Common Sense in Party Clothes

I had lunch today with Peter Hunter, founder of the "Breaking the Mould" movement. We met up at the Royal Society of Arts just off the Strand and spent an animated couple of hours sharing our views on management. Peter's website is the hub of his project, which is very much centred on the concept that change can only happen when the people who are at the base of an organisation take ownership of the opportunities and the initiative to do things differently. These are the people who will "break the mould," and without their wholehearted commitment nothing lasting will ever happen.

This thinking is also at the heart of the third book in the Tork & Grunt series, which deals with Change Management. Tork and Grunt rapidly come to the conclusion that Change is one thing which cannot be "managed" in the conventional sense of being autocratically controlled. They realise that once they brought their tribes to live together, everyone had to accept a common vision, with common values and a clear identity. You can see how easily that metaphor translates into mergers and acquisitions in modern commercial organisation.

The more I write the Tork & Grunt series, the more I am coming to realise that so much of all this management literature is essentially a blend of common sense and courage. It takes courage to discard the jargon and get back to basics: it's much easier to hide behind the rhetoric of management-speak with theory X, theory Y and a dozen truisms that masquerade as cutting-edge thinking. In reality, most of these new ideas are common sense in party clothes.