Steve Denning: An Innovator and Global Leader, Decoding and Simplifying Management for Organizations

Steve Denning

Some speak of their expertise, some of their expertise, but only a select few have both, expertise and experience, with which they enrich those who ask for their company. Steve Denning, is one global thought leader, idea practitioner, and pioneer who is admired by followers and critics alike.

A Life Dedicated to Innovation

Steve’s whole working life has been dedicated to creating great workplaces that are highly productive, fun to work in, and above all, wonderful to those for whom the work is done. A natural innovator, he is continually innovating and finding new ways to inspire higher performance, increased job satisfaction, and social responsibility.

Steve grew up in Sydney, studied and worked as a lawyer in Australia, did postgraduate study at Oxford University in the UK, and then joined the World Bank, where he worked for three decades. He spent this period helping the world’s poorest countries achieve economic development while also helping the organization improve its own management. 

Steve is always ready to question the environment in which he finds himself and explore constructive ways of making it better. The World Bank is one of the world’s most change-resistant organizations. In 1985, he successfully led an effort to reform the organization’s cumbersome internal procedures. In 1996-2000, he successfully spearheaded a change in the World Bank’s external strategy, making knowledge sharing a cornerstone. For his efforts, he was named by Teleos as one of “The World’s Ten Most Admired Knowledge Leaders.”

Since leaving the World Bank in 2000, Steve has spent the last two decades focused on helping public and private sector organizations in the developed world, particularly the largest and most influential firms. He has written eight books, including (a) several on leadership storytelling, (b) several on Agile management, and most recently on (c) reinventing capitalism. He has written more than a thousand articles as a Senior Contributor for Forbes, written a novel and a volume of Elizabethan sonnets.

A Collaborative Working Style

Steve has tended to operate by forming and nurturing alliances and coalitions of like-minded thought leaders who are ready to work together to make the world a better place. He is currently involved in several such alliances and coalitions to promote his current top interest: the reinvention of capitalism and management.

For instance, in his current work on reinventing management as a discipline, about two years ago, he knew he needed help to make progress. So, he wrote to the smartest people in the world on this subject and invited them to start meeting with him online every two weeks to discuss how they could make progress. Most of them accepted, at first cautiously, but as they experienced the discussion, they became enthusiastic champions who now support each other with daily interchanges in pursuit of the common humongous goal of reinventing the discipline of management.

 Reinventing Capitalism In The Digital Age

Steve’s latest book, Reinventing Capitalism In The Digital Age (2022) came about in an unusual way. He had written a great deal about management, but little about capitalism per se. In early 2022, he was approached by Cambridge University Press which was preparing a series of books, called “Elements”, on the crisis facing capitalism.

The lead architect of the series, Arie Lewin, had come across his work and saw that Steve’s insights on management were of vital importance to the challenges facing capitalism. His writing had shown that the kind of management being practiced in modern capitalism was an aberration from the kind of management that had gone before; this helped explain why capitalism was getting such a bad rap, and how it could be fixed.

Arie asked Steve to produce an Element in 90 days. Steve agreed to tackle the challenge and duly delivered the Element, with very positive reviews from lifetime scholars of capitalism.

The main takeaway of the Element is that public sector efforts to reform capitalism will be ineffective unless and until the private sector recognizes that the widely accepted shareholder-driven -based practices are less effective, even on its own terms, than management that delivers value to customers and all the stakeholders. The stark paradox is that customer capitalism is more profitable than shareholder capitalism.

Dealing with his biggest Challenge

Steve’s biggest challenge was in the World Bank in 1996. At the time, he was the director for the African Region and responsible for one-third of the lending operations—an important position. Things were going fine until he met three setbacks. First, someone else was appointed to his position. Second, it became clear that he was not being offered any alternative position. And third, he was told to “go and look into information,” which, in 1996 in the World Bank, was like being sent to Siberia. 

The World Bank was undergoing changes and most of Steve’s colleagues just left quietly. However, he wasn’t ready to leave. Steve went and looked into the information and saw that it was a mess and needed cleaning up. But merely cleaning it up wouldn’t take them far as people were asking whether the world needed an organization like the World Bank when the private sector was now so active in banking in the poorest countries.

So instead, he proposed boldly innovative ideas that would add value for their clients–share our knowledge directly with them, not just making loans.

The management’s reaction was stark and discouraging. When Steve persisted, he was told that he was a troublemaker, and it would end his career if he carried on like this. He was invited to consider taking up a position in a distant field office.

