11/19/12

Niels Pflaeging

Talk: Bye-Bye Management

Business, markets and societies have changed, but the principles, the methods and concepts of leadership and performance management haven’t, by and large. Rigid sales quotas, fixed performance targets, allocations, individual employee assessments, so-called “pay for performance”-pay, budgets, variance analysis, autocratic decision-making and micro-managementfrom the top – these techniques from the industrial age are still widely established standards. But are they still adequate? And if not, how can we adapt our organizational models to the ever-changing environments of the information age and do things better?

Niels Pflaeging will discuss with us how any organization, by movingbeyond command and control, and by abolishing the mindset of management, functional organization, fixed targets, budgets and bureaucratic hierarchy, can become sustainably more successful and profitable. Pflaeging shows how the transformation towards a management model for the knowledge economy really works and how people in organizations can be unleashed from the burdens of bureaucracy – freed from management by command and control.
”Transformation is about a new, far more productive way of dealing with people, performance, and leadership.“

Niels Pflaeging is a passionate advocate for a “new breed“ of leadership and profound change in organizations. He is founder and associate of the BetaCodex Network, and president of MetaManagement Group, a consulting firm based in New York and Wiesbaden, Germany. Prior to the BetaCodex Network, Niels was for five years a director with the prestigious Beyond Budgeting Round Table. Niels´ second book, Leading with flexible Targets. Beyond Budgeting in Practice was awarded the Financial Times Germany Best Business Book award, in 2006. Both this book and his latest one, entitled Bye-Bye Management. The Codex: Why Management is Dispensable, published in 2009, were lauded by critics and readers and became bestsellers. Since 2006, Niels has been strongly involved in transformational consulting projects for firms both in Europe and the Americas.

»When Pflaeging shakes the dogmas of management, they crumble in his hands.« (Financial Times Germany)