Managing Leadership | The strategic role of the senior executive

The Philosopher’s Stone

Friday, June 25, 2010

The first alchemists sought the now legendary “philosopher’s stone” – a special material that could be used to turn common metals into gold. In time, it came to be believed that this magic substance could solve other intractable problems in life as well, not least among them the conquering of death itself.

And serious philosophers really searched for this material, believing that such a key compound might actually be able to accomplish one or another of the vital purposes posited for it. Even the father of modern science, Isaac Newton, gave the matter serious consideration.

Indeed, contemporary scientists might be viewed as doing something like that – seeking a comprehensive theory that explains the physical universe, unifying the insights of Newtonian science operating in our everyday lives with, at one end of the scale, the relativity theories describing universal space-time and, at the other, the quantum mechanics of the sub-atomic world.

There is an interesting – even endearing – combination of earnestness, intelligence, and innocence in the scientists who pursue it. They mean to accomplish their end, they are driven by their curiosity, and marshal fascinating measures of ingenuity in pursuit of their task. And along the way they have done immense good for the rest of us. The applications to which their discoveries have been put have wrought wondrous improvements in the nature and quality of all our lives around the world.

Key to all of this is their development of theoretical models to explain the world. These are conceptual frameworks into which can be fit the known facts about how it works, that offer perspectives for interpreting and examining new ones. They add up. They make sense. They resolve cognitive dissonance.

So much so, in fact, that when new observations are made that do not appear to be reconcilable with current models, these scientists’ first instinct is typically to posit new entities, new forms of energy, or new relationships between them which offer a means of understanding these otherwise disruptive observations within the existing models. That is, they do not seem normally to review or question their models to try to see if wholly new ones are necessary. Rather, they work desperately to preserve them with what can seem to the rest of us as oddly jury-rigged postulates.

That’s of interest to us here. Physicists with one breath will create a postulate – an entirely theoretical entity imagined almost literally out of the blue – the sole purpose of which is to restore order to a model disturbed by an observation it wouldn’t ordinarily explain or predict. The thing is, though, that with the next breath they will speak of that brand-new postulate essentially as an established scientific fact – even as they discuss their efforts to design experiments to prove its existence. They seem to see no irony in this. They pass insensibly, seamlessly from imagining a solution to the disruption of their settled view of the world to adopting a comforting, unchallengeable faith in its veracity, its existence.

Perhaps that is the real philosopher’s stone at work – turning hope into faith. Perhaps, even, it does that while distorting our appreciation of which is the base, and which the precious, metal. Who knows?

But it’s worth asking about us, in management, as well. We’ll do that next. See you then.

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Today’s Tip: Please see this item by Michael Wade about, if you will, putting some zen in your coffee. One of our chores in life, if we are to navigate through it rather than simply be carried along by it, is to try to be sure we have fuel for the fire – that we have grounds for percolating. Do you? Do you find yourself surprised and delighted by the insights that leap out at you sometimes, or perpetually puzzled by what seems to always be happening to you? Not sure? Then see this item by Michael as well. After that, pour yourself a cup of coffee and think it over.

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If you look at the contents section on the sidebar of the main page of this site, you will see a listing of the article series that have been published here. You can click through to view summaries of the pieces, and then read the full series or selections that are of most interest to you. Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: philosopher, science, Isaac Newton, scientist, theory, universe, insight, space-time, quantum mechanics, intelligence, curiosity, ingenuity, cognitive dissonance, philosopher’s stone, management, Michael Wade

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The alchemists

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

An astronomer concluded a discussion of the likelihood of life elsewhere in the universe by enthusing about how fulfilling it would be to find it, because it would help us learn more about who we are.

But the quantum physicists argue that the question is, at bottom, irrelevant because, not to put too fine a point on it, so are we. We – and any other life there may be out there – are merely the entirely coincidental consequences of incalculably innumerable – and perfectly pointless – interactions of mass and energy.

There is no meaning. There is trajectory, but there is no aim.

It is from this dross, this inexpressibly valueless detritus from which we rise, that we struggle to identify a precious meaning to our lives – an end toward which we ascend purposefully – rather than a blunt extinction to which we hurtle heedfully but helplessly, bereft of reference points, with no traction, no leverage, no starting point, no ending point. No control over our fate. Indeed, with no fate, really.

