Management- It's Not What You Think! Read online

Official

  Foreman

  Steward

  Boss

  Head Honcho

  Conductor

  Superior

  Chief

  Kingpin

  Potentate

  Lord

  Pharaoh

  Caesar

  Emperor

  King

  Shogun

  Czar

  Maharaja

  Headmistress

  Head

  Sheik

  Sultan

  Fuhrer

  Viceroy

  Superintendent

  Director

  Executive

  Dictator

  Oligarch

  CEO

  COO

  CFO

  CLO

  Source: Adapted from Henry Mintzberg, Managing, FT/Prentice Hall, 2009.

  Management: It’s Everything you think

  Lists of the qualities of effective managers and leaders abound. They are usually short – who would take dozens of items seriously? For example, in a brochure to promote its EMBA program, entitled ‘What makes a leader?’, the University of Toronto Business School answered: ‘The courage to challenge the status quo. To flourish in a demanding environment. To collaborate for the greater good. To set clear direction in a rapidly changing world. To be fearlessly decisive’ (Rotman School, circa 2005).

  The trouble is that these lists are not consistent – they contain all sorts of different characteristics. For example, where is native intelligence on the list above, or being a good listener, or just plain having energy? Surely these are important too. No problem: they appear on other lists. So if we are to find out what makes a manager truly effective, we shall have to combine all the lists.

  This, for the sake of a better world, has been done in Table 1. It lists the qualities from the various lists that I have found, with a few missing favorites of my own added in. This list contains 52 items. Be all 52 and you are bound to be an effective manager. Even if not a human one.

  The inevitably flawed manager

  All of this is part of our ‘romance of leadership’ (Meindl et al., 1985), that on one hand puts ordinary mortals on managerial pedestals (‘Rudolph is the perfect manager for this job – he will save us’), and on the other hand allows us to vilify them as they come crashing down (‘How could Rudolph have failed us so?’). Yet some managers do stay up, if not on that silly pedestal. How so?

  The answer is simple: they are flawed – we are all flawed – but their particular flaws are not fatal, at least under the circumstances. (Superman, you might recall, was flawed too – remember Kryptonite?)

  If you want to uncover someone’s flaws, marry them or else work for them. Their flaws will quickly become apparent. So too will something else, at least if you are a mature human being who made a reasonably good choice: that you can usually live with those flaws. Managers and marriages do succeed. The world, as a consequence, continues to unfold in its inimitably imperfect way.1

  This, of course, means that those superman lists of leadership qualities are also flawed: people often succeed even while failing on some of these qualities. But more to the point, these lists are often wrong. For example, leaders should be decisive, and they should be decent: who can argue with that? For starters, anyone who has worked for an indecent leader who got results. And how about Americans whose president learned the importance of being decisive in a case study classroom at Harvard and certainly was decisive in his decision to go to war with Iraq. The University of Toronto list calls this quality ‘fearlessly decisive’. He sure was.

  Table 1 Composite list of basic qualities for assured managerial effectiveness

  courageous energetic/enthusiastic

  committed upbeat/optimistic

  curious ambitious

  confident tenacious/ persistent

  candid zealous

  collaborative/participative/cooperative

  reflective engaging

  insightful supportive/sympathetic/empathetic

  open-minded/tolerant (of people, stable

  ambiguities and ideas) dependable

  innovative fair

  communicative (including being a good accountable

  listener) ethical/honest

  connected/informed consistent

  perceptive flexible

  balanced

  integrative

  thoughtful/intelligent/wise

  analytic/objective

  pragmatic

  decisive (action-oriented)

  pro-active

  charismatic

  passionate

  Inspiring

  visionary tall*

  Compiled from various sources; my own favorites in italics.

  * This item appeared on no list that I saw. But it might rank ahead of many of the other items because studies have shown that managers are on average taller than other people. To quote from a 1920 study, entitled The Executive and his Control of Men, based on research done a lot more carefully than much of what we find in the great journals of today, Enoch Burton Gowin addressed the question: ‘Viewing it as a chemical machine, is a larger body able to supply a greater amount of energy?’ More specifically, might there be ‘some connection between an executive’s physique, as measured by height and weight, and the importance of the position he holds?’ (1920: 22, 31). The answer, in statistic after statistic gathered by the author, is yes. Bishops, for example, averaged greater height than the preachers of small towns; superintendents of school systems were taller than principals of schools. Other data on railroad executives, governors, etc. supported these findings. The ‘Superintendents of Street Cleaning’ were actually the second tallest of all, after the ‘Reformers.’ (The ‘Socialist Organizers’ were just behind the ‘police chiefs’, but well up there.) Musicians were at the bottom of the list (p. 25).