But shortly after this, Steve stumbled on the power of leadership storytelling. This enabled him to inspire even critics and doubters to grasp the potential of his idea. To everyone’s surprise, he out-maneuvered the World Bank’s centurion guards through leadership storytelling and won the World Bank president’s enthusiastic support for the idea of directly sharing knowledge as a priority goal for the organization. Hundreds of staff members emerged and started implementing the idea with alacrity and ingenuity. A few years after that, the World Bank was being benchmarked by APQC as “a world leader in knowledge management.”

“I learned from this experience the power of resilience and the importance of leadership storytelling in inspiring change, even with the world’s most difficult audiences. The key is to look beyond daily distractions and setbacks, maintain integrity and empathy, and stay focused on the true goals of the organization and society,” says Steve.

Awards and Accolades

Steve is a member of the Program Advisory Board of the prestigious international Drucker Forum, headquartered in Vienna, Austria.

He also is a member of the International Editorial Advisory Board for the Cambridge University Press Element Series on “Reinventing Capitalism.”

Steve has launched several networks of 21st-century management leaders that support and promote thinking related to his new book. In December 2020, he launched a fortnightly conversation group with ten of the world’s leading management thinkers and executives.

In 2016, he launched—and still leads —a learning consortium, in which a group of firms have shared insights on the ongoing transition towards business agility. It is called “The Steve Denning Learning Consortium,” in tribute to the leadership role Steve has played. (https://sdlearningconsortium.com/)

We asked if there’s anything he would like to change about his career and Steve shared that he does regret that he did not know when he joined the World Bank what he now knows about management—how a radically different management can be so much more effective and fun than top-down bureaucracy. “Like many people, I suspected something was wrong, but it was only in the 21st century that the relevant expertise has come together in the form of management that I described in The Age of Agile. If only I had known all this back in 1969. Now I am taking this to the next level with my forthcoming book on re-imagining the very concept of management,” he says.

 Challenges hindering the transformation of organizations today

Steve believes that there’s a need to reinvent the discipline of management itself. To put it simply, the management that was successful in the industrial era of the 20th century no longer fits the faster-moving, customer-driven, technology-inspired digital age of the 21st century. The most successful firms are those that have grasped these realities and are being run in a fundamentally different way. Piecemeal efforts at change don’t work, this is a genuine paradigm shift in management. Those firms that don’t make the shift won’t survive. 

 The Emergence of a New Concept of Management

Initially, this new thinking was of little interest to established managements, it began to take hold first in software development following the Agile Manifesto of 2001, which offered a set of priorities and principles as a better way of developing software.

In time, as the digital age unfolded and developing software became steadily more important, customer-centric thinking began spreading from the IT department to running the entire firm, eventually transforming almost every facet of management.

Today, it is increasingly becoming apparent that firms embracing the new, more agile ways of creating value for customers, can move more quickly, operate more efficiently, mobilize more resources, attract more talent, win over customers more readily, and enjoy more elevated market capitalizations. Accordingly, the most successful exponents of customer capitalism like Apple and Microsoft have become the most valuable firms on the planet, while former giants, like IBM and GE, which persisted with industrial-era thinking and management, went into steep decline.

Such deep-seated changes require leadership shifts at the very top of the organization. Merely telling people what to do, delegating implementation to lower levels, or throwing money at the problem, have turned out to be ineffective. Leaders must exemplify the new way of thinking and the modus operandi in their own conduct. Instead of controlling and containing, they must become inspiring and energizing.

 Management Has Already Been Transformed

In fact, AI is only one of an array of technological developments that have already transformed the practice of management. There is much hype as a result of AI gadgets embodying such as ChatGPT, which acquired more than 100 million subscribers within a month of becoming available, due to its apparent ability to answer almost any question in plausible prose, as well as to perform other tasks such as write poetry and compose songs. However, AI is only one of several technologies that include cloud storage, machine learning, algorithmic decision-making, blockchain, and quantum computing that have transformed management.

Firms found that to be able to exploit such technologies, they needed more than a change in management style. They had to be managed in a fundamentally different way from the industrial era. In the industrial era, management thinking reflected an internal view of the firm. Management was about making the firm operate more efficiently and effectively within a relatively stable world, with given systems, processes, and practices. The firm did what it could for the customer within the constraints of its existing systems. Top management knew best and issued directives to the rest of the organization, using steep chains of command to ensure order.

“Today the most successful firms already embody different thinking. The perspective is mainly external. Success depends less on the internal workings of the firm and more on its ability to master a turbulent unpredictable world of exponential technological possibilities and to delight unpredictable customers. Innovation is pivotal and involves not merely improving what already exists, but creating what is new. The firm aspires to generate new possibilities of working, operating, interacting, playing, and living, for its customers,” concludes Steve.

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