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From: John Young <jya@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
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Date: Mon, 4 Mar 1996 11:49:22 -0500
Financial Times, March 4, 1996, p. 14.
The new manager, boldly going ...
Peter Aspden finds today's leaders are encouraged to learn
elusive arts rather than scientific skills
Managing a business used to be a straightforward affair.
But today's practitioners are under assault from
psychologists, philosophers and a variety of other unlikely
gurus.
The latest in a series of bewildering books about how to
succeed in life and business takes its cue from the late
23rd century. *Make It So: Leadership Lessons from Star
Trek* purports to be a first-hand memoir of the adventures
of Jean-Luc Picard, captain of the USS Enterprise. It is
mildly entertaining and wildly improbable.
But it is also meant to be a serious text on leadership.
"While the past affords us the opportunity to learn many
useful lessons ... we can also gain insight for today by
giving some thoughtful consideration as to what lies ahead
for us," pontificate the authors, Wess Roberts and Bill
Ross. And what better insight than to imagine lffe on board
a spaceship with an android, a Klingon and assorted
interplanetary misfits?
If you are taking it all too seriously, you need *How to
Make Work Fun*, David Firth's racy collection of tips on
how to bring a smile to your work-station. "Disclaimer:
There are two lies in this book. This is one of them," he
starts winningly. And then some serious fun. Firth urges us
to steal pencil sharpeners ("ultimately futile, but
strangely satisfying"), Blu-tack graffiti to the toilet
walls, and take Polaroids of colleagues "that show just how
silly they look when they are concentrating hard". All this
to support his core ideas: "Work is crazy; work is scary;
work should also be fun".
Then from the world of sport there is Will Carling, England
rugby captain, favourite of the gossip-columnists and, now,
self-styled management guru. Carling's recipe -- as he
extrapolates lessons for top managers from his experiences
on the field in his book and tape, *The Way to Win:
Strategies for Success in Business and Sport* -- is always
have a vision, and you will win in business just as in
sport.
As the above examples show, the idea of management as a set
of learnable, scientific skills is less pervasive in the
eclectic, intellectual climate of the 1990s. Management
books and courses are proliferating, each offering its
ostensibly unique -- and sometimes bizarre -- insight into
the elusive arts of business and commerce.
But if managers of the 1990s have never been offered such
a rich -- and eccentric diversity of theories, the question
remains as to whether they are any use.
George Bain, principal of the London Business School, has
observed the trend taking root in academic circles: "The
management field is characterised by fashions, which have
different lifecycles. When management education got going
in the mid-1960s, it was seen as a science with testable
hypotheses. Now it is seen much more as an art. There is an
emphasis on the 'softer' skills, or what people call the
'touchy, feely' stuff."
Although Bain resists the suggestion that soft skills are
a soft option -- "you could argue it is more difficult to
teach people how to become good communicators or how to
improve their inter-personal skills" -- the changing view
of management has allowed any and every theory to flourish.
Today's management gurus stress the challenges posed by a
rapidly changing world and people's ability to respond to
it. Flux, flexibility, creativity are the new buzzwords;
there is little room for the quiet accumulation of
technique which used to characterise the subject.
"Traditional business strategy used to be all about how to
position yourself in the market. Now it is about action,
about being able to cope with whatever the world throws at
you," says Bain. Many best-selling management authors tap
into this feeling of uncertainty to produce their flighty
remedies. Tom Peters, warming to his theme in his
*Liberation Management: Necessary Disorganisation for the
Nanosecond Nineties*, writes: "If you don't feel crazy,
you're not in touch with the times! The point is vital.
These are nutty times. Nutty organisations, nutty people,
capable of dealing with the fast, fleeting, fickle are a
requisite for survival ... If the marketplace has 'turned
ephemeral' on us ... then we must turn ephemeral, too."
Peters and his fellow ephemerals borrow liberally from
current affairs (Francis Fukuyama's "end of history"
thesis), science (chaos theory and fuzzy logic), philosophy
(the displacement of "truth" implied by post-modernism) and
even feminism (the championing of "soft", intuitive skills
over cold, intractable logic).
The result is to portray an unconfident world in which
confusion reigns. What, therefore, is the point of teaching
skills and techniques that could be redundant tomorrow?
Better to reform your personality (more borrowing here,
this time from the vocabulary of psycho-analysis and
self-improvement) to enable you to deal with the
ever-changing demands of the new world.
