A paper co-authored with Dan Kärreman and André Spicer and (fittingly) slow in the making has just been published: Slow Management. Here’s the abstract:

Management is a practice that runs on ideas. Unfortunately, ideas that organizations must constantly change are prevalent. This can easily lead to junky ‘Fast Management’: management that is change-obsessed, attention-starved and over-hyped; that binges on mass-produced ideas; and that lacks substance. Inspired by the Slow Food Movement, this paper develops a more wholesome alternative. Slow Management is about doing less, but better management that is more thoughtful and less flashy. It emphasizes the context-specific and craft-based dimension of managerial work; the necessity of industry-specific, non-transferable competence; and the long-term and commitment-dependent nature of substantive organizational improvement and innovation.

It is available free from the publisher for the next month-and-a-half on this link. Check it out.

PS: This is part of a larger project to gather and formulate progressive management and organizational practices. As to the gathering part, we’ve started compiling a list of practices that take seriously what we know about things like uncertainty, emergence, the nature of managerial work, control and ideology.