Desde Tenerife (Islas Canarias) donde estoy pasando estas Fiestas Navideñas con una grata temperatura de 24 grados, te deseo- allí donde estés- 46 años de Felicidad que son los que separan los dos christmas card que ilustran este texto.

El del Papa Noël brindando es un dibujo que hice en el año 1964 para “Shock Art” mi primera empresa (especializada en Christmas para empresas) que fundé con dos compañeros de estudios de la Escuela Oficial de Publicidad de Madrid y con la que gané mis primeras “perrillas”.

Con la participación de destacados académicos y profesionales del mundo de la comunicación iberoamericana, la ciudad de Lima será el escenario del 3er Congreso Suramericano de Comunicación Corporativa – COMUSUR 2010.

La cumbre será el 23 al 25 de noviembre y tiene como gran anfitriona de este año a la Universidad ESAN de Perú. La primera institución académica en impartir postgrado en administración de empresas del mundo de habla hispana

El Congreso cuenta con el apoyo del Grupo DIRCOM, del Foro Iberoamericano de Estrategias de Comunicación (FISEC), de la Asociación de Directivos de Comunicación (Dircom) de España ; así como con el patrocinio de destacadas empresas peruanas.

Bajo el lema ‘Comunicación para todos, todo comunica’ el COMUSUR de este año convoca no sólo a profesionales, sino también a emprendedores, estudiantes y público en general, a conocer la importancia de la comunicación como herramienta de gestión empresarial”, expresó Miguel Antezana Corrieri, académico de ESAN y organizador del Congreso.

De acuerdo con la programación, figuran como conferencistas principales José Manuel Velasco y Rafael Alberto Pérez de España; Juan José Larrea de Argentina; Raúl Herrera Echenique de Chile; Esther Vargas y Miguel Antezana de Perú; y una nutrida participación de ejecutivos y profesionales peruanos quienes actuarán como panelistas en cuatro conversatorios.

Las materias a tratar en las conferencias serán: Áreas de acción de un comunicador corporativo; Estrategia y Comunicación: un nuevo enfoque; Retos para el DIRCOM Latinoamericano; Comunicación y periodismo: nada será igual; Comunicación Interna: la gran olvidada; y Hacia un nuevo perfil del comunicador: el caso español. Así mismo, se han programado cuatro conversatorios sobre “¿Cómo se comunica en el Perú?”; “Empresas peruanas y Nueva Comunicación”; "Branding y Comunicación, lucha de poderes”; y "Las empresas y el comunicador del futuro”.

Programa y más información en www.comusur.com

En la Foto de Derecha a Izquierda: Pablo Múnera Uribe, Universidad Autónoma del Caribe (Colombia);Sandra Massoni, Universidad Nacional de Rosario (Argentina); Ivone de Lourdes Oliveira , Pontificia Universidad católica de Minas Gerais (Brasil); María Aparecida de Paula , Pontificia Universidad Católica de Minas Gerais (Brasil)


El VIII Encuentro de FISEC que acaba de clausurarse en la Universidad de Cádiz ha destacado la necesidad de las organizaciones de gestionar estratégicamente el cambio de sus “viejos” a sus “nuevos” entornos. Y ha insistido en cómo la comunicación juega un doble papel en dicha gestión, dinamizador de una parte y, de otra, articulador de los miembros de las organizaciones y entre ésta y sus públicos.

Tanto las conferencias magistrales del encuentro como las mesas de debate posteriores subrayaron cómo, a pesar de los entornos complejos del siglo XXI, puede surgir el entendimiento y el intercambio de conocimiento cuando se gestionan estratégicamente los intangibles de la organización y se generan las condiciones para que la innovación emerja. Es ahí donde se ubica la figura del DIRCOM.
Pasar de ver a las organizaciones como meras unidades de producción a actores sociales responsables que escuchan, innovan, aportan y comunican sus avances a la sociedad en beneficio de ambas exige otra forma de dirigir.

El seminario, promovido por el Foro Iberoamericano sobre Estrategias de Comunicación – FISEC, y la Universidad de Cádiz, atrajo a la ciudad de Cádiz a expertos de 27 Universidades y otras instituciones públicas y privadas de Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, España, Portugal y República de Dominicana.