Even if you avoid the new wave of literature because you
find it puzzling, you may be sent on a management course by
your employer. Courses, too, were traditionally conceived
as a supplement to add new skills. Nowadays, you could find
yourself crawling on a carpet building Lego bridges;
assembling a tent while blindfolded; being woken
unexpectedly at 6am and asked to compete in an outdoor
pursuit.
Alan Howard, a chartered psychologist for CPCR, a
management training company, says unusual outdoor exercises
can help people who work together to see things in a fresh
way. "They are partly bonding exercises, partly a chance to
discuss real business issues at the same level and free of
interruptions," he says.
But even at the most intense level of management training
-- the full-time MBA things are changing. Here one finds a
more considered, but no less radical, re-evaluation of what
it is to be a business manager in the late 1990s.
Eric Briys was appointed dean of the MBA programme at
France's prestigious HEC School of Management in 1992. He
set up a syllabus that included sessions on art and
philosophy. Now, managers are given lectures on medieval
painting from specialists in the Louvre. They have the
option -- taken up by all participants this year -- of
spending four days in a Benedictine monastery to discuss
business ethics with the monks and a senior executive.
Briys says: "I was worried about the traditional approach
to business ethics -- here is a dilemma, here is a
solution, just like any other business decision. And a
business school is hardly a neutral place." So he set up
the monastery retreat with the help of two monks who were
HEC alumni.
He believes the true education of business people must be
as broad as possible. "We take people whose average age is
29, who already have professional experience; they may have
a family, and they are breaking their careers for 16
months, which is a big step. So our aim is to give them
ideas from fields that apparently have nothing to do with
management."
He does not believe this represents a retreat into
gobbledygook or intellectual faddism; rather the reverse.
"We always aim to take a long-term view. By introducing
environmental, ecological, ethical dimensions, we want to
train the students to understand what the marginal cost of
anything is to mankind.
"If business people are going to make important decisions
about the future, they need a cross-sectional view. Then,
they can do what they like -- that is politics. But they
must have no way of saying: 'I did not know'. We are trying
to make people more responsible."
This more reflective, philosophical approach to management
education is gaining currency even among the notoriously
pragmatic British. Brian Baxter is director of Kiddy and
Partners, a London firm of corporate psychologists whose
clients include American Express, Hasbro International,
Bass and the Automobile Association. His courses
unashamedly espouse a "post-modern" view of management:
that you have to deal with a world in which traditional
beliefs are fragmented, there are a plurality of voices
and, consequently, multiple approaches to strategy.
Baxter eschews simplistic notions such as Carling's sports
metaphor for business success. He says managing people in
business today more closely resembles the mounting of a
theatre production: "People come together in short bursts,
and then go away. It is a much more fluid notion than the
old idea of the manager-coach in charge of a happy team,
which makes many assumptions about the capitalist
work-ethic."
He also lectures his clients on the famously difficult
French philosopher Jacques Derrida, whose emphasis on
"deconstructing" meaning has found many followers in
fashionable parts of the academic world but few, as yet, in
boardrooms.
But Baxter says his clients are fascinated rather than
frightened by Derrida's ideas: "It is all about exploring
areas at work which are not normally legitimised. It is
helping an organisation realise that you cannot just impose
male, Wasp (white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant) values in all
your business dealings, for example. It is not just
political correctness, it is about how to allow other
values to emerge.
"Businessmen and women have a very practical reaction: if
this is post-modernism at work, then we could do with more
of it. They come to understand that we are not actually
uncovering meaning in the world but we are making meaning
in a messy, turbulent environment."
But there are those who remain sceptical. Clive Fletcher,
head of psychology at Goldsmiths College, London, sees the
flourishing of extravagant theories, as evidence of the
insecurity felt by today's business world.
"There has been savage social and economic pressure over
recent years. Many managers are now doing the jobs of two
or three people. There is a desperate search for something
to hold on to, a way of making sense of the world. But
there is not going to be a single management style for the
year 2000. There is no simple answer.
"There is emphasis on innovation, but people only innovate
from a basis of psychological security. There is
lip-service paid to the 'long-term view' but all the
pressures are against strategic and visionary thinking.
Businesses still have to live in a world interested in
immediate results.
"There is a big gap between what is being said and what can
be done."
And what about those self-help manuals, the surging prose
encouraging us to shed our anxieties and embrace the new
world with a vigour we scarcely knew we possessed, the
cerebral attempts to impart us with a new-found wisdom?
Fletcher is unimpressed. "Everyone in training and
development has a vested interest in saying: 'Yes, you can
re-invent yourself. But the evidence is that beyond the age
of 25, your core personality attributes remain remarkably
similar. We simply do not change and develop as much as we
would like to think."
[End]