michael Ray, 51, holder of the BancOne chair in creativity at the Stanford business school. “It’s an attempt to dealwith a very difficult time.”So far, what has emerged is a host of management theories and practices benefiting anage of global enterprise, instantaneous communication, and ecological limits. Some arefamiliar: hierarchical organizations being replaced by more flexible networks; workers being “empowered” to make decisions on their own: organizations developing a capacityfor group learning instead of waiting for wisdom from above; national horizons givingway to global thinking. Others may still seem a little far-out; creativity and intuition joining numerical analysis as aids to decision-making; love and caring being recognizedas motivators in the workplace; even the primacy of profit motivate being questioned bythose who argue that the real goal of enterprise is the mental and spiritual enrichment of those who take part in it.Individually, each of these developments is just one manifestation of progressivemanagement thought. Together, they suggest the possibility of a fundamental shift.Applied to business, the old paradigm held that numbers are all-important, that professional managers can handle any enterprise that control can and should be held atthe top. The new paradigm puts people-customers and employees-at the center of theuniverse and replaces the rigid hierarchies of the industrial age with a network structurethat emphasizes interconnectedness.Why would companies want to embrace a new paradigm? “Because the old paradigmisn’t working,” says Ray. He argues that the decline of American business form its
 
 postwar apogee is like scientific anamoly-a situation the old theories fail to explain. Justas a new paradigm emerges in science when old theories stop working, the new paradigmin business begins to take form when the old-by-the-number school of managementstarted to founder during the seventies. The surprise success of 
in Search of Excellence
,with its explicit attack on the old model, signaled the beginning of a new perspective.Several factors since have encouraged the trend. Perhaps the most visible is the faltering performance that has fed the vogue for Japanese management techniques and the questfor “excellence” But the driving force is the need for speed: The spread of computers andtelecommunications and the rise of global markets have rendered bureaucracieshopelessly unwieldy. At the same time, a series of wrenching changes-deregulation,corporate takeovers the demise of the soviet bloc-has made the extraordinary seemcommonplace. The sudden backlash against the money mania of the Eighties- combined,some say, with the gradual rise to power of the sixties generation- has put idealism back on the agenda. The result is a vague but growing sense that business has to be conducteddifferently…In a recent speech before San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, Levi Strauss ChairmanRobert Haas, 48, sketched his idea of the corporation of the future: a global enterpriserelying on employees who “are able to tap their fullest potential” and managers who actnot as authority figures but as “coaches, facilitators, and role models,” Levi Strauss isstriving to transform itself along those lines because it needs creative thinking and rapidresponse to satisfy a fashion-conscious public. “This company isn’t turning into a groupof Moonies for some Platonic management good.” observes chief counsel Tom Baush,47. “It’s a way of promoting our own success.”Presumably Levi Strauss won’t be turning into a bunch of Moonies at all. The point of thenew paradigm is not to get people to tom out in front of some guru but to encourage themto think for themselves. Ideally, this yields an organization that functions like a rugbyteam. “Rugby is a flow sport,” says Noel Tichy of the University of Michigan businessschool. “It looks chaotic, but it requires tremendous communication, continuousadjustment to an uncertain environment, and problem solving without using a hierarchy.”American business has been conducted more like football, with every play a call fromsidelines.One man who’s ready to play rugby is Jack Welch of GE. Having streamlined with aflurry of sales, acquisitions, and plant closings, Welch has now turned to the culture,“productivity is the key,” says GE’s head of management development, JamesBaughman, a former Harvard business school professor charged with effecting much of the change. “You can only get so much more productivity out of reorganization andautomation. Where you really get productivity leaps is in the minds and hearts of people.”But GE’s moves bear the twin hallmarks of new-paradigm thinking the systems view-seeing everything as interconnected- and the focus on people. Welch’s goal is fastturnaround and to get it he intends to create what he calls the “boundary lessorganization”-no hierarchical boundaries vertically, no functional boundarieshorizontally….So what’s the alternative? Business as a spiritual pursuit? Don’t laugh. Jack Welchrecently remarked that he wants people at GE to feel rewarded “in both the pocketbook and the soul.” Thus is the lesson of the new paradigm: if people are your greatest resource
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