Hasta el momento, el Foro Iberoamericano sobre Estrategias de Comunicación se ha reunido en Madrid (2002), Sevilla (2004), Ciudad de México (2005), Granada (2006), Faro (2007), Málaga (2008), Cartagena de Indias (2009) y ahora en Cádiz.

Una vez precisados en el V Encuentro de Fisec en Faro, Portugal, los siete grandes cambios que introduce la Nueva Teoría Estratégica y validados en los Encuentros celebrados en Málaga y Cartagena de Indias los dos primeros de ellos, FISEC ha dedicado este VIII Encuentro a la tercera de esas trasformaciones: el cambio en el sujeto Colectivo: repensar la organización.
La Pontificia Universidad Católica de Minas Gerais acogerá en 2011 eI IX Encuentro de FISEC en su sede de Minas Gerais (Brasil) a fin de estudiar el cuarto cambio que propone la Nueva Teoría Estratégica: el cambio en el enfoque de la estrategia: de ciencia del conflicto a ciencia de la articulación.

FISEC es una organización sin ánimo de lucro, fundada en 2003 con el objeto de mejorar el intercambio de conocimientos entre sus miembros. En la actualidad es un think tank cuyos más de 400 miembros son profesores de 140 Universidades y expertos de 97 instituciones públicas y privadas de 17 países iberoamericanos, Alemania, Estados Unidos, Francia, Italia y Rusia.

>TOWARDS A GENERAL THEORY OF STRATEGY

It seems that the future of Strategy has not been a priority in the experts’ agenda, with the exception of a few authors, very few, that address the question and of some congresses and seminars. To begin with, it is surprising that the strongest and most significant trend that is working on the weak points of current Strategy is Latin and not Saxon (when Strategy has been developed basically in the Saxon world for the last 50 years).

We are referring to the Foro Iberoamericano Sobre Estrategias de Comunicación (Ibero-American Forum On Communication Strategies) FISEC. Throughout the debates of its seven International Meetings (the VIII Meeting will take place in Cádiz, España) in which around 300 experts, professors from 120 universities, journalists and senior executives from many Institutions and companies from 22 countries, FISEC has gone from critiques to proposing solutions. An evolution that we can follow in the 155 articles published in its online Academic Review www.fisec-estrategias.com.ar indexed in LATINDEX. Their proposal is called the New Strategic Theory (NST) and is specified in 7 changes with regards to the conventional formulations and the current praxis in matters of Strategy. 7 changes that we will try to summarise below, and that the interested reader can find developed in the book “Toward a General Theory of Strategy” (Rafael Alberto Pérez, Sandra Massoni, Ariel, 2009).


>THE 7 CHANGES PROPOSED BY FISEC

-1st Change: the central paradigm. From fragmentation to complexity.

FISEC maintains that the cause of failure of many of our strategies lies in the inadequacy of our mind maps. The explanation is simple: all strategies aspire to transforming reality (physical and social) but this reality is not as objective or as external as we thought, but it is reconstructed in our mind and conditioned by the visions of the world that provides us with the theories, models and paradigms in which we have been educated. So if we want to get closer to the object of our transformation we need to review and update these visions and paradigms.

Well, today we know that reality is complex, multidimensional, fluid and sometimes chaotic, but the fact is that most strategic operators think (and think their strategies over) in a dual, fragmentary, unidimensional, static, casual and linear manner, linked to what is quantitative (money, business, success, market share, etc.) and, what is more serious, in confrontative and antagonistic terms. In fact, it seems that society is claiming quite the opposite. The problem is that our leaders have been educated in the old Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm and they lack the practice to act in the new scenario. They are working on the wrong maps made for other purposes, which causes them, most of the time, not to have a map of the territory or to have a transformation process model which they are specifically facing.

Other disciplines have adjusted to the new paradigms and have kept up to date. Strategy still has not done so. FISEC claims this change for it believes that it is a necessary step prior to building a new theory of Strategy that is more appropriate for the new contexts. Quoting Jesús Martín-Barbero, the mission of FISEC is to study together if from our “work as cartographers” we can trace better maps.

