Beware the Next Big Thing; Harvard Business Review Magazine, May 2014

Julian Birkinshaw, Harvard Business Review Magazine; Beware the Next Big Thing:

"Where do new management practices come from? A few emerge fully formed from the minds of academics and consultants, but the vast majority come from corporate executives experimenting with new ideas in their own organizations. A case in point is the online retailer Zappos, which is replacing its traditional hierarchy with a self-organizing “operating system” known as holacracy.

Zappos’s experiment is getting a lot of attention. Like many management innovations before it, holacracy has an exciting zeitgeist appeal. At least a few executives in other firms are no doubt asking themselves, given today’s pressure to innovate and the changing nature of the workforce, is this the management idea of the moment? Could it give my company a competitive edge? What are the risks of trying to import it?

For decades, executives have been asking similar questions whenever management innovations burst onto the scene...

But importing ideas is risky. Even the most obviously useful theory or practice can go wrong if a company is unprepared to act on the insights it offers. And the value of most management ideas—and where they might take you—is far from obvious...

Publicity also has a downside: It raises the risk of hype, disappointment, and, sometimes, a repudiation of the idea. (See the sidebar “The Inevitable Hype Cycle.”) This magazine, for example, has debuted ideas that are now part of the management canon—and ideas that have been relegated to the dusty archive shelves. Your goal as a manager couldn’t be more different from those of the media and academia. You’re not trying to ride the next wave; you’re looking for the perfect wave."