  As for some of the other items on the University of Toronto list, that president’s arch enemy in Afghanistan certainly ‘had the courage to challenge the status quo’, while Ingvar Kamprad, who built IKEA into one of the most successful retail chains ever, reportedly took fifteen years to ‘set [its] clear direction in a changing world’. Actually he succeeded because the furniture world was not changing: he changed it.

  Reference

  Meindl, J. R., Ehrlich, S. B. and Dukerich, J. M. (1985) ‘The romance of leadership’, Administrative Sciences Quarterly, 30, 78–102.

  Footnotes

  1 Not always. Politicians seem to have become particularly adept at hiding flaws until they become fatal. For example, the object of the political debates on television is to demonstrate that your opponent is flawed while you are not (or at least not revealed until you are elected).The assumption is that the flawed candidate should lose. Perhaps this theatrical farce is one reason why people these days are so fed up with political leadership.

  Source: Excerpted from Henry Mintzberg, Managing, FT/Prentice Hall, 2009.

  Decision Making: It’s not what you think

  with Frances Westley

  How should decisions be made? Easy, we figured that out long ago. First define the problem, then diagnose its causes, next design possible solutions, and finally decide which is best. And, of course, implement the choice.

  But do people always make decisions that way? We propose that this rational, or ‘thinking first’, model of decision making should be supplemented with two very different models – a ‘seeing first’ and a ‘doing first’ model.

  Consider how a real decision was made, a personal one in this case. It begins with a call from an aunt.

  ‘Hi, kiddo. I want to buy you a housewarming present. What’s the color scheme in your new apartment?’

  ‘Color scheme? Betty, you’ve got to be kidding. I’ll have to ask Lisa. Lisa, Betty wants to know the color scheme of the apartment.’

  ‘Black,’ daughter Lisa says.

  ‘Black? Lisa, I’ve got to live there.’

  ‘Black,’ she repeats.
<
br />   A few days later, father and daughter find themselves in a furniture store. They try every desk, every chair: Nothing works. Shopper’s lethargy sets in. Then Lisa spots a black stool: ‘Wouldn’t that look great against the white counter?’ And they’re off. Within an hour, they have picked out everything – in black, white and steel gray.

  The extraordinary thing about this ordinary story is that our conventional theories of decision making can’t explain it. It is not even clear what the final decision was: to buy the stool; to get on with furnishing an apartment; to do so in black and white; to create a new lifestyle? Decision making can be mysterious.

  The limits of ‘thinking first’

  Rational decision making has a clearly identified process: define → diagnose → design → decide. However, the rational approach turns out to be uncommon.

  Years ago, one of us studied a host of decisions, delineating the steps and then laying them out. A decision process for building a new plant was typical. The process kept cycling back, interrupted by new events, diverted by opportunities and so on, going round and round until finally a solution emerged. The final action was as clear as a wave breaking on the shore, but explaining how it came to be is as hard as tracing the origin of that wave back into the ocean.

  Often decisions do not so much emerge as erupt. Here is how Alexander Kotov, the chess master, has described a sudden insight that followed lengthy analysis:

  ‘So, I mustn’t move the knight. Try the rook move again… . At this point you glance at the clock. “My goodness! Already 30 minutes gone on thinking about whether to move the rook or the knight. If it goes on like this you’ll really be in time trouble.” And then suddenly you are struck by the happy idea – why move rook or knight? What about B–QN1? And without any more ado, without analysis at all, you move the bishop. Just like that.’

  Perhaps, then, decision making means periods of groping followed by sudden sharp insights that lead to crystallization. Or perhaps it is a form of ‘organized anarchy’, as Stanford professor James March and colleagues have written. They characterize decision making as ‘collections of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they may be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be an answer, and decision makers looking for work.’

  But is the confusion in the process, as described by those authors, or is it confusion in the observers? Maybe messy, real-life decision making makes more sense than we think, precisely because so much of it is beyond conscious thought.

  ‘Seeing first’

  Insight – ‘seeing into’ – suggests that decisions, or at least actions, may be driven as much by what is seen as by what is thought. As Mozart said, the best part about creating a symphony was being able to ‘see the whole of

  it at a single glance in my mind’. So, understanding can be visual as well

  as conceptual.

  In W. Koehler’s well-known 1920s experiment, an ape struggled to reach a banana placed high in its cage. Then it saw the box in the corner – not just noticed it, but realized what could be done with it – and its problem was solved. Likewise, after Alexander Fleming really saw the mold that had killed the bacteria in some of his research samples (in other words, when he realized how that mold could be used), he and his colleague were able to give us penicillin. The same can be true for strategic vision. Vision requires the courage to see what others do not – and that means having both the confidence and the experience to recognize the sudden insight for what it is.

  A theory in Gestalt psychology developed by G. Wallas in the 1920s identifies four steps in creative discovery: preparation → incubation → illumination → verification.

