2016, and I feel extremely happy to be able to devote myself full-time from now on to the things I care most about when it comes to work: team, trust and social innovation. I’m currently gearing up TMG at full speed while studying an Executive MBA at EFL at Lund University School of Economics and Management, in collaboration with LU Open.
The mission is to bring field studies in management innovation (cf. business innovation) from the real world into the university and transfer pedagogic tools back to business life. The EMBA program at Lund University involves doing an individual project to apply theory in practice directly on your business as you go. Action Research is my preferred method here. I’m writing a series of academic papers on the subject of management innovation from the research I do inside various companies and public organisations while also developing a software making it easier to operate so called fractal organisations (cf. cybernetics).
Experiences are brought further into the innovation projects, productions, talks, workshops and films I do together with organisations, colleagues and friends involved in the TMG activities.
Why this passion about management innovation?
The Internet era, with a globally connected world, have distributed the power of knowledge, freedom of choice and the ability to influence, from the few belonging to a privileged elite, to the many in the role as citizens, producers, consumers and “prosumers”. Digitalisation as a megatrend is influencing other megatrends such as Entrepreneurialisation, Globalisation, Urbanisation, Sustainability and Health. This new world has propelled a need for change in the way which organisations are being built (in terms of structure), managed (in terms of process) and lead (in terms of communication).
Management Innovation has become an emerging discipline through the works by influential thinkers and business leaders like C. K. Prahalad, Gary Hamel, Patrick Hoverstadt, Jo Owen, Vineet Nayar, Frederic Laloux, Jan Carlzon, Leif Edvinsson and Brian Robertson, to name a few. The development of new social technologies in business agility, fractal organisation and distributed leadership are focusing on making organisations become more human friendly, innovative and adaptive to change. However, most organisations today, whether public sector or private companies, are still governed by non-userfriendly communication tools, poor analytics for decision-making and old rigid organisational structures making it hard to drive innovation and elicit the very best of employees. As a consequence, what’s not fit for survival in the 21st century economy is on decline and we see huge effects on society, macroeconomics and human labour in the ongoing structural transformation.
I was happy to see thousands of people from the whole world unite at the SOCAP15 conference in SanFrancisco this fall, with a common interest to work for a major upgrade of our society – to create a socially responsible economy. To me, this was a confirmation from leading impact investors, industry leaders, entrepreneurs, academia and politics that TMG is on the right track.
So, I look forward to meet you in a sunny 2016 on the path of human friendly innovation!
– Karl McFaul, TMG founder