Working in a Flum World Isn’t Fun : Management: Executives who engage in the practice flip common sense on its head when they embrace trends and fads and create disorder.

Do you have a flum in your factory? In your executive suite, in your educational institution, in your charitable organization?

A flum is a flaw in the works, a manager who promotes “needed” change but imposes chaos instead, defending it by explaining that old conformities must be destroyed if the company is to adapt to a chaotic world.

Flums are everywhere today, flummoxing top executives with their agenda of disorderly change, sometimes permanent, that utilizes informal relationships, free-form task forces, and spontaneous consultation.

They do so with no clear lines of communication and accountability, resulting in severe disorder rather than measured, responsible and intelligent transition. They pervert the true spirit of informal work processes.

They are, says a professor who has identified them, nabbed them, examined their brains and fired them, proponents of managed chaos, which he calls “an oxymoron utilized as a shield to justify systemic flummoxery.”

They are cultists, says Professor Emeritus Eugene Jennings of Michigan State University, who has taught executives, written numerous books about them, advises them at the highest level, and has been a corporate chairman.

The oxymoron cult of managed chaos, he says, is made up of:

“Self-serving managers who put blind faith in flummoxery as a tool to dispel the evils of traditional, autocratic, bureaucratic management practices, and to feign advancement of creativity and entrepreneurship.”

In short, flums feed on flux and feed into it as well.

Flums flip common sense on its head, embracing all the highly publicized trends and fads and creating disorder and jumbled work processes.

They are opportunists, says Jennings, who defends some agents of change, those who help rebuild the foundations of businesses “without destroying the very discipline that represents the essence of sound management.”

He explains that since the 1960s corporations have tried to soften harsh, arbitrary, top-down management with training in group dynamics, participative management and consultative decision-making, “with emphasis upon decentralization of the business operation and commensurate authority.”

At about that same time, start-up companies outside Boston and in the Silicon Valley of Northern California became populated by anti-establishment scientists and engineers who disdained traditional management modes.

Informality and spontaneity were in, said Jennings, and it produced some spectacular successes, such as Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computer. The media then attributed their success to informal, anti-traditional work methods.

Not exposed to the business public, says Jennings, “was that of the two out of three start-up businesses that failed and went out of business, many if not most were also anti-establishment types.”

Nevertheless, he continues, the informal, anti-autocratic and unbureaucratic work processes continued to be celebrated and embraced by other industries, the better to unleash creativity and innovation.

The movement to liberate employees from traditional management policies and practices then attracted managers “who understood neither old, traditional management practice nor the new work processes.”

These people, he says, “climbed on the bandwagon as a means to save their own positions, careers or power, or to gain advantage and favor over peers and competitors.”

In Jennings view, competent management doesn’t allow chaos to penetrate to the innards of business, into “its spirit, discipline and respect for orderliness.”

Flums, he contends, do not understand or possess the competency to effect orderly change, and in many cases spawn disorder and uncertainty when the business condition does not so require.

“They impose flummoxery as ideologues regardless of whether the business condition so indicates and merits,” he says. He accuses some of being “unable to organize a power phalanx of committed individuals who will consistently move in a coordinated direction.”

Flums survive because of chaos. They help create it. They hide behind it. They defend their “results” as necessary and temporary, but often the chaos they produce is permanent, entrapping them.

“They are radicals. They have no understanding of measured change,” says Jennings. They are flums at work.