: Fredmund Malik
: The Book of Dangerous Words in Management
: Campus Verlag
: 9783593443287
: 1
: CHF 27.20
:
: Management
: English
: 208
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
Disruption? New Work? Agility? Executives are supposed to be charismatic and visionary while staff are expected to be motivated and enthusiastic. Such talk comes easily - and indeed incessantly - to managers. But how much to these all-too-familiar clichés really have to tell us? Fredmund Malik reveals the muddled thinking underlying large parts of the vocabulary of management. His new book cuts through the babble and makes a stand for clear thinking and straight talking. »Not only skeptics will find Malik a pleasure to read. He is skilled at picking apart the fashionable verbiage of management with often sarcastic glee.« Süddeutsche Zeitung (Munich)

Professor Fredmund Malik ranks among the foremost thinkers on management. A best-selling author, he is Professor of Corporate Management at the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland) as well as founder and chairman of the leading institute for the Management of Complex Systems, with branches in St. Gallen, Zurich, Vienna, Berlin, London, Toronto, Beijing and Shanghai.
INTRODUCTION In the world of information technology, every effort is made to keep computer systems free of viruses and malware. Their dangers are obvious, which is why systems and networks must be secured. The best way to do so is by continual updates, allowing computers to correct themselves, repair damage, and learn to deal with threats. But how to prevent 'viruses' from infesting the thoughts and ideas of human beings? How to prevent 'malware' in the form of misguided ideas and dangerous misconceptions from entering our heads - and particularly the heads of executives in societies' countless organizations? How can we prevent the functioning of our organizations being 'hacked'? A still more important question is: How can the thinking of executives be provided with the right updates, containing the concepts that point the future? What's new doesn't have a name yet These questions are important because we are witnesses to the emergence of a New World. Economy and society are undergoing one of the greatest transformations in history. The Old World, as we knew it, is turning into a New World, which we still can know only in outline, and in some of its rudiments. We can conjecture a little more, from which we can infer that in this New World, nearly everything will be unlike it is today. The greatest challenge is to move from the Old World to the New, for in the period of transition, the Old World will keep functioning less and less, while the New World is not yet up and running. Since 1997, I have been referring to this process of profound change as 'The Great Transformation21' and offered a detailed discussion of it in my books. In order to describe it, I needed a largely new language - that of cybernetics, from which the term 'governance' is borrowed. The language of the Old World masks and distorts nearly all the New World's important traits, precisely because they are new. In fact, we probably do not yet even have words for what may turn out to be the crucial properties of the New World. In times of transition, we are in particular danger of failing to notice such properties until we are suddenly confronted with them. Such was also the case with earlier transitions. What was new did not have a name. After all, what to call an apparatus able to do something that,