Vyacheslav Pokotylo, MIM’s vice president and Oleksandr Sudarkin, MIM’s professor moderated the discussion. Bohdan Duchak, co-founder of the AXON.partners was a guest speaker at the Management Café on October, 24. The participants discussed how to manage in the world which is changing and innovating all the time. Is there a toolbox for that? Which of the tools will survive? How different are today’s stakeholders from the yesterday’s ones?

The discussed topics included:
• Everyone is talking about changes. Do you see any traces of those changes in your organization? What changed in your business and your industry in the last 3 – 5 years?
• What shows your companies that you are following the selected path?
• Which managerial tools has been working/not working recently? Why?

The discussion participants came to the conclusion that practically all managerial tools could be applied successfully, if application fir was there. Some employees like the good old “employee of the month” badge whilst others are motivated by the creative workplace.

“Here I see quite a number of managers who know their products and services. When it comes to the point when we stop listen to our rank-and-file people because we know better?” Oleksandr Sudarkin, the speaker asked.

Work mode discussion followed motivation factors. “The market is changing so we are changing our work modes. When the changes result in the unique patterns and behaviors?” Oleksandr mentioned.

The idea of the “healthy organization” has been around for quite a lot of time. To assess how healthy an organization is two questions needs to be answered:
1. How often management makes decision? How quick a company’s reaction to the changes?
2. Are company’s goals and standards clear to employees? Is the track of goals and subgoals kept?
According to Mc McKinsey organizational health is measured against two criteria: how changes speed and keeping track of them.
According to such approach we have four types of companies:
1. Low speed + little track. Those are either small companies which follow their guts or stagnating companies. They are the smallest population.
2. High speed + little track. Such situation is typical for startups. Ongoing changes, no standards and actin on intuition are typical.
3. Low speed + many documents could be found in large public and private companies with a lot of red tape. There is very little change, mostly generic way of operations but a lot of approvals.
4. High speed + many documents usually mean that companies follow Agile path. Such companies keep up with what is going on, able to analyze and forecast the outcomes of their activities. This mode is currently considered to be the best.