We all like to live and work in well established and organized environments. That is history of humans for last thousands of years. But, change started with emerging of individualism in England and later in other countries (as USA) something interesting happened. In many countries people started being more and more innovative because innovation was connected to their interests and that was to improve living conditions. Today’s wealth of top countries is based on that freedom and individualism.

In everyday business we see a diverse company management styles, but one that is distinctive is combination of lean business and promotion of innovation. You would say: distinctive in what? In output, in company value gains. To be big or to be small doesn’t need to have any impact on company health and future. The problem is because larger company is, it has more and more strict rules about every detail of business. But it doesn’t need to be the case. There are positive examples that have less waste than counterparts (Google, etc).

Rules are definitely welcome, but we have to be really careful not to overdo them. Businesses are trying to make perfect system where great rules and regulations make people irrelevant so everyone is replaceable. In real life, that doesn’t work. We have science supporting that, and even it is clearly visible by watching successful companies. Greatest companies are successful because they have successful and great individual innovators that have a vision and know what is the right path to achieve goals. For example, Steve Jobs return to apple rejuvenated that company and after he left, Apple has similar problems as before even it is much wealthier company. That is why clever businesses keep their innovators as “golden geese”.

Great managers have to nurture intelligent individuals that like to try new things, that think about solutions without dogmas learned in schools. For that reason, my experience as a manager in the university taught me to hire interns and people not too established. All of them became great IT professionals. They learned how to think freely and how to solve everyday issues. After working in the university, all of them became top tier IT professionals working for great international companies.

For that reason, if you start micromanaging people it will make them passive. Some companies hire more managers to “animate passive workers”, but that always fail. You have to promote a feeling of ownership and allow individuals to get cheers when something is good or to be responsible if something ended bad. Not to be understood wrong: you have to allow people to fail sometimes because without failures there are no innovations. I learned from one manager that you have to ask them: “what do you think?” before you say something. It is the same when you talk to a patient. Any opinion you say before patient says what he/she thinks only “pollutes” his/her opinion and removes some value from the conversation.

Do not hire people with only questions how they did something 10 years ago by focusing on technology. It is entirely irrelevant. In past experience you should research on person’s ideas, adaptability, critical thinking and problem solving ability. You are not hiring someone to solve your problems as 10 years ago, but to help your business to solve problems in the future. Especially knowing how dramatically technology changed only in the last few years.

In the future we do not know what technology we will have. Sometimes it is extremely hard even to predict. For now we see that open source, distributed computing, big data and high business responsiveness approaches are winning and for that reason ideas as NodeJS had great success. Also many others. Even some hard to change companies like corporate giant Microsoft did tremendous move forward with plans and architecture of new .Net Core by moving it to open source, opening C# and compiler to other IDEs and other servers then Microsoft. But how successful that will be, future will show.

Great individuals will make you successful as a manager. Do not even start thinking that you can be any good manager by yourself. Remember: manager is professional that manages resources in the name of owners. So, if you create great team of individuals and let them to be productive, it will return as a great success to you as their manager.

Remember, do not allow yourself to be caught in any dogma that will cut your ability to see the future clearly. Open your mind!

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