This, we are told, is it. The inexpressibly elegant equations of quantum physics, describing a brilliantly blind reality, frothy with exquisite design, undesigned, expressing no moral or even existential substance, existing for no reason, ultimately to expire to no purpose.

This is the common metal we work – the foundation, but the roof and crown too, of our lives. It is no wonder we seek to transform it into something more grand.

So the alchemists turn to their work. In our daily lives, and in the various endeavors into which we divide them, including management. How are they getting along?

We will continue looking at that next, in our seemingly unending efforts to conclude the current discussion of the “new” sciences and modern management. See you soon!

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Today’s Tips: Please pay a visit to Online MBA, a business education blog aiming to make intelligible order of the chaotic flow of information that might otherwise overwhelm and discourage us. Good alchemy.

You’ve always suspected this, and now the BBC reports on a study suggesting that “creativity is akin to insanity.” Watch out for this and other items on those lists of leadership characteristics you are encouraged to develop. Scary alchemy.

As long as the subject has turned in that general direction, please do also see The Onion‘s report on the recent closing of America’s national parks for their annual “remajestification.” Lot’s of metaphor in this, actually; as the report mourns, “many Americans take their country’s natural beauty for granted and imagine that it is somehow self-maintaining.” But if you’ve no time for that, there’s lots of fun, too. Whimsical alchemy.

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Technorati Tags: astronomer, quantum physics, design, reason, purpose, alchemist, management, business, education, information, alchemy, BBC, creativity, insanity, leadership, characteristic, The Onion

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Obtuse expertise

Monday, May 10, 2010

And obnoxious. The introductory sections to the latest book by the quite literally world-renowned management thinker are filled with notes of thanks that actually serve to highlight his own prominence; each name dropped both to dazzle the reader and, it sometimes seems, to simultaneously equate the author with their company and imply his superiority to them.

Moreover, the author patronizingly suggests that the reader may have something to contribute to his or her own success, although he also understands that it may simply be too much to ask of them to fail to attribute it to the author. His very protestations of humility – cloaked as they are in strained denials of his own greatness – are the essence of unreflective arrogance.

Actually, though, that’s pretty much par for the course for these sorts, and can even be forgiven in the presence of substance. But what a shame when even that isn’t to be found, when it becomes clear that the declarations of revolutionary, game-changing insight and guidance are merely chaff serving to blind not just you – but perhaps even the author – from the vacuity within. There is no target worth seeking. There is nothing there.

Consider the opening words from one such expert, venturing to set up, as is so often done, the presumably fundamental, but typically false, dichotomy between the “old” way of doing things – the way you do them – and the cutting-edge way he will show you. He illustrates this by telling the story of a mission-manager‘s son asking his father who is controlling a spacecraft returning from a trip to the moon. The father responded that it could be argued that Newton was doing that.

The author evidently understood that to be a wry indictment of the way that space mission was organized and run, a pioneering modern endeavor still clasped in the grasping arms of centuries-old thinking. He then went on to ask if you manged your business by similarly out-dated fashion.

But what the father was really saying is that Newton’s thinking was so profoundly true as to be inevitably, vitally relevant today – impossible, dangerous to neglect. That space mission was successful not despite old thinking, but because of brilliant thinking that (the most current revolutions in physics notwithstanding) had survived the ages due to it ongoing veracity.

Is that how you manage your business – according to fundamental truths that endure the passage of time, and that survive the superficial assaults of obtuse experts? If not, are you mistaking the chaff for the wheat?

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Today’s Tips: Speaking of truths that survive the test of time, but that nevertheless get lost in all the chatter, please see how Fred H. Schlegel, at the FrogBlog, cuts through to the center of the issue of understanding your customers. And speaking of superficial understanding of what makes things happen, please be sure to see how Cultural Offering exposes that tendency in the very thinking of – not just management thinkers – but practitioners.

To take the matter over to the corporate governance side, please see this piece at ben’s blog about why founding CEOs are preferable for his investment firm. Then consider this in light of this WSJ column by John J. Brennan about the state of corporate governance today; see in particular his suggestion about an owner relations committee.

