Read the following quote and try to think who wrote it and when: “We can see our forests vanishing, our water-powers going to waste, our soil being carried by floods into the sea; and the end of our oil and our iron is in sight. But our larger wastes of human effort, which go on every day through such of our acts as are blundering, ill-directed; or inefficient.”
Any idea who wrote it and when?
This quote belongs to Frederick Taylor and it was published in 1911. I just made one change, I switched coal with oil. Waste of human effort at work is, paradoxically, still one of the main challenges at work:
So if we spend 100 years on improving a management system and we still struggling with the same problem, maybe the current management system failed the test of time? Is an experiment running for 100 years is enough to understand that we have a problem? As Nasim Taleb says: The future is the best test of your ideas, not people.
We are running fragile management systems that create fragile organizations. The number of companies that disappeared from fortune lists, the significant reduction in company lifespan (from 60 to 15 years in less than 100 years), low employee engagement, the average duration of the CEO in a company. All of those datasets are just a few indications that what we have is fragile.
It’s time to create antifragile management systems and antifragile organizations based on the new antifragile management systems and a more robust organizational structure. Those systems exist around us and function much better than organizations. The best example is the economy and the market. If we will adopt principles used by successful systems and implement them into a new management system, we will create antifragile organizations!