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False Wizards: Why I Don’t Believe in Management Gurus

The late historian, Daniel Boorstin, once said, “Trying to plan for the future without a sense of the past is like trying to plant cut flowers.” That is, planners and managers (politicians too) should not try to replicate desirable organizational outcomes without an understanding of the complex processes of growth and development involved in their creation. In management (and politics), unfortunately, very few follow this advice. The result is the widespread “planting of cut flowers”, using what long-time Harvard Business School professor Fritz Roethlisberger called “verbal wands”.  With the wave of a few words, management “wizards” expect authoritarian organizations to be changed into egalitarian ones, rigid hierarchies to become agile, “command-and-control” to be replaced by “cooperate-and-collaborate” and so on. The American attempt to create democracies in the Middle East with legislation and electoral mechanics, without paying attention to the complex dynamics of the societies involved, is a prime example of this fatal conceit.

Today the use of these “verbal wands” is widespread in the blogosphere as management gurus, both incumbent and aspirant, race to come up with “the new paradigm” that will replace the “old” one. The previous paradigm is variously characterized as “linear” and “mechanistic” and we are told that the new paradigm requires new principles to replace the old, outdated ones. Here’s a typical call to arms from the well-known management writer and former Senior Editor at Fast Company, Polly Labarre:

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Posted in Change, General, Leadership | Tagged abstraction, Amazon, Apple, both...and, cause-and-effect, change, Cisco, complex systems, context, Costco, cut flowers, Daniel Boorstin, democracy, ecocycle, ecological perspective, either/or, Fast Company, Fritz Roethlisberger, Juniper, management gurus, management principles, MBA, Microsoft, Middle East, paradigm, Polly La Barre, power, Salesforce, sweet zone, The New Ecology of Leadership, trust, verbal wands, Whole Foods, Zara | 3 Comments

New Year Resolutions: “What Do I Do Differently on Monday Morning?”

New Year is a good time to discuss changing behavior. At this time of year there is lots of talk about new resolutions, “starting with clean slates” and “turning over new leaves”. Very little of this will turn into action. And even if it does, it is unlikely to persist for long in the form of virtuous habits. The current wrangling in the American Congress over the measures required to avoid the “fiscal cliff” is an excellent illustration of the problem.  Legislators are stuck in a series of vicious traps, where the short-term rewards are such that they swamp any concerns about the long run damage being done to the economy and society. Many Republican members of the House are worried that any compromise with the Democrats will lead directly to challenges in their party’s primaries for the 2014 elections. For them it will be easier to compromise after the January 1 deadline passes, when they can plead the resulting crisis as the reason to make a deal.

Change on a much smaller scale is only slightly less difficult. “What do I do differently on Monday morning?” is the most challenging question that I get from managers when I talk to them about the advantages of an ecological perspective of organizations over the standard economic-based one.  The short answer I give to them is “Everything!” The long answer is, “I don’t know. It depends entirely on your own particular situation and the contexts in which you find yourself. Only you can know what these are, but the ecological perspective can help you frame the situation and tease out the tangled webs of cause and effect.”

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Posted in Change, General | Tagged change, complex systems, Congress, ecological perspective, fiscal cliff, New Year resolutions, Sandy Hook | 2 Comments

Management and the Limits of Logic Part II

When I wrote last week’s blog, I was unaware that Monitor Group, the consulting company founded in 1983 by strategy guru Michael Porter and some Harvard Business School colleagues, had filed for bankruptcy in mid-November and that its assets were to be sold to Deloitte. On its website the company accentuates the positive and represents the events as a strategic coup, with the bankruptcy as a purely mechanical measure to facilitate it.

The bankruptcy is, however, also a sign of failure. When a leading management consultancy fails, it raises inevitable questions about the quality of the advice they were giving and their ability to implement their own advice. The bankruptcy has certainly attracted its own share of scrutiny and perhaps a little schadenfreude on the part of people who have never liked Porter’s work (a group which includes me). In his Forbes blog, aspirant guru, Steve Denning seized the opportunity to deliver a blistering attack on Porter’s Five-Forces Model and the idea that strategy was all about dealing with competition. He describes Porter’s relationship to strategy as being similar to that of “what Aristotle was to metaphysics”. He accuses him of “hype, spin, impenetrable prose and abstruse mathematics, along with talk of ‘rigorous analysis’, ‘tough-minded decisions’ and ‘hard choices’ all combined to hide the fact that there was no evidence that sustainable competitive advantage could be created in advance by studying the structure of an industry.”

