The default mode for managers needs a reset

Grayson Perry, the transvestite artist, took aim last month at "default man": the cabal of white, middle-class, heterosexual, middle-aged males who run the British establishment.

...  Default managers prefer to stay within divisional silos, suspicious of ideas that are "not invented here". They may as a result become detached from the purpose, and even values, of their company. Employers, meanwhile, find it easier to treat them as "collections of human resources" rather than "communities of human beings", to cite a powerful pamphlet on "Rebalancing Society" by Henry Mintzberg, the management expert. I do not blame people who squeeze themselves into this template of default management. It is the destiny of many of those who fight for promotion. They work hard, have good intentions, and may have no ambition to change the framework they inhabit. Revolution, even achieved peacefully, takes time and effort and puts at risk predictable, comfortable routines. But as Prof Mintzberg points out, east Europeans were able to bring about the collapse of communist regimes 25 years ago in part because they always "understood full well how enslaved they were by their system of governance". Many default managers, by contrast, have lost sight of the fact that they are cogs in a misfiring machine. More worryingly, they fail to recognise they have the potential to change it.

Read full article: Financial Times, November 11, 2014