Overview of Management Fad - Assignment Example

Running head: Management Fad Management Fad ___________ d: _________ In management terminology, to identify craze of the market thereby identifying and applying proper niche techniques are classified as 'fad'. 'Fad' works in two situations. Firstly, 'Fad' exists in circumstances where management theories are not sufficient to work in organisational behaviour, so in this respect management theories are not really theories at all, but merely techniques for managing in a certain way, these techniques gives rise to 'fad'. Secondly, 'fad' reshapes and redesign management ideas in a trendier manner so that they become immensely fashionable while others remain largely ignored. Therefore, 'fad' in this situation is more a function of the idea itself or the persuasiveness of the management guru or manager who is promoting it. Often marketing researchers have associated fads with 'craze'. It is from this definition that TQM adopts fad strategies to maximise the overall profits of their firms. According to Camerer and Knez, the fact that management fashions like Total Quality Management (TQM), organisational culture and Business Process Reengineering is due to adopting managerial tools on a temporary basis, therefore "if the job of TQM is coordinating change then, once the job is done the terminology becomes useless and should make way for a new 'fad'" (Jackson, 2001, p. 21) Therefore in order to class a management idea as a true 'fad', one must study the market and identify the target consumers. Management tools have also become increasingly influential in research practice. For example, the field of brand and marketing consultancy employs techniques deriving from ethnography, as evidenced by press coverage in the UK Sunday Times Business Section (25 August 2002, section 3, p. 8). The author has found that the world's leading advertising agencies increasingly employ interpretive techniques drawn from identifying 'fad' behaviour in their pursuit of penetrating consumer insights. (Hackley, 2003, p. 2) Management Fad - Reasonability In circumstances where there are umpteen management techniques, fad implication and thereafter success is not always reasonable. CEOs and managers have many different complex approaches to choose from other than trying a new 'fad' technique every time. According to various researches more or less defined frequently science terms give complexity to science theories with meanings more relevant to firms. Organisation change 'fad' method leads to emergence and empowerment as a tool for management. The record over the past several decades where on one hand presents fad's reasonability, on the other hand states its weaknesses as well. In this context 'fad' is misused on the grounds of legitimacy for management ideas that do not become legitimised by resting on a foundation of high-quality research are quickly replaced by the next fad coming down the pike. (Lissack, 2002, p. 207) It is therefore not necessary that the classification is always reasonable. However it often depends upon consumer external and internal research. If for some reason an organisation has remained unable to identify consumer needs, there is a possibility that 'fad' technique fails. Whether an organisation is aimed to restructure its product or brand management or an organisation is targeted to re-brand strategies, it has to make its 'fad' effective. Therefore in order to make a 'fad' planning effective, the company needs to adopt scenario driven planning and analysis. Scenario Planning In order to put a stoppage to the declining productivity, corporate restructuring is required in the form of scenario-driven planning which acts as a new productivity source for strategy design and implementation. The best thing about scenario planning is that instead of adopting a single alternate to the problem, it lists all the possible alternative techniques and solutions. Scenario Planning or a projected sequence of events begins by identifying variables relevant to a firm's strategic situation, along with their causal interrelationships. Changes in these variables can have potentially profound effects on fad's performance and efficiency. In order to make a fad successful, scenario planning requires external variables identification like intensity of competition, emergence of new products and processes, government regulation, and international interest and currency rates. Changes in these and other variables determine a firm's performance over time. Scenario-driven planning help managers anticipate the effects of future changes triggered in the external environment. Scenarios are not about predicting the future, but about perceiving and re-perceiving possible alternative futures. Good scenarios tempt managers to examine carefully what might have been in their premises thereby helping managers and firms to learn and anticipate. (Acar & Georgantzas, 1995, p. 40) Management history reveals that mistakes have been made and continue to be made. In today's transformation from the industrial to the post-industrial era, managers devote much energy and time on each firm's strategic posture and re-branding management. Therefore, taking