Whether you are sitting in HR, Organizational Development, or any other corporate function, or simply in a position of management and leadership, there is no way, today, that a single discipline will provide you with the theoretical and practical background that once was assumed as the solid grounds behind your praxis.
Traditional Psychology has a hard time explaining, and Behavioural Economics has set things upside down. Must read, must learn.
Risk management stops being standard and ‘rational’ and needs to cater for Black Swans, if that is possible at all.
Employee Engagement as understood today is a weak approach unless it embraces the logic behind social movements, something that many organizations still see as esoteric.
The richness of the day to day ‘informal organization’ and peer to peer work (and influence) can only be understood with a high dose of Network Theory. What do you mean you don’t do maths?
The traditional disciplines took a view, a while ago, that reality was ‘interdisciplinary’. That was the buzzword. This is not enough today. The answers today come from meta-disciplines, not just a semantic trick. Meta-disciplines are not simply the old inter-disciplinary pick and mix, but frameworks to understand things elevating the approach to a completely new territory, theory and practice. Example: digital activism. I know, not something too close to day to day management (really?). Digital activism meets network theory, meets social anthropology, meets political marketing, meets social movements, meets Big Data, etc. It’s not the sum, it is beyond the sum.
I have pointed out to the new disciplines of management, ‘The New Classics’, as a way to tap into territories that, although not new, have not been the traditional source of management and leadership.
Of course, one can ignore all this and the ski may not fall, but, if you are serious, your reading list should be scarily long by now.
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