FISEC suggests we think of reality as a series of fluid, complex and (sometimes) chaotic processes. For FISEC the field of intervention of all Strategy is that and no other.

-2nd Change: in the subject. From the rational player to the relational man

We have been living a long process in which the different disciplines have been replacing man with its components. Strategy, which is being taught in Business Schools and disseminated through a certain successful literature, is not foreign to that trend and has also, excluded the human being, replacing it with reductionist categories and constructs (homo oeconomicus, rational player, player, consumer, customer, target group, elector, etc.). And it is designed on the assumption that these entities operate with an agency germane to a real subject, but provided with a rationality that does not appear in real life. Far from these conventional formulations, FISEC maintains that the human being is the necessary cornerstone for strategic models and explanations to land, be embodied and become more useful. It is the missing link of strategic theory.

To the question of what human being are we talking about, FISEC has prepared an answer: that which transmits science to us at all times. And the truth is that the findings of neurocognitive sciences, genetics and cultural anthropology, among other disciplines, hardly leave the so-called rational decision theory standing.

The sheer fact of recognising that strategies are taken by real human beings-and as such these relational subjects with their reasons and emotions, but also with their incoherencies and contradictions- and not by artificial entities, and that it is also human beings (and not mere numbers and statistics) that may benefit from these strategies-or suffer from them themselves- substantially modifies the explanation of Strategy with which we have been working. This recovery of what is human, represents one of the key aspects in the New Strategic Theory proposed by the FISEC.

If FISEC’s theses prosper, the “economic man” will be facing a strong competitor: “the human man”. Mintzberg and Quinn are not alien to this idea when they say, “One of our main goals is to integrate a variety of views, rather than allow strategy to be fragmented into just “human issues” and “economic issues”. And it is not incidental that some Management experts have wanted to rectify by resorting to a bi-disciplinary view such as that called neuro-economics, which complements the notable shortages of Economics to address strategic processes with new contributions from Neurocognitive Sciences. An effort which we praise but which we believe is insufficient. We either assume the multidimensionality of Strategy or we do not. And if we assume it, why stay halfway instead of searching for a truly transdisciplinary view?

Against a Strategy that has excluded the human being by replacing it with reductionist constructs, the FISEC advocates its reinstatement in a discipline from which it should have never been absent. It is about seeing ourselves and the others as rational, open, dynamic and complex beings embedded in one or several social plots in which we take part (sometime strategically) by transforming them and at the same time by transforming ourselves.

- 3rd Change: in the organisation. From production unit to an innovative and significant nodule.

The organisation is the great collective subject of Strategy. Men associate to achieve certain goals that they would barely attain individually. The aspiration of organisations to be efficient and to perpetuate through time makes them assume mid/long term objectives, and to achieve them they tend to adopt strategies that mark the way to all of its members and facilitate the attainment of such goals. All this gives them a special importance as strategic actors. In fact, a large percentage of literature on Strategy implicitly or explicitly refers to organisations.

But in the mid seventies the idea that studies on organisations had had a “false basis” began to set, and that the inherited simplifying and ultra-rationalist plans were clearly unsatisfactory. And if in the last few decades new theoretic approaches have emerged, this has not prevented that, still today, many assumptions of the old organisational paradigm (among them, economic and work rationality, the organisation itself understood as a hierarchic and centralised governance structure, teleologic pragmatism, a functionalism that only thinks in terms of efficiency, etc.) keep enlightening many of our professional and executives’ eagerness. They no longer talk about chronometers, true, but in their conversations the old mechanistic metaphors are still recurrent, such as in the case of business engineering and re-engineering. Which makes the organisations’ replies to crises not being the result of revisionist readjustments so as to not fall into errors of the past, but they simply resort to a downsizing plan and... to lay off. Oh! I forgot, that’s what they call “re-engineering”.

Now the question is, how are we going to plan good organisational and/or corporate strategies if we are working thinking about organisations with inadequate or simply outdated categories? Or even worse, if we are working bearing in mind wrong organizations.

