The laws of nature can often mysteriously find their ways into complex social arenas. The unsolvable paradoxes in today’s corporate and business environments (For example, see TriStragegist’s earlier blog on Challenges to Today’s IT Managers) indicated that some fundamental changes are needed in leadership and management space of modern businesses. From surveying 43 global CEOs and 400+ young employees, the Wolff Olins Report of 2015, drew some similar conclusions. As the report noticed, “Employees are now more confident, more mobile, more demanding, more idealistic in some cases, and less willing to be company people. Employees, more than ever, are individualists.” Leaders, in response, need become “more the shaper, the connector, the questioner.” “What is clear, as leaders forge their own new models, is that the old ways no longer work. CEOs can’t fall back on best practice. They have to be original. Leadership, more than ever, needs creativity. And achieving the impossible needs the most radical kind of creativity.”

TriStrategist thinks that one of such creative solutions to a modern corporation’s management dilemma has already existed in many forms. That’s the concept of “Self-Management”, which allows employees as individualists to manage their own work and ideas, and collectively a corporation still runs its organic, dynamic and healthy growth. Creative ideas and smart practices can quickly replicate themselves in such a setting, comparable to the way fractals can grow from something simple into complex yet elegant self-growth patterns.

The mere concept of self-management could scare many managers, but the trend may be inevitably coming. With the progress of current age of modern technologies, repetitive tasks are gradually eliminated by automation, and complex endeavors increasingly need a collaborative team of diverse talents from different areas, who are more the creative individualists than the rule-followers.

Will the concept of self-management lead to the disintegration and chaos of a corporation? That may depend on the future definition of a corporation and its condition setting. Future competent leaders are more than ever in demand, but their functions will be more to create the conditions for the healthy growth of a group of self-managed individuals to jointly accomplish complex tasks or common goals, and maintain the cohesiveness of the group in the process.

For self-management to work, a corporation first needs to be super-flat so that ideas from the individuals and small teams can organically grow. To achieve high goals and complex tasks that require large collections of skillful individuals, an organization needs to have the right processes and tools in place so that team collaborations and communications are smooth, intuitive and without barriers. The organization also needs meaningful data-driven measurement mechanisms. As Peter Drucker mentioned, “What measured improves.” Each self-managed individual will understand clearly what success means to him/her and to others. With these, a corporation of collective self-managed employees can function as a cohesive yet dynamic organization.

Such a concept in fact has already been seen in practice. Google is a great example. From their founders who prefer contrary thinking and doing, Google’s management practices have demonstrated many creative and daring ideas for future organizations. A few notable ones are flat organization, smaller teams, data-driven decision-making, talent hiring, impact-focused grouping, and ample freedom for employees to manage their ideas and time. A 2014 book on How Google Works, written by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and former executive Jonathan Rosenberg, provided us a glimpse of Google inside. They in fact illustrated how the basic home-grown concept of self-management worked in Google. Conditions and restrictions of today’s society certainly have limited the effects of some of these ideas and the increasing size of the organization has added more complications, but Google’s unusual success and trend-setting records in many cutting-edge technologies and business models nonetheless demonstrated the power of these modern management concepts.