Six Simple Rules. Yves Morieux

the complexity that is making all traditional hard and soft management approaches obsolete. Our focus with the six simple rules has been on making these concepts actionable—that is, to help managers to use them in their day-to-day work running business organizations. You can think of the six simple rules as guidelines for practice. Because all performance issues arise from people’s actions, decisions, and interactions—what we call behaviors in this book—the six rules provide the basis for tackling the whole lineup of organizational challenges, including productivity, innovation, growth, and cultural transformation.

      Getting Started

      Each of the six chapters of this book is organized around one of the simple rules. The purpose of the simple rules is to let managers really manage, to use the tools that managers have always used—strategy setting and organizational design—but for a different end and a far more effective outcome. The rules help managers foster both autonomy and cooperation to effectively handle business complexity and prevent much organizational complicatedness. Unlike other recent books that propose new roles for managers, we focus less on psychological issues of individual motivation and one-to-one interactions and more on managing large-scale situations and the collective properties (for instance, productivity and innovation) that emerge from multiple interactions among groups, units, and teams.¹⁸ There is a lot of loose talk these days about self-organizing systems and the end of management. Let’s be clear: we believe in the essential role of management. But we contend that traditional methods, developed for a different, less complex era, are obsolete or fast becoming so. Let’s begin, then, with the first fundamental rule of management, simple rule one—understand what your people do.