How do good managers stay in touch? How do they coordinate? First came MBWA, then MBFA, and now it is MBTA. Here’s the story:
One of our profession’s perennial problems is that managers become complacent and lose touch. In traditional hierarchical organizations managers risked losing touch by relying on layers of intermediaries. Later, in the age of information systems, managers risked losing touch by relying entirely on computer generated data.
Thus, MBWA: Management By Wandering Around. MBWA is a management method relying on interpersonal (face to face) contact. The manager gets “into the trenches” with the workers. MBWA managers are widely thought to be more effective than managers who do not wander around. MBWA, also known as Management By Walking Around, was first publicized by HP’s David Packard in the 1940s. It was revived and became broadly recognized due to the highly influential book In Search of Excellence (Peters and Waterman, 1982).
With the dawn of widespread distributed/virtual organizations and teams in the 1990s, MBWA was clearly impossible and had to be substituted with new management approaches. In 1999 I wrote about MBFA, Management by Flying Around, in my book “Global Software Teams” (Carmel, 1999). I did not coin this term, though my book played an important role in publicizing it. I learned this new acronym from pioneering virtual managers at IBM.
In the 1990s, we all believed that the dominant work configuration was that of clustered locations in which co-located tech workers cluster together in an office. For example, American workers were in an office building in Reston and the Irish workers in an office building in Stillorgan, and the Swedish workers in Kista, the Chinese workers in a skyscraper in Pudong, and so on. Therefore managers were able to fly from location to location in order to meet with the local team members.
One decade later there are now several million knowledge workers involved in international distributed work groups. Technology has become much friendlier since the 1990s. However, travel is prohibitive for most of these teams and thus, MBFA is impossible.
Instead, today we see MBTA, Management By Timeshifting Around. Managers stay in place, but timeshift to different locations by adjusting or scattering their work day. Timeshifting means adjusting one’s work hours to accommodate another’s schedule. For example, Sarah, a timeshifting tech manager in the Virginia tech corridor near Washington, timeshifts to her 10 team members’ work time in Germany. She starts work at 06:00 local time and overlaps half her workday with her German colleagues. This allows her to interact synchronously with her German counterparts.
My conceptualization of MBTA came about from more than a decade of research including hundreds of formal and informal interviews with managers all over the world. This research is conducted, in part, with my colleague here at AU, Alberto Espinosa. In these time zone-separated work groups we have found one management/coordination solution prevalent nearly everywhere: timeshifting.
MBTA managers can potentially achieve many of the advantages of MBWA and MBFA. They can have one-on-one intimate conversations via Skype or their mobile telephone. They can coordinate “together” with others examining work products. They can tell a joke. They can develop key personal relationships and trust.
- Carmel, E., (1999), Global Software Teams. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
- Peters, T., Waterman, R. (1982), In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best Run Companies, Harper and Row, New York, NY, .
