Are CIOs ready for a new direction?

It may be time for managers to start cracking the books and learning new ways to do their jobs. The Future of Management, by Gary Hamel, offers tips on how to deal with the competition coming from China and India, not to mention the continuing pressure from Japan and Western Europe. Hamel, co-founder of the Management Innovation Lab, says it may be time to get rid of top-down management, and start trying something new that could help American companies compete in a global world and stay ahead of their competitors.

If American companies can create new products or business models, why can't they do the same thing in coming up with new ways to manage organizations? Hamel looks at three corporations to see how they are managing change. The bottom line is that Google, Whole Foods and Gore & Co., a private firm that invented Gore-Tex, found a new and better way to get ahead of the curve.

Whole Foods, for example, has decentralized its stores, organizing them into eight teams at individual stores with a mandate to provide the food that Americans eat. The teams have carte blanche to hire and fire workers, have wide latitude on what foods to stock on their shelves and how to manage their stores. The change is dramatic because it is not the top management that sees the problems once they become big ones, but front-line employees who see what shoppers want and have to handle day to day issues.

Gore handles change in much the same way. The company teams are small, focused and self-managed. They have the power to initiate changes when they see opportunities without waiting for an idea to head up the decision-making line, a process that can take weeks or--more likely--months to win approval.

Hamel says companies using this style challenge the notion that a upper level manager knows all. The big question here is whether CIOs will be willing to change the way that they manage or if they have enough confidence in the people they hire to allow them to risk trying something new. It may be a tough year ahead as CIOs try to figure out how to keep the bottom line black, the CEO happy and the customers content. We're interested in the ways you are looking at transforming your operation for 2008, so send us an email with your ideas on changing the way you manage.

For more on new thinking for managers:
- See The New York Times article