Listen to the Gurus Six Business Thinkers Who Get It
While the list of companies that embrace Type I thinking is distressingly short, the blueprints for building such organizations are readily
available. The following six business thinkers offer some wise guidance for designing organizations that promote autonomy, mastery, and
purpose.
DOUGLAS MCGREGOR
Who: Asocial psychologist and one of the first professors at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. His landmark 1960 book, The Human Side of
Enterprise, gave the practice of management a badly needed shot of humanism.
Big Idea Theory X vs. Theory Y. McGregor described two very different approaches to management, each based on a different assumption about human behavior. The first approach, which he called Theory X, assumed that people avoid effort, work only for money and security, and therefore need to be controlled. The second, which he called Theory Y, assumed that work is as natural for human beings as play or rest, that initiative and creativity are widespread, and that if people are committed to a goal, they will actually seek responsibility. Theory Y, he argued, was the more accurate—and ultimately more effective—approach.
Type I Insight: Managers frequently complain tome about the fact that subordinates nowadays won’t take responsibility. I have been interested to note how often these same managers keep a constant surveillance over the day-to-day performance of subordinates, sometimes two or three levels below themselves.”
More Info: As I explained in Chapter 3, The Human Side of Enterprise is a key ancestor of Motivation 3.0. Although McGregor wrote the book a full fifty years ago, his observations about the limits of control remain smart, fresh, and relevant.
PETER F. DRUCKER
Who: The most influential management thinker of the twentieth century. He wrote an astonishing forty-one books, influenced the thinking of two generations of CEOs, received a US. Presidential Medal of Freedom, and taught for three decades at the Claremont Graduate University Business
School that now bears his name.
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