Summary INTRODUCTION TO MANAGING AND ORGANISING
Lecture 1 – managing people in organizations
Making sense of managing
Managing = sensemaking & framing. How quickly can you react to complex situations? (stress, crisis)
Management = communicating, coordinating and accomplishing action for organizational objectives.
(modern perspective on management). There are a lot of stakeholders to manage: relationships.
Managerialism = having knowledge on how to manage a company isn’t enough. A diploma isn’t enough.
You can’t successfully lead by making rational decisions. You need: people skills, digital skills, social
responsibility, sustainability… You need to adhere to societal, political and ethical responsibilities.
Claiming to be a great manager because you had an education. Believing managing can solve any
problems. It’s not cold hard strategy, it also involves emotions, etc.
Sensemaking before = in efficient and profit oriented companies, top hierarchy set a frame so that all
stakeholders had common sense of the organization (what it is and what it does).
Sensemaking now = top hierarchy and managers help people and the environment. Give meaning to
unexpected or confusing events (new strategies, cultural/political/economic changes). Dare to challenge
the narrative of your manager. Are you proud to work where you work?
Sensemaking = a manager makes sense through the language and cues they understand and experience. It
is possible others will interpret this differently.
Framing = make the roles that everyone plays in the organization clear. Like in films: leaving details out and
focusing on others. What is relevant? Manager decides what to focus on and what is irrelevant. E.g.:
metaphors, stories, traditions, slogans, artefacts… all used to make sense of the issue.
Sense breaking = breaking away from old organizational processes to make change. E.g.: UA is against war,
but still accepts Russian students as it’s not their fault.
Sense giving = sharing influence with someone else, giving sense.
Constructive reality = there is no ONE reality. Every experience and reality is different. Managers should
take that into consideration and should understand people.
Digital organization
Changes:
- International division of labour, digitalization
- Globalization and deglobalization
- Less traditional competition between organizations (factor endowments = the amount of land,
labor, capital and entrepreneurship that a country possesses and can exploit for manufacturing).
Organizations can be great now when they’re innovative (in the past = because they were close to
raw materials).
- 4th industrial revolution: algorithmic innovation, gig economy, digital nomads, working from home.
Managing in this digital age = employees solve problems themselves, and not have to go to management.
Flexible work (time and location). Different generations: different digital capabilities. Hard/soft power
relations. Knowledge intensive work requires tacit knowledge = intuition, insight, wisdom that can’t be
learnt easily.
EDI = equity, diversity, inclusion. Increased importance. Equity: everyone in the company has access to
same opportunities. Inclusion: everyone is being treated the same, sense of belonging. Pressure from
outside world (media) to focus on EDI as a company.
Economic context = less bureaucracies, economic neo-liberalism, tax cuts and trickle-down effects, covid-
19, new public management. Trickle down effects = when a product gets more widely adopted, the price
drops.
Neo-liberalism = market-oriented reform policies such as "eliminating price controls, deregulating capital
markets, lowering trade barriers" and reducing, especially through privatization, state influence in the
economy.
, Global shifts
- AI, smart teams
- Intelligent machines and devices
- Organizational/spatial decomposition of employment (different people with different skills and
backgrounds)
- Skills needed changing (international division of labour: you can hire anyone from the world)
Lecture 2 – Opening, thinking, contextualizing
Digital organizations
Digitalization = the use of digital technologies and data to manage organizational processes.
Digital organization = knowledge-intensive work, different kinds of employees that need to be able to
work with sophisticated databases and software, ‘brains, not brawn’ (muscle).
Digital bubbles = your network that came to be via social media and other electronic media. Shared
emotions and experiences, not shared rationality. Emotions can be very powerful. E.g. when Trump got
elected, they shut parts of the internet down, to keep protests to a minimum. Bubbles can be exploited
and become loyalists to brands. These bubbles follow the same narrative of a company and are a
community.
Power of the internet = if a bad story leaks about a company online, this can break that loyal community
(bubble) and have disastrous consequences.
Digital platform economy = many alternatives, spot contracts, reduced transaction costs, assess
contribution of companies more easily, need fewer employees but with higher knowledge.
Digital nomads = people with a laptop and WIFI who do their work whenever and wherever they’d like.
Con: you can get disconnected from the team.
Organizational culture and social relations at work
Diversity = more varied insights and knowledge and experience. Challenge: understand each other. You
can study it, but it’s still difficult.
Homogeneous workforce = opposite of diversity.
Global sales = you must understand all those markets in order to sell there. Tip: hire employees who
understand those markets.
Online all the time = you can work long days, working with a team from different time zones.
Culture = need to be culturally sensitive. Doing by learning.
Global shifts
- International organisations establish rules for companies at high level, be aware of these rules.
- Can’t move to different country to get tax cuts, there are rules about this, maybe illegal, maybe
possible on some levels.
- Globalisation has major challenges and downsides.
- Before: innovation in USA, production in China. Now: China has both. Europe and USA are losing
ground to Asia. Capitalist investment no longer Western.
- Different kinds of political systems or capitalisms.
- Unclear power centers (used to be Europe, now Asia on the rise).
- Outsourcing production AND skills.
Lecture 3 – Managing cultures
Organizational culture
Culture = how people make sense of the world. Patterns, symbols, artefacts, language. Happens
unconsciously.
Norms = unspoken assumptions and informal rules. How we greet each other for example.
- Artefacts = surface layer, what we see: decor, clothes, design, etc.
- Values = deeper layer than artefacts. Beliefs and emotional investments.
- Basic assumptions = deepest layer. This is culture. Intangible, unconscious, tacit.
