RADICAL MANAGEMENT by Samuel Culbert

Author:Samuel Culbert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Free Press
Published: 1985-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

An individual must have the ability to communicate his or her strengths and associated needs for context so that others can comprehend what he or she has to contribute and what supporting role he or she can play.

An individual must possess the ability to perceive another person’s strengths accurately and be responsible to his or her needs for context in key organizational situations.

With these skills in mind, review with us two instances where managers were able to make use of their understanding of symbolic events to operate more strategically. Both illustrate the use of the strategic orientation in engaging the competitive and political forces set in motion by others using a tactical approach.

The first instance involves an army brigadier general with responsibilities for coordinating the annual Pentagon budget proposal. In confiding to us the secret of his success, the general described his experience as follows:

When I first took over as Director of Army Budgets I was faced with a structure that was guaranteed to be adversarial. Key commanders and division directors arrived at the appointed meeting place with an entourage of staff and, when the time came for them to speak, they would make the most partisan case for their unit’s budget needs. Nothing I could say was useful in getting commanders to make the necessary concessions for putting together a budget that was realistic for the Army as a whole. And, as the most junior ranking officer in the room, I was certainly in no position to single-handedly cut a unit commander’s budget request.

Then I had an insight. I figured I could make more headway by breaking the process into two distinct steps. The first followed tradition and brought together all of the major bureau directors and their key staffs to hear each chief give a hell-fire presentation of his unit’s essential projects and funding needs.

For the second step, we excused all the adjutants and let them run back to their units with stories of how the “old man,” their commander or bureau director, took a hard line and didn’t concede an inch. This allowed each of the principals to maintain his image. Of course, with their staffs gone, the dynamics changed dramatically. The game changed from hard-ball advocacy to producing an integrated budget that would fly with the Congress.

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