How to Manage in a Flat World

When Thomas Friedman, the distinguished New York Times columnist, first declared ’the world is flat’ a couple of years ago, he opened the door to a global army of consultants and gurus looking to exploit this latest Big idea.  Whatever the phrase meant, - and I always took it to signify a smoothed-out world of instant global commerce and communication – a flat world was clearly going to require new strategies and new ways of working.

But this new book is perhaps the first (in the management arena anyway!) to rise to Friedman’s challenge explicitly, confronting the flat world head on.  The authors are well placed to do this.  Susan Bloch was, until recently, head of global coaching practice within the Hay Group, having also worked as head of ‘thought leadership’ for the headhunters Whitehead Mann.  Philip Whitely is one of the UK’s most experienced management writers.

In a crisp but wide ranging discussion – refreshingly the book is a succinct 150 pages long – the authors consider the practical realities behind the hype surrounding the global age.  How do you manage teams whose members you may only rarely get to see in the flesh? How much do you need to travel? Can remote colleagues ever really ‘connect’ in the way that Friedman imagined?

The authors have spoken to many business leaders who are themselves wrestling with these challenges.  Far from being ‘soft’ these human resource questions matter.  As the authors rightly point out, today ‘the only distinguishing features of an organisation are the skills, capability and motivation of the people who are hired’.

Miles Flint, until recently global president of the mobile phone maker Sony Ericsson, is quoted at length in the book.  He describes the globe-trotting businessman as someone who never quite shakes off his jet lag.  All the same, he remains a great advocate of the need to travel, bothering to meet people face to face.  ‘It I qualitatively better than conference calls with people you don’t know,’ he says.  The authors’ commonsense (but important) conclusion is basically this: the faster, flatter world makes ever greater demands on the capabilities and competence of managers.  We all need to smarten up our acts,: communicate better, co-operate better.  Global supply chains and networks require it.   In a flat world there s no dark corner in which to hide.

Quibbles? Well, it is slightly concerning to see the so-called ‘Hawthorne effect’ being referred to at the start of the book as though it were an incontrovertible fact.  The ‘data’ derived in these famous experiments in the 1930s are in fact much disputed.  The ‘Hawthorne effest’ ; is something that management writers like to believe in, even if the evidence for it is not as robust as we like to pretend it is. (The Hawthorne effect describes a temporary change to behavior or performance in response to a change in the environmental conditions – Editor)

The second quibble is that there are two Ts in Warren Buffett’s surname, and it really is about time everybody started getting that right.

These two whinges aside – well, we like giving feedback, good and bad, in management-land, don’t we? – this is an extremely helpful book.  Read it to make sense of the flat world we all have to operate in nowadays.