When you choose a personality to act as a keynote speaker during a business event or a conference, your thoughts are bound to drift to people who are not just charismatic and famous but who also have something powerful to share. As the most important speaking performance, keynote speeches need to be thought-provoking and inspiring. They have to leave the audience with a feeling they can take an idea or two home and draw from them. Possibly make their life or their business better, help them become less afraid of taking new decisions or inspire them to pursue one direction or another. This is why Julian Birkinshaw of the London School of Business is an ideal candidate for the job.
A renowned professor of strategic and international management at the London Business School, he recently published a book titled “Reinventing Management”, in which he analyzes the reasons behind a recent decline in the quality of management in corporations around the world and gives cautious recipes about how to get companies and their managers back on track.
What is interesting about Birkinshaw is that he is not cay at all about pouring well-deserved criticism at the discipline has been a practitioner and theorist of for years. His critique is poignant and capable of setting a new agenda for managers who are unhappy about where the latest developments have taken them.
An experienced and appreciated keynote speaker, Julian Birkinshaw asserts that management is in decline and that many executives have not only lost touch with the demands of the modern business but also lost a mandate to run key companies. These are very powerful and damning assertions that he nonetheless does not bring up for no apparent reason, but to rouse the crowd to action.
His therapy sounds balanced yet solid. He argues that management has to let old notions that have been inherited from industrial revolution era go for good. There are many great things that can be taken from these models, but they need to be reorganized and, first and foremost, adjusted to fit the complexity of the current marketplace and business. Birkinshaw proposes a framework for managers to diagnose the situation in their companies along four major dimensions, or scales. It will allow them to see the full picture instead of just getting stuck in one rut and to pick the best tools from a wider and more flexible repertoire of tools.
His second conclusion is that management has given too much space to leadership. He argues companies need to find better balance between long-term vision and detailed running of an enterprise. Too much attention has gone in recent years to securing a soaring voice, a high flying ideal for a business while careful implementation and execution have been overlooked or neglected. Managers need to understand their role as leaders and leaders need to become managers to a greater extent, says this outstanding keynote speaker. This combination of a micro scale and a macro scale is sure to produce great results.