Management Model
What is a management model?
A look at the prevailing management models serves as a source of the best examples:
- Ford 1920: assembly line. Ford’s management model became the most influential at the beginning of the 20th century. It took advantage of the opportunities offered by the assembly line.
- General Motors 1930: multi-division company
- Toyota 1960: Lean. What is remarkable about lean is that, in addition to a different way of thinking about optimization, a different view of people emerges that sees employees not only as resources
- Spotify 2010: A prime example of an agile company (we’ll leave out the details of the “Spotify model” and the question of whether it even exists as such)
- Haier today: Rendanheyi
Haier? Rendanheyi? Haier is a Chinese conglomerate specializing in household appliances and the inventor of a radical management model based on micro-enterprises and dynamic clusters thereof. The example of Haier is certainly not easily generalized, but it does question many of the conventional practices and can therefore serve as a spotlight.
Rendanheyi: The Haier Business Modell
Some essential prerequisites and practices shape the tangible reality of the management model:
- ensuring customer relations
- Decision-making structures and models
- How are learning, cooperation and knowledge sharing institutionalized?
- Psychological safety
Customer orientation
One of the key elements of a management model is the way in which customers are involved. The example of Haier shows how much is decided by this definition:
- Conventional brands (e.g. Mercedes) involve the customer in a single transaction.
- Platform brands (e.g. Amazon) generate additional value through a continuous stream of interactions.
- Haier focuses on creating an “ecosystem brand” that gains its competitiveness through lifelong users, e.g. by constantly interacting with users to discover small user wishes that could become a need for all other users as well.
Decisions
Decision-making in the organization has many aspects
- What types of decisions: You can differentiate between business decisions, policy decisions, personnel decisions, and compensation decisions and formulate separate rules for each.
- How does the context (e.g. its complexity) influence decision-making (see here)?
- Who makes decisions: is decision-making centralized or decentralized? In adaptive organizations, it can be said that decentralized decision-making generally speeds up the process. In SAFe, this means “decisions as low as possible but not lower.” At Haier, this maxim leads to radically decentralized decision-making, following the general logic of the management model.
- How is conflict resolution organized: the principle of consent is an example of a non-classical method: decisions should be made in such a way that no one has “serious objections.” This is used in the various variants of sociocracy and holacracy.
Learning, cooperation, knowledge transfer
Learning in organizations starts in the team. Beyond that, an organization needs a strong focus on providing the climate and structures for a learning environment.
Psychological Safety
Psychological safety is the individual security of being able to do and say things that put oneself at personal risk and thus make oneself vulnerable. Voice behavior is a better term: being able to express criticism and dissent without succumbing to group think, group pressure, sanctions or disadvantages. This makes psychological safety the key factor for the effectiveness and performance of teams and the decisive condition for organizations to avoid or correct mistakes.
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