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Posted in Change, General | Tagged balance, both...and, change, competition, creativity, ecological perspective, either/or, elephant, entrepreneur, Five-Forces, gardening, innovation, Jonathan Haidt, logic, markets, Max Weber, Michael Porter, Monitor Group, Protestant Ethic, rationalism, rider, shareholder value, Steve Denning, strategy, The Righteous Mind | 1 Comment

Management and the Limits of Logic

I grew up in a middle-class English household that was not very intellectual. As a child I was cautioned against ever discussing religion, politics or money round the dinner table. As I grew older, I discovered that these were the only subjects I was really interested in!

Recently I have been reading Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, his reconfiguration of the field of moral psychology and his explanation of why good people are divided by politics and religion. His central metaphor for the human mind is that of a rider on an elephant, where the rider is reason and the elephant is intuition. Although it is not often posed in this way, the central question in moral psychology has been the relationship between the rider and the elephant. Haidt places the possible views on a spectrum ranging from Hume (the elephant is in charge) to Plato (the rider is in control). David Hume, a Scottish empiricist philosopher, was famous for his belief that “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” Plato, on the other hand, believed that reason is or ought to be the master of all. In the middle, with an interactionist model, Haidt places Thomas Jefferson (a puzzling choice, but Haidt is a professor at the University of Virginia, an institute that Thomas Jefferson founded).

Haidt describes Plato’s view, that the rider is or ought to be in charge of the elephant, as the “rationalist delusion”, and shows how moral psychology has been under its spell for some time. That era is now coming to an end, with Haidt suggesting that “anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason”.

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Posted in Change, General, Leadership, Strategy | Tagged America, Berlin Wall, capitalism, communism, contradiction, David Hume, ecological rationality, emotion, Jonathan Haidt, Kahneman, limits of logic, metaphor, paradox, Plato, rationalism, rationalist delusion, reason, rider an elephant, Soviet Union, Stalin, The New Ecology of Leadership, The Righteous Mind, Thomas Jefferson, Tversky | Comments Off on Management and the Limits of Logic

CEO Succession at Intel: A Critical Decision

The surprise announcement of the retirement of Intel’s CEO, Paul Otellini, in May next year, three years ahead of the mandatory date, sets the stage for perhaps the most challenging and important CEO selection in the firm’s history.  For students of management Intel has always been an interesting company and I discussed it specifically in The New Ecology of Leadership.

As the diagram from the book shows, Intel’s revenue history tracks the classic S-shaped curve spanning over forty years. Intel began life as a start-up founded by Robert Noyce and Gordon E. Moore. They were members of the famous “traitorous eight”, who left Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in 1957 after conflict with the domineering founder of that company. They first participated in the founding of Fairchild before going on to start Intel to make random access memories (DRAM):

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Posted in Change, Leadership, Strategy | Tagged Andy Grove, ARM, Bob Noyce, CEO succession, Craig Barrett, DRAM, ecological perspective, Fairchild, Gordon Moore, Intel, means and ends, microprocessor, Microsoft, mobile, Paul Otellini, PC, Schockley, The New Ecology of Leadership, value chain | Comments Off on CEO Succession at Intel: A Critical Decision

Hunting Dynamics: To Think Out of The Box, You Must First Act Out of The Box

Last week I travelled to Ottawa to take part in “Public Sector Transformation 2012: Navigating the Perfect Storm” a two-day session put on by the Conference Board of Canada. The meeting kicked off with a presentation by Jordan Peterson, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto and a most interesting and exciting speaker. He is best known perhaps for his work on “self-authoring” – his belief that writing about one’s past, present and future can improve one’s mental and physical health and increase productivity. The world, he contends, is not made of matter or things but of “what matters” or meaning. This perspective is highly compatible with ecological rationality and the emphasis I place on narrative in The New Ecology of Leadership. I believe that the same process of meaning-making is at work in organizations, which is why learning from their past and understanding the present helps them and their people create their future.

