In yesterday's post I wrote that the command and control model is coming to an end. Borrowing from Rosabeth Kanter, and from Tom Malone's language, I suggested that a better metaphor for the 21st century is coordinate and cultivate.
Cultivate: she cultivated a taste for fine wine, to prepare and work the land in order to raise crops, to promote the growth or development of a science or art, to foster.
The assembly line and most routine production lend themselves to command and control. Individual creativity and intelligence are not at all necessary when you're dealing with routinized, formulaic processes. But with a global marketplace demanding creativity, innovation and deep smarts, companies will have to take advantage of the intelligence and creativity of their people. People become the real assets of an organization, not bricks and mortar.
The cultivating model surfaced in the late 1980s, not in any finalized or clear format, but I saw managers in technology breaking free from the old command and control of traditional business. Indeed, some of my clients in strategic sales, info technology and architecture work out of the coordinate and cultivate model.
What does cultivate look like?
Malone suggests that film-making provides a prototype of "knowledge-and-creativity intensive work" that will show up in many more industries in the future.
Kathleen Kennedy, the producer of ET, Jurassic Park, . . . describes (the process) for a film producer: "Once principal photography begins, the producer steps back and sees where the movie is going. A film is an organic, living, breathing thing. It's not just defined by what's on paper, it continues to change. The creative process continues throughout and out of that comes sometimes the best ideas. But there needs to be someone who maintains a cohesive vision, a focus on the entire picture and not just the individual elements."
You can see that managing in that setting can be scary: certainly not easy. But, as Malone suggests, thinking of your work as cultivating, rather than controlling, can enable you to be more flexible and open to differing possibilities.
Bottom line: You can't be completely certain of the product or the service that will result, but the intelligence and creativity of professionals are going to be a prerequisite for business success.