advantage of new opportunities and deflating threats may be the essence of strategy, but changes in strategy do not take place automatically. Strategy depends on a firm's ability to identify emerging patterns in the business environment and to act accordingly on time. This is the true 'fad' thinking and implementation which requires a firm to recreate strategy design which depends on institutional learning. (Acar & Georgantzas, 1995, p. 4) Scenario planning from the advent has been used by organisation theorists to latch on. The meaning of scenarios became primarily literary. Common sense and imagination produced flickering apocalyptic predictions of a strikingly optimistic or pessimistic future. Political, organisational, and marketing experts use scenarios today to conjure up visions of alternative favourable and unfavourable business environments. (Acar & Georgantzas, 1995, p. 22) A blend of various scenarios drawn together in a single framework, including those of professional planners, analysts and managers suggest that many managerial changes have taken place during the last ten years. Strategy theorists state that the 1970s witnessed the transformation of product markets into a global perspective. Several changes with the combined geographical expansion of markets have increased the complexity of managerial work by rendering the managerial capability which flourished during the 1960s. (Acar & Georgantzas, 1995, p. 26) Today, environmental challenges are developing progressively faster and it would not be wrong to say that management 'fad' has contributed whole heartedly in making the processes faster. Scenario Planning - Benefits There is no doubt that scenario-driven planning can help a firm integrate its competitive intelligence efforts with thinking and brainstorming strategy design, not as a narrow specialty, but as admission of limitations and environmental complexity. The analysis of strategic situations requires a comprehensive inquiry into the environmental causalities and equivocalities that result from competitive actions. Scenarios probe the combined consequences of environmental trends, changes in the firm's own strategy, as well as the moves of its current and future competitors. Therefore scenario planning after taking into account all the possible measures for product existence, takes decisions as decision-making is the major tool for scenario planning. Computed scenarios help managers understand what they do not know, enabling strategy design and implementation through the co alignment of the 'right' tactics to improve long-term performance. Through its use of corporate resources, scenario-driven planning makes the tactics required for implementation clear. Also, it can reveal the required co alignment of tactics over time, so scenarios enable managers to take wise decisions after 'future forecasting', the decisions that lead a firm towards efficiency, effectiveness and time management. Problems in Introducing Scenarios Despite of all the plus points of scenario building, there are certain problems confronted by the managers in introducing scenario driven planning. The foremost is the decision making capability escorting to future prediction. Scenarios where on one hand predict an organisation's future, on the other hand it arises the need for managers to be conscious about the future psychologically and environmentally. However, thanks to scenario building that it does not offer a single solution or a single perspective to problems, but mentions all the possible solutions. Now, it depends upon the manager for which option he chooses to go with. Another problem lies with the illogical sequencing of ideas behind scenario formation. Such random multiple decisions in scenario building enables the managers to take free action according to their choice of interest but again, the future is unpredictable and with a variety of solutions a manager often gets trapped in a particular 'schema' or narrative that fails to take into account important dimensions of one's activities. This entrapment may lead to difficulties or even disasters. Few managers possess serious training in moral philosophy, utilitarianism, rights theory, and theories of virtue or justice. There is a set of arguments that develops the thesis that training in moral reasoning might increase moral awareness, facilitate moral decision-making, and, may prevent the problems from occurring. The best solution to the problems of scenario planning is to adopt an 'open or free source plan' approach to all the alternates and to evaluate each and every solution to the extent where one finds the best 'free' solution. In circumstances where a manager is unable to meet company's needs with respect to solution, he is free to develop free solution along with 'combinational strategies'. That means the best way of scenario planning is not to stick to a single or couple of perspectives but evaluate all the methodologies in the light of combining or merging selected possible solutions. This strategy has remained successful so far in designing corporate and business strategies. Firms can use it in formulating and analysing strategic situations productively. However the