New Work Culture: HRD Transformational Management Strategies

Citation

Simons, G.F. (1999), "New Work Culture: HRD Transformational Management Strategies", European Business Review, Vol. 99 No. 2, pp. 125-126. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.1999.99.2.125.1

New Work Culture is an act of continuity. Phil Harris has combined and updated two of his seminal publications, prophetically written in the 1980s, that brought to light the emerging norms, values and behaviors of organizations moving into the future (Harris’s first exploration of these new organizational themes occurred in New Worlds, New Ways, New Management (AMACOM, 1983)).

He updates and documents the progress that has been made in the transition from the industrial age organization to the current stage of meta‐industrial management.

Predicting the future, even from what seem to be evident trends, is often a risky process. This new volume shows, however, that Harris was largely spot‐on a decade ago. Now he charts the learnings and challenges and provides advice from the perspective of the human resource development field. The book has four units, discussing, respectively:

1. 1

   The HRD challenges that we face in making the transition to the new work culture.

2. 2

   What makes up the new work culture.

3. 3

   How this affects the day‐to‐day conduct of human resources management.

4. 4

   Successful HRD strategies for the new work culture.

A generously descriptive glossary complements the units and acquaints the reader with terms that are philosophically critical to the book.

With the thoroughness of a researcher and the pixels of a contemporary journalist, Harris traces the transition that organizations and managers have been making over the past decade to create the flatter, more flexible, technology and market‐driven enterprises of the present. New Work Culture is full of the stories of organizational struggles and successes and well illustrated by graphs and charts that make visible and understandable the trends he describes.

Harris and Robert Moran are best known for their blockbuster handbook, Managing Cultural Differences, now moving into its fifth “millennial” edition. Not surprisingly, we find ample descriptions of the impact of cultural factors on new ways of working. There are observations about international as well as corporate and professional cultural factors, and how these impel and give direction to changes in management and business practice. Harris provides ample culture tips for global managers and for the management of transnational human resources.

Information and brainpower define the nature of work and the structure of activity in today’s meta‐industrial organization. Hence it is critical to understand the nature of communication within and beyond the organization. In discussing this, as well as throughout the book, Harris moves easily from the broad overview to well‐researched developments and finally to practical everyday advice and instructions for those who manage and work in the emerging technological work culture. His practical analyses provide guideposts for the constant state of future shock in which we are immersed.

Unlike industrial‐age companies whose leadership defined and even dictated their purposes in terms of market strengths, the new organization is proactive and consciously self‐defined. It invents and reinvents itself in ways that the author amply describes in a key chapter on “Changing organizational purposes and standards”.

Harris is able to see and highlight the important connections between what happens on the shopfloor, in robotics, for example, and the changing career development patterns not only of those who manage the machinery but also of those who manage its purposes.

While reading the author’s description of the free flow of jobs across national boundaries via electronic media, I was also struggling to acquire a visa for a colleague to physically enter the USA. Accustomed to working virtually around the world, I felt like Prometheus carrying a stone up the hill and having his liver torn out by user‐unfriendly government processes. While New Work Culture is essentially a management education book, I would highly recommend its reading and implementation in the public sector.

New Work Culture is not a book to read in one sitting. Its encyclopedic 600‐plus pages suggest a slow digestion over time and a revisiting of the key lists and charts that provide a backbone for HRD managers to move forward. At a time when information is more and more piecemeal, just‐in‐time and increasingly electronic, it seems that Harris’s work begs to be delivered in some online form, an indexed, searchable part of a knowledge management system.

Harris speaks personally to the individual manager and employee. He provides background information, situation analysis and well‐grounded recommendations on how to manage culture shock, and what is for many an ongoing role change. This concerns not only departing from classical patterns of management to contemporary ones, but also responding to the feminization of management. Not only do the high numbers of women in the workplace and their growing numbers in leadership roles inevitably bring a change in perspective, but traditionally feminine skills are also needed for interactions in a multicultural and global environment.

Perhaps the most important element of the book for this reader was the as yet unfulfilled promise in Harris’s vision of the future organization. While the nature of work has improved for many, we are still far away from the sense of leisure, independence, and community that the futurists predicted a decade ago. Young people still speak of the “corporate jungle” and the trade‐off that often has to be made between life and work. Yet, this comes from a consciousness that calls into question what an earlier generation might have simply accepted as the price of success.

One cannot but compare the hopes for the future raised by New Ways of Working to the industrial promises of new leisure and freedom made in the post‐World War II years. The 1960s brought about a state of wellbeing for a percentage of the US population unparalleled in history. The Wirtschaftswunder and parallel developments had lifted European lifestyles to beyond pre‐war standards. Since then, as Harris suggests in his Epilogue to the book, we have been backsliding and have much to do. The world is ever more divided into the very rich and the very poor. Will the new meta‐industrial revolution ultimately succeed in bringing wellbeing to a global level? I suspect the recent economic success of the USA and Western Europe, as well as the stress of present economic crises, will help us put these developments into perspective and urge appropriate corrective action to bring us to the new millennium.

Finally and paradoxically, both high technology and care‐giving dominate the US workplace of the future. While Harris discusses models of organizational success in promoting employee and executive wellbeing, this is only one small area of concern. On the highest level, our essential humanity is at stake in the coupling of technology and care, two very different but complementary partners. This, it seems, is the vision and the message of the author of the New Work Culture who has long observed their courtship and would witness their marriage in the organizations of the future.