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Technorati Tags: management, humility, arrogance, insight, expert, mission, manager, Newton, endeavor, physics, manage, business, Fred H. Schlegel, customer, Cultural Offering, corporate governance, CEO, investment

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Roundup: Lessons from every quarter

Saturday, February 6, 2010

Advice for effective management has been showing up in some of the most unlikely places over the past several weeks, or in unexpected guises. Let’s take a look at some of these, leavened with some real advice from some of the best management trainers around.

Clues to communication. The range begins at The Boston Globe, for an excellent piece on “cognitive fluency” and what it means for anyone – from managers to marketers and beyond – trying to make a message connect. It then moves on to Steve Roesler‘s piece on getting your ideas heard – note point numbers one and two, in particular. Then we complete the journey to clarity with a classic memo, courtesy of John Phillips.

Obvious places. Start with this WSJ editorial on the dangers of believing your own PR. It’s a political piece, but the lesson is there to be had, whatever you may think of the choice of this particular object for the lesson. In the same vein, next view this by Steve Tobak at BNET, about key lies managers deceive themselves with.

Now, let’s return to the WSJ for this Fouad Ajami column; again, a political piece, same target. But leaving that aside, consider this sentence from it: “A charismatic leader had risen in a manner akin to the way politics plays out in distressed and Third World societies.” How does that insight, and what follows in the essay, translate to what we see in business? But to return to the subject of communication for a moment, please see this item from The Economist about how some politicians aren’t getting – don’t want to get – this increasingly strongly felt and urgently delivered message from the electorate.

Staying motivated. You will definitely want to see this terrific book review by Aubrey Daniels – and why it’s key message drives him crazy. And speaking of insufferably irritating, please see why forced fun can be much more damaging for a company than you might think, in this essay by Grant McCracken.

Unlikely places. Much has been made, of course, of the late-night host debacle of recent weeks in the US. One WSJ piece argues that it is a rich source of management lessons. Another insists that our very effort to find these in it is a condemnation of our individual and cultural common sense. What’s your view?

Here and there. Before leaving the WSJ, you will want to see this column about how the drive to diversity on boards can actually be quite destructive. Next, please be sure to see what management coach Katy Tynan has to say about handling conflict – well worth your time. Subscribe to her blog while you’re there.

You will surely want to see this from Miki Saxon about the real message in the failure of a football team. This is definitely a transferable lesson.

And finally, please do see this BBC piece about why you might want to be slimed – and what unexpected lessons you can learn even from that.

Enjoy your reading, and have a great weekend – see you soon!

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Technorati Tags: management, advice, trainer, Boston Globe, manager, marketer, message, Steve Roesler, clarity, John Phillips, WSJ, Steve Tobak, BNET, Fouad Ajami, charisma, leader, insight, business, communication, Economist, Aubrey Daniels, Grant McCracken, Katy Tynan, Miki Saxon, BBC

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The Management Uncertainty Principle

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

We’ve seen how physicists have discovered the limitations on their ability to attain precise and comprehensive knowledge about the characteristics of an object at a given moment in time. How certain, in the face of this from physics, are we in our own field that we can even identify precisely the vital components of management – or, even more implausibly, of individual leadership – much less take them on in our own persons or teach others to do so? If the physicists are having such a hard time with what most of us would acknowledge are at least legitimately testable scientific models and material, how reasonable is it for us in so soft a field as management and leadership to assert our certainty in these regards?

As it happens, there are researchers who adopt something very much like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle with respect to management. Perhaps the best known of them is Henry Mintzberg, who argues in his most recent book, Management (see review here), that there is so wide a range of factors impinging on what effective management actually winds up looking like – across industries, levels of management, business structure, geographic location, social and corporate culture, not to mention individual personality – that it is really unhelpful to insist on reducing it to a specific list of features or characteristics. Rather, he argues, it should be formulated and developed into specific practice according to an assessment of what he calls the three planes of information, action, and people.

Sounds rather mystical doesn’t it? But the interesting thing is that when you analyze the demands of your work on the basis of the information necessary and available, the actions you and others must take to advance it, and the qualities, abilities, and even locations of the people with whom you collaborate in so doing, it begins to make a lot of sense that the result for each of us in our varied circumstances would fall quite variously across a broader range of possibilities than the gurus, surely, would allow. Indeed, we become more certain about the veracity of our specific solutions, just as we become more doubtful about the more popular generalizations.

