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

The New Paradigm Manager

Attributes of the new management paradigm

Don Beck (chapter 3), based at the Center for the Study of Values near Houston, Texas, is an American who has devoted much of the past 12 years of his working life to helping South Africa sort out its political and economic problems. Having become, therefore, a man of the west and the south, and a physical scientist with an interest in management, he has defined the new-paradigm thinker for us, in the following terms:

• you think in flow states and recognize that organizations and societies pass from one plateau to the next
• you have the scope, range, and power to manage the entire staircase of your own, of others', of your organization's and of society's history
• you recognize that everything connects to everything else
• your commitment is to the living planet: to traditions and collective memories, to people living today and as yet unborn, as well as to the environment
• you are a product of the information age, your sensory systems and those of your organization being constantly open to the flow of data from all possible sources
• you are skilled at recognizing, and dealing with, different levels of development, each in the process of change
• you respect competence, wherever it exists, and have a passion for doing things that are unique, by yourself and with others

Such a new-paradigm manager, as we have already said, possesses individual self-mastery (competence and uniqueness), fosters social synergy (flow and connectedness), ...