  Preparation must come first. As Louis Pasteur put it, ‘Chance favors only the prepared mind.’ Deep knowledge, usually developed over years, is followed by incubation, during which the unconscious mind mulls over the issue. Then with luck (as with Archimedes in the bathtub), there is that flash of illumination. That eureka moment often comes after sleep – because in sleep, rational thinking is turned off, and the unconscious has greater freedom. The conscious mind returns later to make the logical argument: verification (reasoning it all out in linear order for purposes of elaboration and proof). But that takes time. There is a story of a mathematician who solved a formula in his sleep. Holding it in his mind’s eye, he was in no rush to write it down. When he did, it took him four months!

  Great insights may be rare, but what industry cannot trace its origins to one or more of them? Moreover, little insights occur to all of us all the time. No one should accept any theory of decision making that ignores insight.

  ‘Doing first’

  But what happens when you don’t see it and can’t think it up? Just do it. That is how pragmatic people function when stymied: They get on with it, believing that if they do ‘something’, the necessary thinking could follow. It’s experimentation – trying something so that you can learn.

  A theory for ‘doing first’, popularized by Karl Weick, goes like this: enactment → selection → retention.

  That means doing various things, finding out which among them works, making sense of that and repeating the successful behaviors while discarding the rest. Successful people know that when they are stuck, they must experiment. Thinking may drive doing, but doing just as surely drives thinking. We don’t just think in order to act, we also act in order to think.

  Show us almost any company that has diversified successfully, and we will show you a company that has learned by doing, one whose diversification strategy emerged through experience. Such a company at the outset may have laid out a tidy strategy on the basis of assessing its weaknesses and strengths (or, if after 1990, its ‘core competencies’), which it almost certainly got wrong. How can you tell a strength from a weakness when you are entering a new sphere? You have no choice but to try things out. Then you can identify the competencies that really matter. Action is important; if you insist on ‘thinking first’ and, for example, doing formalized strategic planning (which is really part of the same thing), you may in fact discourage learning …

  Characteristics of the three approaches to making decisions

  ‘Thinking first’ features the qualities of ‘Seeing first’ features the qualities of ‘Doing first’ features the qualities of

  Science Art Craft

  Planning, programming Visioning, imagining Venturing, learning

  The verbal The visual The visceral

  Facts Ideas Experiences

  So how did you choose your mate? Did you think first: specify all the criteria, then list all the alternatives and finally choose one or was it love at first sight? Maybe you acted first – we’ll let you think about that, and its consequences.

  Source: MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring 2001. © 2010 by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services.

  Managing: How can you possibly think?

  Have a look at the popular images of managing – the conductor on the podium, those executives sitting at desks in New Yorker cartoons – and you get one impression of the job: well ordered, carefully controlled. Watch some managers at work and you will likely find something far different: a hectic pace, lots of interruptions, more responding than initiating. So let’s have a good look at some of these facts, compared with that folklore.

  Folklore: The manager is a reflective, systematic planner. We have this common image of the manager, especially in a senior job, sitting at a desk thinking great thoughts, making grand decisions, and above all systematically planning out the future. There is a good deal of evidence about this, but not a shred of it supports this image.

  Facts: Study after study has shown that (a) managers work at an unrelenting pace, (b) their activities are typically characterized by brevity, variety, fragmentation and interruption, and (c) they are strongly oriented

  to action.

  (a) The
Pace Reports on the hectic pace of managerial work have been consistent, from foreman to chief executives. As one CEO put it, the work of managing is ‘one damn thing after another’. Managing is an open-ended job with a perpetual preoccupation: the manager can never be free to forget the work, never having the pleasure of knowing, even temporarily, that there is nothing left to do.

  (b) The Brevity, Variety, Fragmentation, and Interruption Most work in society involves specialization and concentration. Engineers and programmers can spend months designing a machine or developing some software. Managers can expect no such concentration of efforts. Their work is fragmented and loaded with interruptions. Why? Because they don’t wish to discourage the flow of current information, also because they develop a sensitive appreciation for the opportunity cost of their own time: no matter what they are doing, managers are plagued by what they might do and what they must do.

  (c) The Action Managers like action – activities that move, change, flow, are tangible, current, non-routine. Don’t expect to find much general planning or open-ended touring in this job; look instead for tangible delving into specific concerns. Does this mean that managers don’t plan? Sure they plan; we all plan. But the real planning of the organization, at least in a strategic sense, takes place significantly in the heads of its managers and implicitly in the context of their daily actions, not in some abstract process reserved for a mountain retreat or a bunch of forms to fill out.

  Folklore: The manager depends on aggregated information, best supplied by a formal system. In keeping with the classical image of the manager perched on some sort of hierarchical pedestal, managers are supposed to receive their important information from some sort of comprehensive, formalized Management Information System. But this has never proved true, not before computers, not after they appeared, not even in these days of the internet.