Market-oriented conditions that Russia faced several years ago have deeply influenced all the spheres of social life and first of all our economy. Improvement has become the most important factor in its survival. This improvement depends on purposefulness and dynamism of development of the sphere of management.
Thus it is the sphere of management what is the keystone of the economy in the whole. Managers make only about ten per cent of all the workers but this very tenth defines the final result. In other words, to achieve any result one can make ten times fewer efforts just concentrating them on the organization of efficient management.
Efficiency of management directly depends on what fundamental principles are in the basis of the ideas about its organization. It is quite clear: people can do only what they know and how thoroughly these people understand the details and correlations of their work defines the efficiency of this work. It seems so easy: one should just take somebody else's experience, study and use it. Hardly anyone of directors doubts that to organize management properly in our situation one should consistently assimilate modern managerial experience. However, despite of this, the assimilation goes too slowly and with great difficulties.
The matter is the following: today there are many methods of approach to the organization of management in the world but the experience accumulated by western managers is not a harmonious united managerial theory but different theorizings on separately taken questions. This experience works in Western countries because managerial culture was formed there during many decades, new inventions in the managerial sphere were made when there was a need of them, and managers assimilated new things only because they produced perceptible effect. And the main point is that all this experience has been assimilated there gradually, step by step, sometimes by the method of trial and error.
It is obvious that the circumstances that Russian managers face today essentially differ from the western ones. We have all the experience accumulated at our disposal but we do not have one very little thing - the decades for assimilating it.
It is like making an applicant take a first-year exam in mathematics instead of an exam for admission allowing him/her to use all possible textbooks. Somebody will be able to think out the task, to use something, but hardly many of them will be able to fulfil the task perfectly. The same situation is in our management: somebody understands something and successfully uses something. This mostly defines the managerial sphere.
The problem is that it is rather difficult to define what is right and most suitable for these or those circumstances and what is not. And the most difficult point is that every single director has to define these qualities when it is necessary to make crucial decisions and to take real actions.
Thus it must be clear that thoughtless copying somebody else's experience cannot give the necessary effect. That is why we need some other method of approach considering the peculiarities of our situation to speed up the improvement of managerial sphere.
The solution to the problem both in economy in the whole or in a separately taken company is not to do everything at once but to concentrate the efforts on the most important points. First, one should choose the main things in the great variety of methods of approach to the organization of management and first of all one should concentrate the managers' efforts on studying these main points. Secondly, one should not make all the managers do it but should choose the most gifted ones and make them the leading figures in the managerial system. Understanding of different facts' correlation will arm them with criteria of correctness and enable them to assimilate numerous kinds of knowledge about management independently and on a qualitatively new level. And they will not only assimilate but will also successfully use this knowledge in everyday practice, drawing the rest of managers into this activity.
Both these tasks have been successively solved in practice.
Scientifically Assimilating Company (SAC) POSITION has worked out Positional Method by means of which the social consciousness and social activity are structured. By force of the reasons mentioned above management is the prior sphere where the Method should be used. The positional theory of management has been created basing on the Positional Method and the essence of management has been comprehended on a qualitatively new level. As a result of this comprehension there have been worked out notions enabling us to structure existing approaches, there have been created qualitatively different managerial technologies. Also principally new instrumental means have been introduced - everything that should be first of all taken into consideration before the assimilation of the various existing knowledge about management.
When one has to understand a great deal of kinds of information, schemes help to do it. A properly built scheme is a thoroughly comprehended and compressed knowledge stated on the level of simple but thoroughly verified ideas. Schemes do not substitute for the knowledge but help us to coordinate it into the whole. Understanding of the whole makes it essentially easier to understand the particulars.
Moreover, the Positional Method nontraditionally approaches human abilities. It allows choosing the managers who are able to think independently, to take the responsibility for either correctness of their actions or other people's actions. These people are able to comprehend everything new and to reorganize their own activities most effectively. According to SAC POSITION's statistics there are about 10 % such able people in the managerial sphere. It means that if one concentrates efforts only on them, one can raise the effectiveness of the reforms ten times as much.
It is difficult to calculate how many times fewer efforts these managers will have to make to assimilate the necessary schemes as compared with the assimilation of all the various kinds of information about organization of management, but if we take the most modest appraisal we can talk about a tenfold gain here as well.
Thus, if a director reforming business is occupied not with everything at once but concentrates his/her efforts on organising the system of management, if he/she chooses the cleverest managers and begins to form their complete ideas about managerial sphere. This on the whole will take 1000 times fewer of his/her efforts than a "traditional" all-round method of approach.
In any case the Positional Method introduces wide opportunities for realizing purposeful work to organize effective management and allows doing it as dynamically as fully the director uses the positional methods of approach.