Hello, and welcome to the the last of my five video clips around the, the discussions that have been happening in the forum, you've made it through to week five. Congratulations I'm just going to give you my thoughts on, on the two forums that we posted this week. I saw quite a lot of other interesting posts. There was something about some English football managers. There was quite a lengthy one about the pros and cons of homeworking. And, and, and a few others besides, so I encourage you to, to take a look at those if you haven't already. But let me focus on those two discussion questions. One was around, what does good management look like? And the other one was around this case study of Eden McCallum. The first one said essentially, look, we know what good management is meant to be. We know that good managers are the people who give their people space, they give them a good sense of direction, they give them lots of encouragement and support. Why don't we do that more consistently? And I think there was a very rich conversation on, on the system there, a lot of you I think picked up on the, the, the important and obvious points around, we're very busy, we don't have time to do the job perhaps as well as we know we should we have often very conflicting priorities. We have people with very different needs, and what makes good sense in terms of how we manage one person may not make sense in terms of how we manage the next person. So if we are going to be good at our jobs, we've got to understand each individual's personal kind of motivations. But I think the real point of that question is to get at the underlying drivers or more important, the underlying obstacles to doing a good job. Because essentially, we have almost all risen through the ranks as individuals by being in control, by doing a good job, by being focused on our task, by taking credit for, for doing that. And, and, and the problem is that being a good manager or leader often involves doing things which go against that which we have been hired or promoted to do. In other words, a good leader is somebody who gives power away, who actually allows other people to take credit and allows other people to make the mistakes. And so you almost have to unlearn the set of things that got you to where you are in order to do your good jobs in the more senior positions in the organization. Wrapped up in that, of course, is the fact that most people in organizations simply do not reward people for being good at what you might call people management. The incentive systems, nine times out of ten, are geared towards essentially promoting people who deliver results, not people who are really good at actually motivating and coaching the people around them. Long-term perspective would mean investing in people would be rewarded, but most companies have a very short-term view on that set of issues. So in short, good management is an unnatural act. It doesn't come naturally to us. We have to work at it, and to some degree, we have to push against the pressures, the sort of the, the short-term ism of our organizations, and I think that's really the underlying challenge. The second of the two discussion questions this week was around this company in the, in the UK, in London called Eden McCallum. And I know the people, I know Eden, and McCallum, and all of the other partners pretty well. And I've got to know the challenges and, and, and the opportunities of their model. It's a terrific model, there's no question. It has worked very well for them. They have, within their chosen niche, a very, very strong position. And I think it's fairly obvious what the pros and cons to an individual, a person are of working in that sort of networked model. I think it's very obvious that this model gives Eden McCallum a great deal of flexibility. It's gives them much lower fixed cost rates. But, and this is the, really, the key point, is that it comes at a price. And that price is that they have to be really good at relationship management. The essence of Eden McCallum is, it's a little bit like a recruitment consultancy, or recruitment agency, is they are acting as a mediator between a bunch of a thousand of consultants on one side, and a bunch of clients on the other. And they have to know each side intimately. They have to know what makes those individuals on both sides tick in order to make the correct match. So it turns out that there's no dissent mediation problem. There's no risk, it turns out, that, that the consultants were bypassing Eden McCallum and go straight to the clients because Eden McCallum adds a great deal of value in that relationship. The risk of a limitation, I believe, is that it's a very difficult model to scale above a certain size. Because it's so built on personal relationships, you simply can't substitute those relationships for a set of formal and depersonalized procedures. And that for me, that it the key point here, which is that work beautifully, but you couldn't take a 1,000 person consulting model and turn it into a 5,000 person consulting model. You have to almost say, let's just sort of start again and replicate this model in another market, which is, in fact, essentially what they're doing, they're gone to Amsterdam. They're looking to go to New York or Boston. So, hopefully, that's useful. Very interesting model that they're playing with. I think we're going to see more of those types of models out there in various different forms. But neither are we going to lose the big traditional companies, which have been around for so long. So I encourage you to take the exam. The exam is open til Wednesday, and then, of course, you have the opportunity, almost an obligation, to do some peer reviewing of the exams written by others. And if you want to know more about the subject, I would encourage you to go to the, to the Management Innovation Exchange website. I've mentioned it before, and we'll send you an email with a link. But it's www.managementexchange.com is the website. It's got lots of fresh content about all the issues I've been talking to you about during the course. So, I encourage you to do that by all means, get in touch with me. By all means, continue to post on the website, and I hope you enjoyed the course. Thank you.
