Tag Archives: Enlightenment

Making Sense of Management: Theory and Practice

What’s the relationship between management theory and management practice? Today I published a 3,000-word essay on the topic on Medium. Here’s a brief introduction: The relationship between theory and practice has vexed management academics and practitioners alike for decades. Traditionally … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Aristotle, context, ecological perspective, Enlightenment, Mary Parker Follett, means and ends, particulars, Plato, power, practice, Raphael, theory, universals | Leave a comment

Management Needs to Return to Reason

‘The arts of life…turn out to possess their own special methods and techniques…Bad judgement here consists not in failing to apply the methods of natural science, but, on the contrary, in over-applying them’. Isaiah Berlin, Political Judgement Ever since the … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General | Tagged AI, analysis, big data, calculation, Cartesian, economists, Edmund Burke, Enlightenment, existential, French Revolution, Hamilton, identity, instrumental, Isaiah Berlin, Jefferson, Mercier, political judgement, pragmatism, rationality, re-engineering, reason, Ronald Reagan, Sperber, Steven Pinker, Thomas Paine, utility, West Point | Comments Off on Management Needs to Return to Reason

Climate Change and Evidence-based Management [Part II]: The Case for Practical Wisdom

This blog is a continuation of last week’s in which I suggested that in managing complex systems with unstable parameters one cannot rely just on data-based predictions, one has to depend more on judgement-based anticipations: In The Rational Optimist Matt … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged analytical philosophy, Aristotle, BCG, confirmation bias, Drucker Forum, Enlightenment, evidence-based, Honda, intrinsic motivation, intuition, Isaiah Berlin, judgement, logical positivism, Matt Ridley, Mr. Spock, Oxford, paradigm shift, phronesis, practical wisdom, rational optimist, rationality, Richard Pascale, The New Ecology of Leadership | Comments Off on Climate Change and Evidence-based Management [Part II]: The Case for Practical Wisdom