Sir John Harvey-Jones, who died back in January at the age of 83, was a company man, a hired hand whose promotion to chairman of ICI was the final stage in his rise through the executive ranks.

Thanks to inertia, ICI, as a top-heavy corpocracy, was heading for unprecedented losses. That was the dire prospect that led the board to appoint Harvey-Jones, a dissident who had long and loudly expressed his dissatisfaction with the work of his fellows and, perforce, himself.

Personal responsibility is a key pillar of Making It Happen, three little words Harvey-Jones chose as the title for a deservedly successful book. He did enough time at ICI to demonstrate his abilities and the great scope available for resuscitation.

His management style was like a breath of fresh air. ICI, like so much of British industry, seemed to have become introverted and unenterprising. The new boss was extroverted and adventurous, and the openness and warmth of his manner contradicted the corporate personality. It was those qualities, too, which made him such a success in retirement as TV’s Troubleshooter, visiting small to middling companies that had asked for the Great Man’s help.

Some had obviously expected to get patted on the back for their achievements, and were more than surprised to be kicked in a more sensitive area. The most famous example was the Morgan Car firm, noted for making a reasonable living by producing cars with obsolete technology which fitted its vintage marketing platform. The waiting lists were the notorious result. But the family management saw this pile-up, not as failure, but as an asset.

The true business of a business, of course, is to create and satisfy high demand that makes the most of fully balanced, highly modernised supply.

The rarity of the Harvey-Jones boss-type isn’t because it’s hard to acquire sufficient management know-how. It’s the human dimension. Strategy isn’t a cold subject. It requires emotional drive to turn the plans into action.

Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Cynthia A. Montgomery notes that just planning is not enough. ‘Strategy should also guide the development of a company – its identity and purpose – over time’. She argues that the prevailing approach sees strategy as a set solution, not as a dynamic process.

However, the old goal of a long-term, sustainable, competitive advantage must now give way to creation of value. She rejects strategy consultants; leadership demands that the CEO, with no outsourcing, is Chief Strategist. An analytical, left-brain exercise yields to an organic process – adaptive, holistic and open-ended. And the time-frame does not jump from year to year, but is ‘everyday, continuous, unending’.

That’s how to go about making it happen – exercising and perpetuating the dynamic powers of a Harvey-Jones.

See more on management style here: http://www.thinkingmanagers.com/business-management/management-styles.ph...