Before this situation, FISEC asked “what should we change?”. And their reply was assertive, we have to work with a new conception of organisation: systemic, integrated, co-evolutionist, innovative, connective, significant and socially responsible.
It is not about an ideal organisation, but one that is possible. However, it does require a new way of administration.

Let us see this with a current example: the much acclaimed “innovation”. For FISEC it is very important that we understand that innovation is not something we can ask for and obtain on ordering it: two plates of innovation on table six!. All innovation is the fruit of non linear processes and of those incredible connections that Poincaré spoke of in its day. Innovation emerges-like Blas Lara brings to our attention- when circumstances are appropriate. Once this is understood, executives only need to create the conditions for this emergency to be produced.

But how do we know what the appropriate circumstances are? FISEC tells us that in order to achieve a new order we first have to generate certain disorder (it is “the order from noise” of Heinz Von Foerster and the “ordered chaos” or “chaords” of Dee Hock, the founder of VISA) and also a high degree of “connectivity”. If this is so and we think that yes, the new executive task will no longer be “to order” (impose order) but to (a) know how to manage spaces of “relative instability” and (b) encourage what Pierre Laffitte, the father of technology parks, named “cross-fertilisation” and Derrick de Kerckhoven as “connective intelligence”.

The question is now, how can we interconnect the contributions of the different individuals that work in the organisation and incite synergies between them? FISEC also has an answer to that: by encouraging communication. Making communication have a constituent role and not a mere instrumental one in the organisation (like it is today in the best of cases). Also constituent of the relationships with its external audiences. It is all about generating shared spaces of stable bonds and sense. All of this in a world that flows (hence the importance of applying the co-evolution principles). In this context, establishing how to improve the connectivity pattern and generating the appropriate significance, becomes the strategy that should guide an organisation. For this, each company will have to define the specific connectivity and significance it wants to adopt as a differential factor of its identity.

In this and in other matters, FISEC does not want to be original, that is not its objective, but to find a propose solutions. And for this, they pay credit to Greenfield, to Luhmann and to all who have levelled the way. In times of uncertainty it is important to be clear on which course is to be proceeded and to keep to it.
FISEC’s proposal is to see organisations as complex systems that co-evolve. It is all about looking at their interconnections, their flows and their networks to maximise them and generate the adequate significance. From this new perspective we will be able to design strategies that encourage innovation and social well-being.

(It will continue)

As Raul Morales states, in May 2008, a group of distinguished professors and innovative businessmen met in Half Moon Bay, in the state of California, United States, to outline what future Management could be.

The event lasted two days. There was a coincidence in the diagnosis: the administration model that predominates the larger organisations is seriously outdated. This model stemmed in the 19th century and was invented to solve a problem: how to make semi-qualified human beings do the same thing over and over again becoming more effective with time and with the same perfection. This problem had to be solved at that time, but that is not the most important challenge for companies today.

Gary Hamel, one of the critics in 1994 (together with Prahalad) and one of the experts that went to Half Moon Bay sums it up in this way in “Moon Shots for Management” (Harvard Business Review, February, 2009).

“Managers today face a new set of problems, products of a volatile and unforgiving environment. Some of the most critical (….) To successfully address these problems, executives and experts must first admit that they’ve reached the limits of Management —the industrial age paradigm built atop the principles of standardization, specialization, hierarchy, control, and primacy of shareholder interests. They must face the fact that tomorrow’s business imperatives lie outside the performance envelope of today’s bureaucracy-infused management practices.”

But if they reached an agreement on the diagnosis, this did not mean that there was no debate with regards to the new Management model. In a disciplined manner the participants were subject to the methodology that the American National Academy of Engineering had recently used to propose “the 14 Grand Challenges for Engineering” in the 21st century. In this way they reached the conclusion that:

It is necessary to reinvent company administration so that organisations become more inspiring places of work, making them as humane as the employees that work in them. 21st century Management must provide more adaptable and innovative organisations that inspire those who work in them. It must recover horizontal communication, diversity, imagination and passion. This requires drawing inspiration from concepts in other fields such as biology or theology.

