Managing Value in Organisations: Experience of the Author

My new book Managing Value in Organisations: New Learning, Management and Business Models is now out! In an interview, Simon Caulkin, the radical business and management writer asked me why I’d written it –what background had I drawn on.

(For the longer interview ‘Explaining the key ideas’ see: (http://youtu.be/ADzyaWBAmKM) )

Here’s what I said:  I drew on 2 particular areas of experience - reflected and reinterpreted: teaching and consultancy.  

First consultancy: a consultant colleague said that virtually all consultancy work reminds her of elevator music –it always sounds the same without ever quite repeating itself. What she means was that in virtually all consultancy, the presenting problem is rarely the ‘real’ one. That’s invariably deep-seated, unacknowledged but whatever it’s called it always concerns change (it’s real name!) –organisational, team, personal change -towing in its wake questions of how do we do business, how we manage and how we learn to work together –or not! 

Secondly, teaching: for a long enjoyable period I was head of Teacher training/adult learning and I developed an awareness of how adults learn (I hope!) and importantly, how to build a Learning Culture to encourage critical, creative, independent learners. The team used to say that while we were in the business of learning, somehow our organisation wasn’t. we were always asking what a critical, creative, independent organisation would look like –probably a high performing one. 

I built on this when teaching for 10 years on the Open University Business School MBA programme Creativity, Innovation and Change, working with many managers at all levels across all sectors in enabling them to learn to lead change in their organisations. 

What was emerging from all this was the key headings framing practically all organisations  issues were management, business and learning. As consultants a key challenge was how to enable organisations in the way we enabled individuals. So we brought these 3 headings together in a comprehensive approach as 3 models, and identified their effects so organisations could have (possibly new) choices about their models, depending on their circumstances.   

However, again from my experience, the learning model has a crucial role: this is a different beast called ‘significant learning' with powerful untapped properties. In some systems that part with most flexibility ends up controlling the system. Here the learning model is midwife for changing both management and business models –because of its flexibility – its capacity to transform.

Learning is a hidden excitable resource. All organisations have loads of it -the challenge is to risk finding and releasing it! Managing Value in Organisations suggests how! 

What do you think?  

If you want to come to the ‘launch event' of Managing Value in Organisations contact us at: d.carroll@criticaldifference.co.uk