Beyond Leadership: Balancing Economics, Ethics and Ecology, Revised Edition

Change and Uncertainty, Conflict and Complexity

As the business world becomes more complex, more uncertain, more changeable and more conflict-ridden, so the requirements of managers proliferate. We are called upon, simultaneously, to manage complexity and uncertainty, change and conflict in ever larger doses. Our ability to cope with all of this should be enhanced by the multiplicity of concepts and techniques that have developed over the past 50 years. The trouble is that by now there are so many of them that it is difficult to know which way to turn. Moreover, for the discriminating manager it is not good enough merely to discard the old ideas in favor of the new. For much of the conventional wisdom still has value to this day.

What we shall be doing in this handbook for the “new paradigm” manager, therefore, is threefold. Firstly we shall be identifying, in this introductory chapter, the kinds of conventional management wisdom that we shall not be covering. Secondly, and at the same time, we shall identify those American (western) and Japanese (eastern) approaches to management which have already become part of the manager's stock in trade, and therefore do not warrant further consideration. Thirdly, and substantively within this book, we shall be focusing on those “global” concepts and methods that constitute the “new paradigm” in management.

• As far as the individual manager is concerned, what will distinguish extraordinary from ordinary management is the focus on self-mastery. ...