scenario experts should not impose their own models and scenarios on managers. A firm should enable its managers through flexibility, initiative, and power to make scenario explorations genuine and their own. Scenario-driven planning is not a panacea but has proved successful in a variety of business settings. Because of its multidisciplinary nature, it has helped even professionals and managers in a variety of applications, namely, capital budgeting, career planning, competitive analysis, crisis management, macroeconomic analysis, marketing, portfolio management, and product development. Scenario-driven planning enables managers to perceive a strategic situation, to discern their assumptions about the situation so that they can improve their decision quality. Scenario planning enables the managers to visualise the external environment whether it is suitable for initiating the project or not. In this case 'environmental scenarios' should be built up in order to determine whether the environment is favourable for launching a new 'fad' or not. Yet, despite the popularity, growth, and enthusiastic reception of environmental scenario planning, the usefulness of straightforward mathematical extrapolations is severely constrained in practice. The reason is that scenarios are forecasted and predictions of the effects of changes in the environment are much more difficult than foreseeing the primary changes themselves. Integrating environmental scenario implications into the strategic plans of a strategic business unit (SBU) is even more problematic. Even in organisational setting where there are limited resources, established programs and political interests, potential changes and combined effects must be linked to strategy design. Environmental monitoring involves searching the environment for signals of change. Identifying possible consequences and choosing events to observe can help verify the speed and time of the anticipated change. This approach is predicated on the idea that changes in the environment are visible in increasingly tangible forms before they assume economic, political, social, or strategic importance. Researchers who have chosen to make institutionalisation a key motive in explaining the creation, dissemination and adoption of new management programs have tended to utilise the metaphor of the market to organise their accounts. Viewed through the lens of the market, the process is conceptualised as a relatively simple supply-and-demand model by which management ideas, theories and techniques are developed by groups of suppliers and then consumed by a largely undifferentiated group of manager consumers. In fusing this market metaphor with the equally powerful metaphor of fashion, Abrahamson has presented the most comprehensive, and arguably most influential business fad phenomenon to date. His model is presented to help scholars better understand the dynamics of "management fashion" which he defines as "a relatively transitory collective belief, disseminated by management fashion setters that a management technique leads to rational management progress" (Abrahamson In: Jackson, 2001, p. 28). Scenario planning is not just another management fad, various organisations like 'Shell' and 'General Electric' (GE) has been using scenarios since 1960s. Scenario driven planning has changed the entire Shell's strategic posture. Formerly one of the weakest of the seven largest oil firms, it has now become second only to 'Exxon' in size and, the first in profits. Shell's senior planners are no longer concerned about forecasting. Their main concern has become the mind-set of Shell's managers. To a large extent, the popularity of scenarios is attributed to the work performed at the Royal Dutch-Shell Group of Companies. Shell's use of scenarios has made a unique contribution in scenario-driven planning. Its scenario experience has produced both promising results and methodological innovations. Since the oil crisis of 1973, numerous studies have either duplicated or built on Shell's scenario work. The second example presents GE's (General Electric's) classic experience with the scenario approach. Therefore one can see the importance of scenario planning and building in an organisation's infrastructure. References/ Bibliography Acar William & Georgantzas C. Nicholas, (1995). Scenario-Driven Planning: Learning to Manage Strategic Uncertainty: Quorum Books: Westport, CT. Blackwell W. Charles, Gibson Jane & Tesone V. Dana, (2003) Management Fads: Here Yesterday, Gone Today In: SAM Advanced Management Journal. Volume: 68. Issue: 4. Page Number: 12+. Hackley Chris, (2003). Doing Research Projects in Marketing, Management and Consumer Research: Routledge: New York. Jackson Brad, (2001). Management Gurus and Management Fashions: A Dramatistic Inquiry: Routledge: London. Lissack R. Michael, (2002) The Interaction of Complexity and Management: Quorum Books: Westport, CT. Morris Steve, (1998) The Handbook of Management Fads: Survival in Business without Taking Yourself Too Seriously: Thorogood: London. Sunday Times Business Section In: Hackley Chris, (2003). Doing Research Projects in Marketing, Management and Consumer Research: Routledge: New York. Read More