Anyone who has studied “management” in school probably remembers learning about the four functions of management. The terminology can vary, but these functions are often referred to as “Plan, Organize, Lead, and Control,” and are viewed as representing a closed loop process. Furthermore, these recurring functions are visualized as cascading from the top of the enterprise all the way down to each individual unit. Simple enough, right?
The “good news” is that as organizations have grown in size, scope, and complexity, numerous enabling technologies have emerged to assist in managing each individual business process. At this point, robust solutions are in place for processes such as customer relationship management, finance and administration, human capital management, manufacturing operations, supply chain, vendor management, various industry-specific functions, etc. Even better, as newer agile cloud-based solutions emerge, we are seeing ever-increasing advances in ease of use, the power of the analytics, Artificial Intelligence, etc.
So what is the “bad news”? The problem is that despite all of today’s process maturity and functionality, the corporate “train wrecks” just keep on occurring. There is hardly a day that goes by in which there is not yet another unpleasant surprise. GMI’s point of view is that this is due to the fact that most overall management processes have never been appropriately architected to deal with today’s unprecedented velocity of change and increasingly complex and demanding environment.
We believe that the only solution is to replace currently disconnected, inefficient, and poorly designed approaches with holistic Management Operating Systems (comprised of those tailored governance processes, frameworks, tools, and behaviors needed to systematically Plan, Organize, Lead, and Control each organization). Since our founding in 2001, GMI has been laser-focused on this one issue. Key building blocks in our methodology are illustrated below.
