We teach people to be fast, fluid, and flexible, instead of slow, sticky, and stiff
Management guru, Bill Reddin believes that that there was only one realistic and unambiguous definition of managerial effectiveness: The extent to which a leader achieves the output requirements of the position
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Q. You developed the GettingItDone® management system and have been teaching it to Rotman MBA students for 19 years. Tell us about its key principles.
The system uses the thinking of three well known management gurus. The first is the late-great Peter F. Drucker, the father of modern management. He had plenty of great ideas, but the one we embrace most in our framework is management by objectives. I ran into him in the early 1970s and was lucky enough to get to know him pretty well in the late 1990s. I have been a devout apostle of his methods throughout my career.
The second guru is late British-born management behaviouralist Bill Reddin, who believe that that there was only one realistic and unambiguous definition of managerial effectiveness: The extent to which a leader achieves the output requirements of the position. For him, the manager's only job is to be effective. A Drucker fan himself, Bill built on Drucker’s management by objectives to create ‘effective management by objectives’.
The third guru featured in our framework is former Rotman School Dean Roger Martin, author of Playing to Win and The Opposable Mind. Roger is well known for Integrative Thinking and Design Thinking, but he also knows a thing or two about strategy. Our system embraces his concept of the Choice Cascade. This entails answering five key questions to form your strategy: What is our winning aspiration? Where will we play? How will we win? What capabilities will we require? And what management systems do we need? Our course helps with that fifth question. Roger is the one who brought me to the Rotman School back in 2001.
[This article has been reprinted, with permission, from Rotman Management, the magazine of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management]