Management upside down: global is local, leadership goes grassroots, top is at the bottom, and traditional management needs a retirement party.
 
It is perhaps the Age of Inversion. The weights have gone the other way. Globalization, big G, or small g, or just corporate speak, has not gone away, but the value of local is higher. Back is the local expert, the local grocery and the local travel agent. Maybe, even, the local bookshop, dare I say, that has more than books.
 
Top leadership is weaker than we care to believe. But this is such a sinful admission that nobody dares to say it. Top leadership is progressively less powerful; grassroots-anything has great traction. The bottom has power: in the street, in the political campaigning, in the health care system, in the peer-to-peer associations. The business organization is next. Employee activism is not employees giving positive messages about their companies. This is a prostitution of the word activism. And it is sad when I see it used as a mere employee with a megaphone. Employee activism is employees taking charge and being more and more self-managed, not necessarily the fundamentalist, extreme way. If you don't have a percentage of your workforce self-managed, even small, you are not listening.
 
'Management' is literally upside down and looking for new ways of doing things, more devolved, more bottom up, more self-managed, more autonomous. Old words such as as empowerment, delegation and ‘ownership’ are so incredibly tired that they have lost their meaning. They need a break, perhaps a long break, perhaps retirement.
 
It is a new concept of the enterprise we are dealing with, where ‘community organising’ and ‘people mobilization’ skills will be a premium, and traditional MBA management may remain, but as a commodity. We will send people to understand and participate in social movements, as a way to skill them for leadership positions in the company. We will not send them to a Leadership Course in a Business School. We will hire people who have built something (a football club, a petition, a youth centre, an association, a club) at a premium, and we will have the ones who ‘can do a job’ as a commodity. Businesses will have more leaders coming from charities, from the army, from ex-diplomats in war zones, from social movements, from people who know how to navigate life and bringing others with them.
 
I am not worried about the super-digitalization-super-transformation taking away jobs for the robots. I am worried about humans thinking that the answers are more skilling for the logic of the last Century. Behavioural Economics, Social Movements, Viral Change, Network Theory, Political and Social Campaigning, Large Scale Social Interventions, Design, Digital Activism, Voluntarism, all are in, and fresh. Traditional economics, traditional management, linear Kotter-ian change, academic ‘research’, mechanistic employee (happiness) engagement and old Business School lenses are out. Tired, aged, looking sad, desperate for a retirement. We all are very grateful for your contributions. Enjoy the freedom. Well deserved. We’ll call you if we need you.
 
We are busy here figuring out how to look at the world upside down.
 

Leandro Herrero has pioneered the Viral Change Mobilizing Platform, the new ‘Organization Operating System’. He is the author of six management books and works with organizations across the world on transformation, leadership and culture change, powered by Viral Change TM. He regularly shares his thinking on the Daily Thoughts, an acclaimed daily blog on all things new management, people and organizations.