This is a collection of more than 100 mostly satirical columns reflecting the evolution of management life and style and organisation in international companies: from the telex and typewriter age of the 1960’s and 1970’s to cyberspace and the IT revolution – and the author’s view that satire should be almost indistinguishable from reality. Satirists these days are always being second-guessed by real events. Now you see it, now you don’t. Does satire reflect a truer reality?
Are managers more fulfilled, more secure, more effective, than they were 50 years ago? Have relationships within organisations improved or become more stressful?
Much has changed, of course: technology not only enables, but requires, managers to be totally wired at all times, so that business travellers now have two jobs, one on the road and one fighting their corner back in the office at the corporate Kremlin. Thanks to the ‘War on Terror’ and the age of mass tourism, business travel has become more onerous.
Instant communications has brought its own challenges.
The Internet brings new challenges and opportunities. It enables even a small company to market its products worldwide. ‘Viral marketing’ through ‘social media’ have become the new buzzwords. Remember the old buzzwords and the quick fix ‘how to’ books, such as the ‘Three-minute manager;’ ‘In search of excellence’…?
Organisations may seem to have changed. ‘Globalisation’ has seen the transformation of companies from export led by ‘international’ departments in the Mid West and elsewhere to being fully ‘domesticated’ in many countries, with a ‘matrix’ management with shared responsibility between local, or regional, general managers and international product line managers. ‘Kinetic equilibrium’ is how an erstwhile chairman of the author described it with subsequent fear and loathing in the organisation. One of the realities of management today is that managers have more responsibility than authority.
But management is always re-inventing the wheel. The IT revolution helped to strip out layers of middle-management to create ‘flatter’ hierarchies, with ‘business units’ as semi-autonomous ‘profit centres’ and a stripped down ‘headquarters unit.’ Entrepreneurship, or rather ‘intrapreneurship,’ was the name of the game. As management gurus came and went, corporations centralised and decentralised every so often in seismic ‘restructuring.’
In the foreword go this book, the author describes this management evolution from first-hand experience from his roller-coaster international marketing career – from running a ‘creative boutique’ in Lausanne for the largest British international advertising agency of the 1960s, Colman Prentis & Varley; head of European marketing for Miles Laboratories, an emerging U.S. multinational; to VP responsible for business development for a family-held Swedish health care company based in Geneva; to marketing and sales director for the British subsidiary of the international pharmaceuticals giant Merck Inc. of Rahway, New Jersey.