So, perhaps there is something to be said for uncertainty, after all. If we are willing to acknowledge its inherent influence in the world of work, we may wind up developing a personally more precise and effective appreciation of how it influences the form of effective management from where we stand at any given time and place. What’s more, we might be better prepared to more effectively develop anew that appreciation when our personal times and places change.

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Today’s tip: Speaking of professors, we all know that they have generally a bias to the left – that is at last widely acknowledged. But there remains some controversy as to why that should be. Perhaps we’ve been asking the wrong questions about it from the outset. Please see this NYT piece for an intriguing explanation.

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Technorati Tags: physicist, knowledge, physics, management, individual leadership, scientific, leadership, certainty, researcher, Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, Mintzberg, business, structure, culture, information, work, NYT

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The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

One of the most peculiar phenomenon uncovered in physics over the past century is known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. This states – to the great frustration and irritation of many – that we cannot know with precision both elements of certain pairs of characteristics of an object. Most commonly, position and velocity are used, and the meaning of the principle is that the more precise is our knowledge about an object’s position, the less so is our knowledge of its speed, and vice versa.

There is some debate about what this principle is saying to us at a fundamental level: is our current ability to measure these characteristics simply unable to grasp both at once, or is the inability to simultaneously measure both just inherent in the nature of the physical world? Can it possibly make any sense that if we know precisely the speed of an object, in the very act of attaining that knowledge we have reduced the fact of its location to a mere range of possibilities?

Some argue that that is exactly the case – that it is not merely that the object could be in any one of the places comprehended by the range of possibilities, but that it is at once in none and all of them. It is, they insist, in a suspended state of probability that is only glimpsed at by the probability range, and that will not become concrete until we abandon our precise knowledge of the other characteristic to the hazy realm of probability, and capture a particular location. We cannot know both, because there is no both; at least, not at the same time.

Does that make sense to you? Mind you, while many quantum physicists have a peculiar habit of adopting rather dogmatic attitudes about the oddest features suggested by the most distant, and least understood, corners reached by their meandering logical inquiries, the truth is that they really don’t know either. Even Einstein had difficulty with this one, although other physicists insist it is only the inevitable consequence of some of his own discoveries.

Well, let’s leave them to sort that out. How about us in management? We’ll look at that next. See you soon!

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Today’s tip: Canada may not boast only one of the most insightful management thinkers around today (as we will see in the next post), but also the freest economy in North America. Please see this WSJ piece for why – and why there is even more bad news in this for the United States.

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Technorati Tags: physics, Heisenberg, Uncertainty Principle, knowledge, probability, quantum physicist, dogma, Einstein, management, Canada, North America, WSJ, United States

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Notes for the New Year

Monday, January 11, 2010

Events drive others until you prioritize, imposing some degree of control on their flow and on the degree to which that affects you – or, better yet, reversing the direction of that influence. In my case, a re-prioritization was called for by events of late last year, and one of the events affected by it is the publishing schedule of this blog.

I long worked to present an essay or item a workday here. As it happens, I will not be able to maintain that. I am and will continue to review the means by which I get my message out, and this blog will remain an important part of the effort. But it will not be the venue for that every day or, even, regularly.

What will happen here is a periodic, probably once a week, commentary on current events in business and management, as well as in the perversely fascinating dialogue in these realms about individual leadership. This will sometimes take the form of a series of articles, as in the past; indeed, we are still in the midst of one that has another two or three essays in it.

Just as often, though, it will take the form of direct observations about a news item, another author’s views on a topic of interest here, or commentary on the latest drivel to drool out of the sundry schools of leadership “science,” which, despite ever-accumulating evidence of their irrelevance or, even, destructiveness, continue to assert their primacy and, sadly, to attract subscribers among we presumptively level-headed practitioners. Book reviews will also continue to be conducted here, as well as a “roundup” now and then.

So, I hope you will continue to keep this blog in your RSS reader or email subscription list, and stop by to view and participate in the discussion. Thanks for your support over the past 5 years or so – I will continue to work to earn it over the increasingly interesting years ahead.

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