Liberation Management- Lessons for the Modern Business Age

Over 30 years ago, Tom Peters published the groundbreaking book “Liberation Management,” which dared to reimagine the standard corporate hierarchy of the day through a new lens. 

Now, in 2023, much of the way we do business has changed, but Peters’ points remain no less salient. It’s time to return to the lessons of liberation management, discovering how this groundbreaking work continues to impact organizational structures today—reexamining the discoveries of Liberation Management of thirty years later.

Flexibility as a Feature 

Peters was one of the first management gurus to cast a gimlet eye towards the online world of what would be then, the future. Peters assured that hierarchical and bureaucratic corporations operating on a traditional model would, in the brave new world of globalized cyberspace, quickly become irrelevant. 

The fragmentation of the international marketplace, both of products and ideas, would mean that the slow moving behemoths who had ruled the roost in the good old days of corporate management would go the way of the megalodon.

In their place would emerge a new class of companies, organized into project oriented teams designed to take immediate advantage of fleeting opportunities as they arose. 

These companies would work faster, smarter and harder than the industrial titans of the past. Instead of an army of worker ants slaving away in their designated silos, Peters predicted a smarter, more nimble future where people would create opportunities and seize them with gusto, moving not upwards on the old school corporate ladder, but rather laterally, remaining flexible in their thinking, attitudes and creative approaches to their careers.

In 2023, Peter’s grasp of this concept seems positively clairvoyant. Just as Peters predicted, the internet ushered in the era of open plan offices, of teams assembled as quickly as they are dismantled, swinging from one project to another. 

We’re living in a time of unprecedented movement, as people leap from career to career, from team to team, taking on the challenges of the working world as spontaneously and flexibly as Peters could have hoped. But how should this new class of worker be managed? Once again, Peters has the answer.

Float Like A Bumblebee 

In the post-internet, post-globalization future we live in, Peters predicted that companies and individuals would have to relinquish their attachment to the traditional top down hierarchies of days past. 

Old school work environments may have been all about a downward flow of information meeting an upward flow of labor, but in an information age when knowledge is accessible to all, that’s no longer necessary.

Taking the place of this old model of management is something one of Peters’ interview subjects, Gary Withers [who this writer happened to work with during this period], borrowed from his interpretation of Walt Disney’s management approach—blending the old school with the new wave of management principals. 

According to Withers’ understanding, “[Disney] acted like a bumblebee, floating around, pollinating ideas, providing the creative spark but no line responsibility as such.” Withers himself followed suit in his management style of his rapidly growing creative agency, Imagination. After hosting office hours over breakfast in the company’s restaurant, Withers spends the rest of his day “...wandering around,” making himself available whenever, and wherever, his team needs him.

A more flexible attitude towards work means a more flexible attitude towards management, as Withers, and Peters, prove. Instead of confining themselves to the limited scope of a clearly defined role, managers should think of themselves as perpetually “on call” to the needs of their team. Staying responsive, responsible and attuned to the shifting moods, needs and desires of the teams they manage keeps a company’s culture vital, and sets a whole organization up for success. 

From Product to Marketing to Brand…And Back Again

In the era when Peters wrote his book, the market had made a major and historic shift. First there was a commercial era built around the product, as in Ford’s Model-T. Then there was an era focused on sales, as with IBM’s Corporate Man. Then came the era of marketing, exemplified by brands such as Coca Cola. Lastly was the brand-led era, with companies like Apple taking the lead. 

These days, what once was old is new again, as companies innovating in the software as a service space create new models of product led growth. But there’s a peril in this approach that Peters saw coming—focusing on the product to the detriment of your brand.

A recent McKinsey article highlights how companies focus on the sequence of product led growth leading to sales led growth, and then a final triumphant stage of product led sales. But this perspective lacks a clear focus on brand presence and how it responds flexibly to changing conditions in the marketplace. 

As companies advance a product led, sales led, brand led or hybrid approach, they’ll also need to remember the lessons conveyed by Peters and McKinsey. They’ll need to rethink the way they design teams, placing an emphasis on cross-functional and multidisciplinary approaches. Each team needs to include experts on each stage of the customer journey. 

This means that brand marketers, product marketers, digital marketers, PMs, designers, engineers, sales and customer success teams all need to be included under the same big tent, sharing a joint mandate, rituals and forms of collaboration.

Back to the Future of Cross Disciplinary Collaboration 

As we revisit the lessons of Liberation Management, it is this fundamental flexibility that remains key. By focusing growth strategies around a network of teams where managers “float” from problem to problem, companies will be able to more successfully adapt the new school approach to hybrid models, responding intuitively and creatively to the shifting winds of market demand.