Archivist Attic: A Review of Alan Murray’s "The End of Management", WSJ, Aug 21-22, 2010, W3.
Worthy of consideration for not only business but for public health injury control public service, Alan Murray’s
Essential Guide To Management
, (Dow Jones & Co. Published by Harper Business Imprint of Harper Collins Publishers, 2010), shows how (corporate) bureaucracy is no longer viable and what managers should do about that, namely, act like venture capitalists.
What does a book on the history of modern management and its future demise offer our IC disciplines?
When I moved in the NYS Dept of Health in the early 1970 to a newly created position, Director of Burn Injury Prevention, Burns Care Institute; my new boss, a well liked doc closely linked to the department’s leadership hierarchies oriented me to his work- organizational style: "Les, see this department policy and procedure (P&P) manual – that’s for everyone else – not for you (or us)." He explained that much of new research funding took place, promptly and expediently, for new Department resource allocations in creative collaboration with Health Research, Inc, (HRI), a NYS approved non-profit research, independent arm of the state health department. (Over many years, I was able to persuade and leverage HRI’s innovative administrative funding mechanism, as a principal investigator for federal and state injury prevention practice -research contracts and grants programs.)
Of course, my new boss did not mean to fully throw out the weighty P&P binders but he was offering me and the rest of his bureaus’ staff the chance, then, to innovate beyond Peter Drucker’s "the most important innovation of the 20th century", management- in a bureaucracy. And yet, per Murray, modern management’s (for me, not to be confused with modern leadership) fundamental role is toward self-perpetuation and does not take on the 21st
century whirlwind challenge of change that we need to face and re-think, especially in today’s accelerated downturns in economic and political systems.
That, as Murray mentions in the WSJ, is "heady stuff". However, in our work we too need to "devise a new form of (economics and polity) organization and a new science of management." And all that means more focus and action in the leadership quadrant of innovation (see signature below: APHA ICEHS community website, my
Millennium
historiography, Figure 3. Page13ff. (Quinn, RE. Beyond Rational Management. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc, 1988, 86-87, 96-97 and 102-103. With copyright permissions).
What will all that look like in the future public health injury control organization? That’s not an easy question to answer as we have great comfort for now in the old organization. However, per Murray: ‘we, fully vested in the status quo, will need quickly to adjust to the (for IC: public and private) marketplace developments...and become even more ‘ruthless in reallocating resources to new ventures’.
For we in IC, that might range from assuring our IC organizational program resource allocations are not only evidenced based but translatable to the fluxes of the real world, that our research background section paper shows dynamical trends of past historical successes and failures- and any lesson learned- and that our work does not just conclude that more research is needed but it offers that obviously needed working plan for public health practice, that we are not paralyzed by our analysis due to an imperfect world with few always clear answers, that our practice whims for new venture capital (grants and other funds) are based on some review of weighed and ranked innovative collaborative options with NIH, Kellogg Foundation, et al., that we apply modern leadership texts and archetypes and systems leadership, etc. (See APHA ICEHS community web, below: My Millennium historiography and also the conclusions in my Kansas City speech to Bureau of federal Maternal and Child Health leadership, circa 1975, as an invited speaker.)
As Haddon synergized medicine and engineering, we must better overlay and act with new effective leadership archetypes and models of change agents. The past is prologue.
Thus, also read again Julian Waller’s paper (Public health then and now: Reflections on half century of injury control.
Am. J. Public Health
. April 1994;84; 664-70)and also Leon Robertson’s (Injury Epidemiology
. Research and Control Strategies. Second Edition
. New York: Oxford University Press; 1998) critiques and new creations of IP programs. Also, look at Sue Baker’s many publications, (Injury science comes of age. JAMA.1989;226:2284-5).
Murray concludes in his WSJ article: ‘Change, innovation, adaptability, all have to become orders of the day.’ I recommend a through read of his WSJ article and his book for its transfer value to our present and future IC histories.
My opinions do not necessarily reflect other groups nor organizations.
LFisher Copyrighted 2010
Les Fisher M.P.H. , Safety/Leadership Consultant, Archivist, American Public Health Association, Injury Control and Emergency Health Services Section - See my monthly Archivist Attic commentaries at www.icehs.org and at extranet.icehs.org Newsletters and my Millennium... a historiography , with figures posted for Part 1-4 , all on injury prevention leadership history-at: http://www.apha.org/membergroups/sections/aphasections/icehs/ecommunity/Archivist's Bulletin Board