I don’t know if there’s a secret magic pixie reading WorkPlay, but I found a nice one-year subscription to Harvard Business Review waiting for me in the mail today. Thank you secret magic pixie, whoever you are.
From the latest issue of HBR, here’s some juicy thinking from Henry Mintzberg. It falls under the article title of Productivity Is Killing American Enterprise. Consider that our organizations are organic systems. They exist only because of the people who operate within these systems.
Here’s Professor Mintzberg’s advice:
Treat the enterprise as a community of engaged members, not a collection of free agents. Corporations are social institutions, which function best when committed human beings (not human “resources”) collaborate in relationships based on trust and respect. Destroy this and the whole institution of business collapses.
Take care of the organizational relationships that drive and sustain your business. It’s your people, not your profits, that will define your organization’s success.
[...] Henry Mintzberg makes some highly civilized suggestions about how to improve organizational functioning: “Corporations are social institutions, which function best when committed human beings (not human “resources”) collaborate in relationships based on trust and respect. Destroy this and the whole institution of business collapses.” Chris Bailey agrees. [link] [...]