Managing Performing Living

Managing Performing Living is a classic in the field of management. Fredmund Malik reveals everything that all executives and experts in leading positions need to know, anytime and anywhere. He provides readers with the universal principles, tasks and tools of effective management and self-management.

His book ranks among the 100 best business books of all times. The new, completely revised and updated edition is tailored to a new generation of managers, to whom effectiveness is the key to success. It shows the way to turn knowledge, personal strengths, talent, creativity and innovative thinking into results. Managing Performing Living helps readers to cope with the "Great Transformation21", as Malik calls the ongoing centennial change in business and society. It is a book on how to create functioning organizations in a viable society.

Auteur
Prof. Dr. Fredmund Malik is one of Europe's most renowned experts on management, leadership and governance. He is known for his precise way of thinking, sharp analyses, and candid language. For over 40 years, the management scientist, entrepreneur, and author of several award-winning bestsellers has been working on establishing a universal standard for professional management that can be taught and learned.
Malik is the founder and chairman of an institution carrying his name, which is now one of the leading institutions on managing complex systems. Having served as a member, chairman and advisor to several international boards, Malik is an acknowledged connoisseur also of the practice of corporate governance. His numerous distinctions and awards include the Cross of Honor for Science and Art from the Republic of Austria and the Heinz von Foerster Award for Organizational Cybernetics from the German Society of Cybernetics. With a habilitation in Corporate Management from the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, Malik is a Special Professor of Management at the Capital University of Economics and Business (CUEB), Beijing, as well as at the Inner Mongolia Agricultural University (IMAU), Hohhot; he also serves as an honorary professor at Jilin University ( JLU) in Changchun, China. Prof. Malik is married and a father of two, and lives in St. Gallen, Switzerland.

Échantillon de lecture
PREFACE TO THE NEW 2014 EDITION

Managing Performing Living is one of the most important books I have written. It deals with people's effectiveness in the increasingly complex organization setting of multinational corporations. The book addresses the kind of effectiveness that allows individuals to keep pushing their boundaries. Above all, it demonstrates that it is possible to learn to be effective-and it shows you how.
The book answers the question of what knowledge and what skills people need in order to be successful-both at work and in their private lives, both as managers and as experts in their fields. Managing Performing Living tells you what you need to manage yourself and others, at every organizational level and in every position, and thus to generate the right kind of performance that will enable you to lead a meaningful life. The much deplored work-life imbalance is thus dissolved.
Effectiveness means to do the right things and to do them right. This is the core competency of Right and Good Management: the profession of transforming resources into results and thus creating value.
In today's world, factors such as knowledge, talent, personal strength, creativity, innovation, and intelligence have become even more important than conventional economic parameters; the same goes for emotional energy and commitment, social responsibility, and the courage to think and act in new ways. In themselves, however, these factors - including the economic ones - just are potentials. It takes effective implementation-that is Right and Good Management-to transform these potentials into meaningful results that meet a specific purpose. Also, the "leadership" so often talked about these days depends particularly on effective management: Without it even the best leaders would remain unsuccessful.
So what has changed since Managing Performing Living first appeared in 2000? I have two answers: Almost everything has changed "out there" in business and society, and these changes have been more fundamental than most people could have imagined. Even so, the essence of what constitutes right management has remained unchanged.
It was in response to this fundamental transformation and the resulting management needed that Managing Performing Living was originally written. Back in 1997, I had already described and analyzed the imminent social transformation in my book on corporate governance, in a chapter called "The Great Transformation 21." It is no coincidence that the subtitle I chose for the first edition of this present book was "Effective Management for a New Era."
Even back then, the stage was set for the deflationary debt and financial crisis that was to ensue; the revolution of science and technology (including digitalization) had begun; demographic and ecological change was inevitable, as was political and social instability. It was also plain to see that traditional management and existing organizations were less and less equipped to cope with the rapidly increasing complexity of their environment.
The Great Transformation of the 21st century has been underway ever since that time. It is affecting more and more spheres of life at ever-growing speed, and it is increasingly plain to see that what we are facing is actually more than a new era: A new world is on the rise.

In this new world, almost everything will be different. And yet there is no need to change anything about the theoretical foundations of Managing Performing Living. Effective management is not based on the economic and social sciences taught in conventional management training. Even though these are still needed, much more important are the three sciences of complexity-systems theory, cybernetics, and bionics-that have provided the theoretical foundations for my management theory ever since I embarked on my first research projects. Over the years these three fields of science have gained even more significance than when the first edition came out.
That is why in this new edition I have placed even stronger emphasis on the new application fields for management that this fundamental transformation generates. First and foremost, they include the exploding complexity of more and more tightly interconnected systems, as well as the increasing dynamics of global change and the resulting social, political, and economic turbulences. In a manner of speaking, these represent what is called "creative destruction" of the Old World and the birth pangs of the New World. To master the Great Transformation 21, virtually all societal organizations will need new, innovative tools and high complexity management systems.
At the heart of this new "functioning of organizations"-and the self-regulation and self-organization needed for it-is the effective individual. My cybernetic management systems offer the support needed to develop and unfold full effectiveness. They provide tools for the right thinking and acting that have been designed specifically for that purpose.
The new methods and tools I have developed, and which are described in my other books, help the homo effectivus (in my definition a counterpart to the homo oeconomicus) to achieve the enhancement in power and intelligence that is needed to master the new and complex challenges.
Complexity, when uncontrolled, becomes complicatedness. At the same time, it provides the raw material for organizational intelligence. Releasing this intelligence and making it effective is key to managing major change, and to ensuring the adaptivity and evolutionary functioning of any kind of organization. Hence this book also leads the way to exp…