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Perhaps, the buck starts here: the case of Morning Star

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Recently, on hbr.org, I listened to Professor Gary Hamel speaking about a company called Morning Star, the world’s largest tomato processor headquartered in Woodland, California, near Sacramento and handling about 25% to 30% of tomatoes processed each year in the United States. Amazingly enough, the tomato-processing giant with $700 million annual revenue has no managers at all. Let me repeat it: Morning Star is a company without managers. The traditional management hierarchy is both cumbersome and costly. First, the more layers of management an organization has, the more overhead it adds. Any way we cut it, management is expensive. Also, it increases the risk of big, disastrous decisions. “Give someone monarchlike authority”, writes Gary Hamel in the Harvard Business Review December 2011 issue in an article titled, ‘First, Let’s Fire All the Managers’, “sooner or later there will be a royal screwup.” And a multi-layered management structure means more approval layers and slower resp
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Question the Status Quo

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Just recently, I finished reading ‘Different Thinking: Creative strategies for developing the innovative business’ by Anja Foerster & Peter Kreuz, two European-based management thinkers. I would like to share with our readers a few insights from this illuminating book. “At dusk on Friday, 13 December 1907 the sailing ship Thomas W Lawson sank off the Scilly Isles in the English Channel…” goes the opening line of The Attacker`s Advantage by Richard N. Foster. What happened? The owners of the colossal seven-masted schooner wanted to make a splash in the commercial shipping in a bid to eclipse the steamers which were becoming popular fast. But, it never worked out. According to Foster, “The age of commercial sailing vessels ended with the Thomas Lawson, and from that moment on, the steamers ruled the seas.” Obviously, the owners of Thomas W Lawson did not bother to question the status quo and were completely blind to all signs of technological progress. And the cost of fai
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Learn from your Mistakes and Avoid the Blame game

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When Tony Hayward, a former CEO of British Petroleum (BP), was called before Congress following the infamous oil spill, he denied blame. Similarly, Richard Fuld, then CEO of Lehman Brothers’ disavowed responsibility for the financial crisis. It’s interesting to note that even before the oil spill Tony Hayward’s nickname was Teflon Tony. Also, both had been notorious for mismanaging blame long before they had been summoned to the hot seat. Apparently, every time CEOs testify before Congress, they seem to lay blame on any organizations excepting theirs. They do so because they tend to be what psychologist Saul Rosenzweig called ‘extrapunitive’, that is, they blame others without acknowledging their faults. In an enlightening article titled ‘Can You Handle Failure?’ published in Harvard Business Review  April 2011 issue, Ben Dattner and Robert Hogan write that they have identified, by using data on thousands of managers from every industry, 11 personality types that are likely to have r
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The Apple Way of Management

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DRIs, STEVE REQUESTS, Death March and so on… Synonymous with innovation, Apple Inc. is one of the world’s most valuable companies by market capitalization. It’s the birthplace of revolutionary products such as Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, iPad, known throughout the world. Steve Jobs, the former CEO, who passed away on October 5 2011, is widely believed to be the spirit of Apple Inc. that recorded $156.5 billion in sales revenue in 2012. A Productive Narcissist as Michael Maccoby called his ilk in his classic HBR article, Steve Jobs is a visionary, a genius and a legend. But his leadership style and the way he and his executive team runs the company go right against the best management practices dished out by business pundits. Still, Apple has prospered. It’s intriguing to peer into Apple and see what drives their extraordinary success. Writes Adam Lashinsky in his book ‘Inside Apple: The Secrets Behind the Past and Future Success of Steve Jobs’s Iconic Brand’, “Apple employees know som
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Put your Brand on the Map

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It was a busy day on the famous Times Square in New York. The spectators gathered had their eyes wide open and mouths agape on Sir Richard Branson and the cast of Broadway’s The Full Monty dangling, virtually naked on some 100 ft above the Square from a crane. In fact, they were not naked but were clothed in nude bodysuits with their creative parts covered by a Virgin cell-phone. The outrageous Bransonian stunt was performed to mark the launch of Virgin Mobile in the USA. As usual, Sir Richard was the cynosure, the very conspicuous public face of the brand. The bold stunt made a fantastic talking point in the media and put the brand Virgin Mobile right on the map. Certainly, it was a madcap exploit, but it was thematically perfectly consistent with Virgin Mobile’s motto ‘Nothing to hide’ meaning that they had no hidden service costs. With the competition growing stiffer and stiffer, it’s more necessary today than ever for entrepreneurs to be bold and innovative in presenting their br
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Collaborative Leadership and Organizational Performance

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“ Never underestimate the power of a small dedicated group of people to change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has. ”- Margaret Mead For years since the F.W. Taylor introduced the Principles of Management, tradition has been to make key decisions at the top level and communicate it down the hierarchy to those who execute them. But, now, Gary Hamel, ranked by The Wall Street Journal as the world’s most influential management thinker argues that the traditional hierarchy no longer fits into today`s organizations. Advocating new management principles like ‘reverse accountability’, he makes a clarion call for management innovation where, I believe, collaborative leadership plays a central role. In an interview with hbr.org on leading collaborative groups, John Abele, Cofounder of Boston Scientific narrates a great story about a guy who led a skunk-works group at a famous Massachusetts company called Data General.  At the time, this company vied with Digital Equipment. In
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Catalyzing Innovation on the Frontlines

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All businesses today are on the look-out for leaders with the innovation instincts of Steve Jobs, the political skills of Lee Kuan Yew, and the emotional intelligence of Desmond Tutu. But, should the truth be told, such people are rare, if they’re at all. When it comes to innovation, a business enterprise may be lucky to have a leader of Steve’s caliber; but, I’d like to argue that they can innovate just as well even without such a leader at the helm. In one of his HBR articles-The Innovation Catalysts-Professor Roger Martin, a former Dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and the man who is credited for coining the much popular phrase today – ‘Design Thinking’ tells us how the software giant Intuit catalyzed innovation on the frontlines. One day in 2007, as he wrapped up of his five hour-long PowerPoint presentation on the merits of design at the Design for Delight (D4D) workshop, Scott Cook, Co-founder of Intuit had an epiphany. Much to his disappointment
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