SIX STRATEGIC MENTAL ATTITUDES I.
This is an introduction to my planned series of 6 posts on Six Strategic Mental Attitudes corresponding to the list of six important and well documented management concepts listed below.
I have chosen to write on this approach due to its originality, its emphasis on mind-sets and personalities which so often play a determining role in team work and management meetings decisional and pre-decisional
(reference translated from the french version a booklet ISBN: 87-90172-10-8 by M. Wiman, Stefan Boéthiusand Per Hamann.)
INTRODUCTION
Management is about thought for organisational action and improved performance.
Management science is a field of many concepts and organisational performance methods.
This ebook will consider in depth, the essentials of six important concepts.
1-Benchmarking to measure and improve performance.
2-Networking and Virtual Organisation.
3-Re-engineering. Re-engineering a company’s work-flow processes for a new start.
4-Learning Organisation to improving the company collective know-how.
5-Key Competence, know-how as competitive advantage.
6-Empowerment, individual responsabilisation.
Underlying principles are brought to the fore in order to make better use of each individual manager’s style-preferred thinking processes individually and as a member of the project management team. It will be shown how to optimise overall project and company performance by integrating the benefits of multiple concepts and methods.
GENERAL-OVERVIEW:
In essence every activity implies the repetition of three [thought] mechanisms:
1. VALID - Choice of orientation. Identify what is available -VALID.
2. TRUE - Understand the situation: requires sufficient knowledge pour determiner what is TRUE.
3. NEW - Evaluate one’s own capacity: keep an open mind in order to seek what is NEW. [what is changing.]
Each of these three mechanisms has in turn two aspects or dimensions:
1. Objective
2. Subjective .
They are two fundamentally differing types of thought:
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Objective thought is rational and realistic. It entails making a good choice of measures which require to be taken, choices based upon sound principles and foundations, sound information and knowledge and capable of functioning in the real world.
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Subjective reasoning is intuitive and affective: delegate tasks, call upon the understanding of others and apprehend the subjective pulsions-automatisms- motivations of the people involved.
These six different management concepts and underlying principles are summarised in Table 1, (2x3) above:
Table 1 allows us to efficiently describe, not only personal mental attitudes, but also the type of reasoning required by a particular situation or task.
Successful action implies an interaction between the six types of reasoning. An effective manager or project of management is capable of evolving between the six aptitudes and to use those which respond best to the characteristics of any situation.
Insights into many modern management concepts may be obtained by referring to the degrees with which the six strategic mental aptitudes are required to achieve a success in practice and also how the concepts or methods are related to one another in order to achieve successful project results.
For example management by objectives is based on intuitive values, a rationality and objective information. Team work, by definition, is an activity based on communication and a group of shared values
Each of the following six modern well known management concepts:
-Benchmarking to measure and improve performance.
-Networking and Virtual Organisation.
-Re-engineering. Re-engineering a company’s work-flow processes for a new start.
-Learning Organisation to improving the company collective know-how.
-Key Competence, know-how as competitive advantage.
-Empowerment, individual responsabilisation.
will be considered in turn, in the six post to follow in the following weeks(approx 1/week). Each concept and associated methodology gives, and in fact requires, a different emphasis, a different blend of the these different mental aptitudes.
The degrees to which the six management concepts listed above may be characterised by different blendings of the six strategic mental aptitudes. These will be illustrated graphically using a grid system, whereby the mental attitudes are the defined colours as shown above in Table 1, and the degrees to which these enter into the Management Concepts and methodology are estimated in percentage given on the vertical axis.
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