Harvard Business School professor Gary Hamel suggested this radical step in the December 2011 edition of the Harvard Business Review. At first glance, this seems more than a little inconsistent in a text about learning to be a manager — but he has a point. He argues that what is needed in organisations is not ‘no management’, but better leadership — just one of Fayol’s four management functions.

Management, says Hamel, is both inefficient and expensive for organisations. In his view, management allows calamitous decisions by those at top level, yet systematically disempowers those lower in the hierarchy. It also adds layers of people in the organisational structure, thereby slowing responses. In private life, we can go out and buy an expensive car; as managers, we are not able to requisition so much as an office stapler. Managers, thus, separate the ‘doers’ from the ‘customers’, and we shrink the incentive to dream and to innovate.

Hamel notes that even though markets work best only when the needs of each party are simple, stable and easy to quantify, hierarchies are better than markets in bringing activities together productively. What is important is that we manage things and lead people — and that we do so by appealing to their natural desire to be responsible for the outcomes of their work.

Another writer with this counter‐view of managers was Ricardo Semler, whose successful Brazilian manufacturing company Semco became the famous subject of his book Maverick! (1994). His muchcited article in the Harvard Business Review (January–February 1993) outlines how he restructured his company by partnering with his employees and employing them as external contractors, leasing them his company’s equipment. Rather than using the PLOC approach, he was able to cut his costs and increase revenue, while providing his workers with autonomy and flexibility.

Semler encouraged his workers to select their own bosses and to be responsible in teams for workplace output. In fact, he doesn’t like the word ‘boss’, preferring to see the role of coordinator as the key role to organising teams and groups. Workers have access to financial records, and the company provides courses to help them learn to read balance sheets and profit and loss statements. Workers even set their own salaries and budgets, which is definitely not part of the PLOC model! Semco’s workplace culture is relaxed, along with its dress code, with no secretaries or receptionists. Even the role of CEO rotates around a group of leaders, each assuming the day‐to‐day tasks for six months at a time.

It is interesting to note that Ricardo Semler’s ideas became popular two decades ago. Some people now may dismiss them as being out of fashion, or at least not the latest management fad. However, his ideas have stood the test of time, and he has demonstrated success in an environment of withering recession, galloping inflation and market turbulence. Some of Semler’s worker participation practices have even become mainstream and his methods remain a source of guidance.

QUESTION

How relevant are Fayol’s four management functions — planning, leading, organising and controlling — to describing what managers do and/or should do? What does he omit? Has the workplace moved on such that these functions are no longer central to what managers do?