25. The best strategy for managing a business, or any enterprise, is to find the most capable people and give them as much authority as possible.
Discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the opinion stated above. Support your views with reasons and/or examples from your own experience, observations, or reading.
Is the most effective management approach to hire the best people, then to give them as much autonomy as possible to serve the firms goals? This strategy would certainly enhance an employees sense of involvement, purpose and personal worth. It would also benefit the firm by encouraging employees to work creatively and productively. But the strategy requires two constraints1 to operative effectively.
First, the strategy must be constrained2 by strong leadership that provides clear vision and direction. Simply putting the most capable people together, and letting them loose on projects will provide neither. Thinking so involves the mistaken assumption that just because the parts of a whole are good, the collection of the parts into a whole will be equally good. Business organizations are more than just the sums of their excellent parts; to be similarly excellent, the organization must also be unified3 and cohesive4. And it is strong and visionary leadership that provides these two ingredients.
Second, the strategy must be constrained by an organizational structure that brings all inpidual efforts together as a coherent whole. Of course, structure can be crippling, heavily layered; overly bureaucratic5 organizations probably stifle6 more creative productivity than they inspire. Still, inpiduals will be capable at some things and not others, so some organization of efforts is always called for. The moderateand perhaps optimalapproach would be to create a structure that gives inpiduals some authority across areas relating to their field of expertise7, while reserving final authority for higher-level managers. For example, no inpidual in a finance department should have much authority over a design department. However, within the design department, inpidual researchers, artists, drafters, and engineers can all contribute meaningfully to one anothers projects, and a flexible organizational structure would allow them to do so.
In sum, the advice to hire the best people and give them wide authority requires modification8. Hiring capable people and granting them some concurrent9 authority across areas related to their expertise is better advice. Moreover, solid leadership and a cohesive organizational structure are prerequisitesboth are needed to coordinate10 inpidual efforts toward the accomplishment11 of common goals.
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