Peterson’s opening session was followed by a series of presentations, many from the public sector, dealing with their own efforts at change and transformation. What struck me about most of these was their use of text-only slides and their compulsion to have an abstract set of principles to talk to. The emphasis was on the logic of their approaches, the set of policies, principles or rules they used, rather than how they actually went about creating real change. I felt as though I was listening to conversations between groups of middle managers and their conservative, risk-averse, mistrustful bosses, who needed to see formal plans before they would give their permission for anything to be “implemented”. Apparently this was a group of people that privileged thought over action and believed that effective action should always be preceded by deliberate, conscious thought. And the assumption seemed to be that the more refined the thought, then the more effective the action would be…

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Posted in Change, General, Leadership, Strategy | Tagged acting, change, community, Conference Board, fission-fusion, hunter-gatherer, hunting dynamics, Jordan Peterson, Kalahari Desert, leadership, logical thought, meaning-making, MIT, National Film Board of Canada, Public Sector, Sandy Pentland, self-authoring, social media, The New Ecology of Leadership, thinking, Tooby and Cosmides, transformation | Comments Off on Hunting Dynamics: To Think Out of The Box, You Must First Act Out of The Box

The 2012 Drucker Forum – Never Stop Playing

I returned over the weekend from the Drucker Forum in Vienna. It was a great conference! From my ecological perspective it was an “open patch”, a place in which people with many different backgrounds and perspectives can gather, have an open dialogue and exchange questions and answers. This is the “soil” in which new ideas of all kinds can grow without being crushed by giant orthodoxies.

On the first evening – a cocktail party for speakers and essay-winners – I introduced myself to a man standing alone. I noticed that he had a tiny gold medal pinned in his lapel. He was Dan Schechtman, winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, and a pioneer of Israel’s entrepreneurial revolution. We spent about ten minutes talking about entrepreneurship, as well as his efforts to teach physics to very young children (5 year-olds). He described how he teaches the concept of phase states (solid, liquid and gas) by having them pretend that they are atoms and then forming different relationships with each other, depending on the state they are in. Thus for solids the atoms (children) are packed together as tightly as possible but for liquids they have to form molecules (two hydrogen atoms for every oxygen atom, in the case of water), which allows them to move around in little clusters, and so on. Professor Schectman is clearly a thinker in multiple dimensions and I was delighted to find that he was a fan of Bucky Fuller’s work. According to the Nobel Committee his discovery in the structure of crystals “… revealed a new principle for packing of atoms and molecules…this led to a paradigm shift within chemistry.” (Thanks, Wikipedia).

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Posted in General | Tagged Bucky Fuller, Dan Schechtman, Drucker Forum, ecological perspective, entrepreneurs, Nobel Prize for Chemistry, Palais Ferstel, Papermoon, Peter Drucker, phase states, playing | 2 Comments

The Drucker Forum: A Bridge from the Past to the Future

Today I am headed to Vienna to take part in the 4^th Global Drucker Forum, where an essay I wrote earlier this year has won second prize in the manager/entrepreneur category. The Drucker Global Essay Challenge has two categories – students and young managers/entrepreneurs. I must confess that I was uncertain as to whether the term “young” applied to entrepreneurs as well as to managers and I was also concerned that I might not qualify chronologically as “young”. But there was no age limit specified and as every entrant had to submit his or her date-of-birth, I figured, as every entrepreneur should, that one should always let the client say “no”. So I sent my entry off and waited.

Drucker had always been an enigma to me. When I was a manager I had liked a good deal of his advice, but I could never figure out where he was coming from intellectually. My concern was always that fundamentally he was too “left-brained”, a rationalist, or perhaps that his advice lent itself to interpretation in too rational a way. Drucker was well-known for not citing his sources, arguing that the ideas themselves were more important than who came up with them, but this just made my problem worse. What did he mean by “think” in his repeated injunctions to managers to “think through” their issues? Was it an analytical process? Perhaps it was the logic of logical positivism that flourished in Vienna while he grew up there? My concerns were practical as well as philosophical. Take management-by-objectives (MBO), for instance, the approach to management that he helped pioneer and popularize. Participative goal-setting between managers and employees sounds great in theory, but in my experience it rarely seemed to work well in practice, at least not for long. No sooner did one bring MBO into a real organization than the whole logic of the practice was perverted by the presence of power and the absence of trust. If you hadn’t had those kinds of problems before MBO, you certainly did afterward! Divisions and other business units were pitched against each other as “scarce capital” was allocated by the “shareholders’ representatives”. One usually ended up with MBO cascaded down from the top of the organization with every negotiating session bedeviled by the subtle (or not-so-subtle) use of power and endemic mistrust.

