Management and complexity

What is management? Management is the transformation of resources into results.

This definition expresses that it is about effectiveness. It is not about working a lot and “hard”. In organizations of all kinds, we transform human labor, capital and – today in particular – knowledge into results. These results consist primarily of providing a certain service for the customer, developing a new product or simply being productive or profitable.

Dealing with complexity is the biggest challenge for managers in today’s rapidly changing world and extremely volatile markets. Management today is more than ever about dealing with uncertainty, about making decisions under extreme lack of information.

Everything that our organizations produce, whether intentionally or unintentionally, is the result of our actions and decisions. And the complexity that we have to deal with in most cases ensures that things often turn out differently than planned. We can compare the manager to a rider who has to control his horse (his company, his department), which is much bigger and stronger than himself. And this horse not only has to go in the direction he has set, but also overcome obstacles and other adversities.