Lingfield College Business

Bartleby The fashion for agile management is spreading Executives need to be a cross between Spider-Man and Simone Biles The Economist  Print edition | Business Jul 5th 2018 AGILITY is such a modish word in modern management theory that it can seem as if the ideal corporate executive would be a combination of Spider-Man and Simone Biles, a gymnast. The concept has its roots in the idea of “lean management”, developed by Toyota in car manufacturing, and in the “Agile manifesto” drawn up by a group of software developers back in 2001. Big software-development projects were (and are) notorious for producing costly, late and cumbersome results. The idea of agility was to focus on small, innovative and multi-disciplinary teams. Among the manifesto’s principles were that “individuals and interactions” were more important than “processes and tools”, and that responding to change was better than sticking to the plan. Latest stories The dos an...

THE politically correct view of people management is that it is mainly about team spirit and co-operation. Meanwhile, the idea that companies are run as dictatorships seems repellent to decent citizens in the 21st century. A recent book, called Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Co-operators on Earth, argues that mankind has advanced thanks to the productivity that comes with elaborate governance institutions and teamwork. The book was self-published by the evolutionary scientist Peter Turchin, who set out to discover why our culture has made mankind so prosperous.  Stephen Pinker makes similar points in The Better Angels of our Nature, where he writes that commerce is one of the five driving forces that have made mankind less violent over the course of history. Commerce is “a positive sum game in which everybody can win; as technological progress allows the exchange of goods and ideas over longer distances and among larger groups of trading partners...

Great video on what "leadership" really is: