For a New Approach to Management
Posted by Ahmad Barirani in 
While an important body of knowledge is produced by great management scholars, my personal experience leaves me with in the feeling that the industry is still in the Stone Age when it comes to understanding and implementing sound leadership principles. Matter of fact, management theory is seldom used in the industry. This might be because a great number of managers or team leaders do not have the proper training to grasp the day-to-day subtleties of management. They have been selected to these positions because of their natural political and people skills. As a result, they perform management tasks based on the “set of management tools” that their personal experience has given to them. It is thus unavoidable that they react more instinctively than with deep understanding of what is going on in their environment.
Surprisingly, this reality does not give result to catastrophic results as projects always end up being delivered and business units end up being profitable. Would it mean that management is not necessarily a science but that it has features of an art? Certainly, as it is taught as a first rule to any management training program. So, complex calculations and the use of mathematics is not a necessity when it comes to leadership; only the application of predefined recipes is enough to give acceptable results.
But here lies the problem: everything in the world is becoming increasingly rational. Customers, firms, and industries are becoming rational. This tendency will unavoidably lead to situations where process optimization and waste elimination is the first priority of every organization. In order to achieve these goals, firms will have to use mathematical (and scientific) tools to take decisions. These decisions will translate into a set of objectives which will in turn require expertise in order to be implemented with success. In this new world, leaders will need to be expertise in scientific management rather that rule of thumb management. In scientific management, I do not include only the application of rational or mathematical models for the supervision of technical issues but also the application of social psychology for a better coordination of human resources.
In world of increasing complexity, the acquisition of competences in both these branches of scientific management will need intense training and as opposed to “on the field training” in current state of affairs. In tomorrow’s world, managers will not be craftsmen or politicians. They will be scientists that will perform planning as in operations management rather than planning as in political campaigns.
