Nov

26

Management f-LAWS

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What are f-LAWS you may ask? The f-LAWS website says that:

f-LAWS are truths about organizations that we might wish to deny or ignore - simple and more reliable guides to managers’ everyday behaviour than the complex truths proposed by scientists, economists, sociologists, politicians and philosophers.

In 1958, Professor Cyril Northcote Parkinson first articulated Parkinson’s Law, which states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. His law and the accompanying book was based on his extensive experience in the British Civil Service and on his own scientific observations.

Almost 50 years later, Professor Russell Ackoff, renowned American management guru and systems thinker, has compiled over 80 new laws in the same vein. Based on a lifetime’s experience in public and private sector organizations, these f-LAWS (or laws as flaws) are designed to whet your appetite and get you thinking about the often-unacknowledged realities of organizations: what really motivates managers, why are companies run the way they are, how come they don’t work better…?

There are over 80 f-Laws and the authors intend releasing their book “Management f-LAWS: How Organizations Really Work” in January 2007. To whet our appetite the authors hae release a free e-book “Little Book of f-Laws” containing just 13 laws from the book. From the free e-book “Little Book of f-Laws” I found the following f-Laws most interesting…

  • Managers who don’t know how to measure what they want settle for wanting what they can measure.
  • There is nothing that a manager wants done that educated subordinates cannot undo. - The basis of this f-Law is as follows: the more power-over educated subordinates that managers exercise, the less is their power-to get them to do what they want them to.
  • The more time managers spend trying to get rid of what they don’t want, the less likely they are to get what they do want. - It is more difficult to define what we want than what we do not want. Nevertheless, a ‘getting rid of’ strategy is a cop out. Great gains are seldom made easily.
  • A bureaucrat is one who has the power to say ‘no’ but none to say ‘yes’. - In a bureaucracy a ‘no’ cannot lead to what is considered to be an error, only a ‘yes’ can do that. Therefore, within a bureaucracy doing as little as possible is the best strategy for avoiding detectable errors.
  • The less important an issue is, the more time managers spend discussing it. - More time is spent on small talk than is spent on large talk. Most talk is about what matters least. What matters least is what most of us know most about. The more something matters, the less we know about it.
  • Managers cannot learn from doing things right, only from doing them wrong. - Doing something right can only confirm what one already knows or believes; one cannot learn from it. However, one can learn from making mistakes, by identifying and correcting them…… Organizations fail more often because of what they have not done than because of what they have done.

The book is planned to be released in January 2007 which you can pre-order here. The authors are running a competition looking for additional f-Laws. If can submit your own f-Law to the authors for consideration and stand a chance to win the f-LAW trophy. Entries will be judged by the publishers.

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