A philosophy that they pinned down in 25 conclusions that the Harvard Business Review has just published.

1 - Ensure that management's work serves a higher purpose. Management, both in theory and practice, must orient itself to the achievement of noble, socially significant goals.

2 - Fully embed the ideas of community and citizenship in management systems. There's a need for processes and practices that reflect the interdependence of all stakeholder groups.

3 - Reconstruct management's philosophical foundations. To build organizations that are more than merely efficient, we will need to draw lessons from such fields as biology and theology, and from such concepts as democracies and markets.

4 - Eliminate the pathologies of formal hierarchy. There are advantages to natural hierarchies. Where power flows up from the bottom and leaders emerge instead of being appointed.

5 - Reduce fear and increase trust. Mistrust and fear are toxic to innovation and engagement and must be wrung out of tomorrow's management systems.

6 - Reinvent the means of control. To transcend the discipline-versus-freedom trade-off, control systems will have to encourage control from within rather than constraints from without.

7 - Redefine the work of leadership. The notion of the leader as a heroic decision maker is untenable. Leaders must be recast as social-systems architects who enable innovation and collaboration.

8 - Expand and exploit diversity. We must create a management system that values diversity, disagreement, and divergence as much as conformance, consensus, and cohesion.

9 - Reinvent strategy-making as an emergent process. In a turbulent world, strategy making must reflect the biological principles of variety, selection, and retention.

10 - De-structure and disaggregate the organization. To become more adaptable and innovative, large entities must be disaggregated into smaller, more malleable units.

11 - Dramatically reduce the pull of the past. Existing management systems often mindlessly reinforce the status quo. In the future, they must facilitate innovation and change.

12 - Develop holistic performance measures. Existing performance metrics must be recast, since they give inadequate attention to the critical human capabilities that drive success in the creative economy.

13 - Stretch executive time frames and perspectives. Discover alternatives to compensation and reward systems that encourage managers to sacrifice long-term goals for short-term gains.

14 - Create a democracy of information. Companies need holographic information systems that equip every employee to act in the interests of the entire enterprise.

15 - Empower the renegades and disarm the reactionaries. Management systems must give more power to employees whose emotional equity is invested in the future rather than in the past.

16 - Expand the scope of employee autonomy. Management systems must be redesigned to facilitate grassroots initiatives and local experimentation.

17 - Create internal markets for ideas, talent, and resources. Markets are better than hierarchies at allocating resources, and companies' resource allocation processes need to reflect this fact.

18 - Depoliticize decision-making. Decision processes must be free of positional biases and should exploit the collective wisdom of the entire organization.

19 - Enable communities of passion. To maximize employee engagement, management systems must facilitate the formation of self-defining communities of passion.

20 - Further unleash human imagination. Much is known about what engenders human creativity. This knowledge must be better applied in the design of management systems.

21 - Humanize the language and practice of business. Tomorrow's management systems must give as much credence to such timeless human ideals as beauty, justice and community as they do to the traditional goals of efficiency, advantage, and profit.

22 - Better optimize trade-offs. Management systems tend to force either-or choices. What's needed are hybrid systems that subtly optimize key trade-offs.

23 - Retool management for an open world. Value-creating networks often transcend the company's boundaries and render traditional power-based management tools ineffective. New management tools are needed for building complex ecosystems.

24 - Share the work of setting direction. To engender commitment, the responsibility for goal setting must be distributed through a process where share of voice is a function of insight, not power.

25 - Retrain managerial minds. Managers' traditional deductive and analytical skills must be complemented by conceptual and systems-thinking skills.

25 conclusions that sum up 15 years (1994-2009) of critical reflection on "the future of Management” and that under no circumstances should go unnoticed, but, to the contrary, we think they should be a guide to reinvent a more human company and, as such, a more innovative one. At least we will reflect on them. But before this, in the IVI issue of this miniseries we will see the proposals that FISEC has been elaborating for the last 8 years on “the future of Strategy”. And, in the IV and last issue, we will try and see to what extent both proposals coincide and if they are of use to us or not as a joint platform to address the changes that 21st century companies and society are claiming.