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Posted in Change, General, Leadership, Strategy | Tagged Bob Lutz, budgets, change, complex systems, Drucker Essay Challenge, Drucker Forum, ecological perspective, ecological rationality, ecologics, Honda, logical positivism, MBO, performance management, Peter Drucker, power, self-control, shareholder value model, social ecology, The New Ecology of Leadership, trust | 2 Comments

The Presidential Election: America In a Trap

The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley and it is difficult to imagine how disruptive Superstorm Sandy must have been to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. He was effectively prevented from campaigning and forced to watch his rival playing Commander-in-Chief and collecting plaudits from Republicans and Democrats alike. Some observers have suggested that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, whose egocentric speech at the Republican Convention left little doubt about his intention to run in 2016, seems to have seen his main chance in a second term for Obama, rather than taking on an incumbent Republican in four years time. Christie denies falling out of love with Mitt Romney of course and pleads the circumstance of the disaster that struck his state.

Perhaps. Who knows? It is has been such a sorry election campaign; the most expensive on record with unprecedented nastiness and bold-faced lies from both sides. Mitt Romney’s Mormon values don’t seem to have resulted in a discernably different tone to his approach. One egregious example is last week’s claim from the Romney campaign that Obama had colluded to sell Chrysler to the Italians so that they could move production to China. It sounded like a last ditch attempt to win Ohio and veteran political observers say that the candidate has to approve such desperate measures. If so, shame on Mitt.  In 2008 John McCain, to his lasting credit, refused to sanction last minute ads playing on Obama’s relationship with controversial cleric, Jeremiah Wright. But if the party machines are firmly in charge, the candidates may have little to do with it. George Orwell foresaw it all of course in his factional novel, 1984, which anticipated a world where power was pursued for its own sake.  The “party” does anything and everything it has to in order to stay in power and no one knows whether its advertised leader,  “Big Brother”, even exists as a real person.  One might ask the same question about American Presidential candidates!

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Posted in Change, General, Leadership, Strategy | Tagged 1984, Barack Obama, Big Brother, change, china, Chris Christy, Chrysler, community, dependency corruption, ecocycle, ecological perspective, George Orwell, Great Recession, Jeep, Jeremiah Wright, John McCain, Lawrence Lessig, leadership, management, Mitt Romney, Mormon, narrative, Ohio, power, regulation, social trap, special interests, Superstorm Sandy, sweet zone, tax code, winner-take-all | 1 Comment

The Ecology of Health Care: in Sickness and in Health

Health care in America is in a horrible mess, the lair of what complexity theorists call “wicked problems”. A recent article in Wired magazine described it as “a morass, a quagmire, a slough of policy despond”. As every one knows, the US spends almost twice as much on health care as any other country (as a percentage of GNP) but with less satisfactory results. Classical indicators like infant mortality are far too high and show little sign of improvement. It is estimated that at least 30% of the resources spent on health care are wasted. And the situation is going to get worse as the population ages.

For the past thirty years I have been working in the belief that the best way to sort out complex messes is to use a theory of complex systems. Unfortunately complexity theory and systems thinking are abstract disciplines and can be as difficult to understand as the organizational messes one is trying to deal with! This is where the ecological perspective and analogical thinking come in. I use theories of complex systems to discipline analogies drawn between complex natural systems and human organizations. This way one gets all the benefits of systems thinking without having to grapple with learning a new set of abstract concepts.  This past month I have been working on the application of this approach to a US regional health care system and this past weekend I delivered a big presentation to their top people based upon my work.

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Posted in Change, General, Leadership, Strategy | Tagged change, community, complex systems, complexity theory, ecocycle, ecological perspective, ecosystem, healthcare, industry rollup, means and ends, private-equity, systems theory, The New Ecology of Leadership, upcode, vertical integration, wicked problems | 2 Comments ← Older posts Newer posts →