Most management solutions remind me of the “Mao Suits” the Chinese used to wear just after the communists took over. Much care went into the development of these suits, as they attained to a perfect fit over time. While the sixties raged in America, all Chinese men came to wear the exact same clothes on a daily basis, often to hide themselves from their own more bitter cultural revolution. Didn’t Mao know that you can’t mass produce style?

Management trends tend to be a bit like the Mao Suit. Strategy, innovation, change management, consulting: when we find out how to do it, we apply our solutions universally, like some vaccine against eccentricity. Even as we talk of discovering specific business cultures, we have developed a universal culture of business that stifles and stultifies, even as it prods us to find our niche.

But perhaps this is unfair. Most management solutions are an aid to the discovery of originality. Just because all pants have two legs doesn’t mean there aren’t incredible variations in size, color, and style. Crafting a mission statement or doing a SWAT analysis should provide a space for our style to emerge in the same way the basic structure of pants do. But somehow it doesn’t seem to work like this. 

Perhaps the most salient feature of information age businesses is their overwhelming complexity. Writing a business plan should make running a business easier, but often times it is the most difficult part. The simple fact is that implementing the solutions to complexity are often the most challenging part of running a business. Rather than adapting the solutions to our own unique culture, we adapt ourselves to the solutions. Thus, we learn how to do strategy, write business plans, and set up policy guidlines. And it is these solutions that have become our Mao Suits.

The problem it that the variations in business structure and culture are staggering and more like snowflakes than the sizes and shapes of a human body. Every business is different, with its own structure, size, strategy, and market conditions. So also are the employees different, with their own unique skills and capacities, motivations, aspirations, visions, and values. The differences are structural and cultural. And we all too often forget that they are developmental as well.

For a business to thrive; for it to unleash the full potential of it’s employees; for it to build a unique culture and find its niche: it is essential that the management tools it uses remain tools. So many of these tools and procedures are a blessing and a necessity. But all too often they leave us living under the hammer or cut to shreds as we attempt to use them.