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

  There is an additional and secondary function that should be mentioned. While superstition is useful if it randomizes action, the magical rites associated with superstitions are useful in justifying random action. Devons has noted how difficult it is for government or nationalized industry to plan sensibly, and says:

  No Chancellor of the Exchequer could introduce his proposals for monetary and fiscal policy in the House of Commons by saying, ‘I have looked at all the forecasts, and some go one way, some another; so I decided to toss a coin and assume inflationary tendencies if it came down heads and deflationary if it came down tails.’

  Thus, magical rites, including the use of economic statistics, permit managers to justify taking random action.

  Having said all this, it is clear that many managerial superstitions are dysfunctional. The basic reason for their dysfunctionality is that, while they reduce anxiety and build confidence in times of uncertainty, they may simply provide justification for continuing past practice rather than sanctioning innovation. Most techniques do not generate random data but introduce a biased series – the caribou are likely to pick up your pattern.

  References

  Devons, E. Essays in Economics, London: Allen and Unwin, 1961.

  Galbraith, J.K. ‘You can’t argue with a monetarist’, a feature article in The Christchurch Press, 23 September 1982; from the London Observer Service.

  Jahoda, G. The Psychology of Superstition, New York: Pelican, 1970 p. 127.

  Langer, E.J. ‘The illusion of control’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32, 1975, pp. 311–328.

  Malinowski, B. Magic, Science, Religion and Other Essays, quoted in Romans, G.C., The Human Group, London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1951 pp. 321–323.

  Moore, O.K. ‘Divination – a new perspective’, American Anthropologist, 59, 1957, pp. 69–74.

  Perlmuter, L.C. and Monty, R.A. ‘The importance of perceived control: fact or fantasy?’, American Scientist, 65, 1977, pp. 959–964.

  Source: © 1984, by The Regents of the University of California. Reprinted from the California Management Review, ‘Management and magic’ by M.L. Gimpl and S.R. Dakin, Vol. 27, No. 3. By permission of the Regents.

  If you’re not confused, you don’t know what’s going on.

  Jack Welch (as CEO of General Electric)

  CHAPTER 2

  * * *

  MANAGEMENT OF MEANING

  We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are.

  [The Talmud]

  Managing meaning – for better and for worse: this is the subject of Chapter 2.

  Jargon is the hand-maiden of modern management. It provides assurance, confers membership, and beams out the message that ‘we know what we are doing’. Smullyan fires the first shot by challenging one of the seemingly most neutral words of managing: ‘problem-solving’. Maybe that’s where the problems begin. Then along comes Lucy Kellaway with a machine-gun round of challenges: to a whole mother-load of ‘waffle words’ all crammed into one sentence by a consulting firm: Broad. Strategic. Focus. Highly integrated system. Capabilities. Fundamental. Strategies.

  ‘Mana-gems’ follow: wonderful typographical errors. Be prepared: there’s a lot of wisdom in serendipity. (Anyone for a brief executive?)

  How is most of today’s jargon delivered? Might you have guessed: PowerPoint? Edward Tufte calls it evil, since it ‘turns everything into a sales pitch’.

  Henry Mintzberg follows this with a look at strategic planning as a public relations exercise – to impress those who wish to be thought of as modern and professional. Henry suggests that there are no winners in this: outsiders get useless pronouncements and junior managers waste their time filling out forms while the senior managers get distracted from important issues.

  Then R. Farson looks at some of the contradictory components of communication. For example, he notes that the healthy organisation needs both full and accurate communication and distortion and deception. We end all of this with a reading on a ‘buzz-word’ generator. Now, you too can write impressive – ‘sounding memos and reports that mean absolutely nothing’.

  Problems, Problems, Problems

  by Raymond Smullyan

  Once when I was playing for a musician, he complimented me on the way I played a particular passage. He told me how well I handled a certain modulation and added, ‘You don’t realize in what a remarkable way you have solved this problem!’

  I must say, I was thunderstruck … I was totally unaware of any problem let alone solving one! The whole idea of ‘problem solving’, especially in music, strikes me as so weird. Not only weird, but most disharmonious and destructive. Is that how you think of life, as a series of problems to be solved? No wonder you don’t enjoy living more than you do!

  To compliment a musician, or any other artist, on having ‘solved problems’ to me is absolutely analogous to complimenting the waves of the ocean for solving such a complex system of partial differential equations. Of course, the ocean does its ‘waving’ in accordance with these differential equations, but it hardly solves them … I believe my objection to the notion of ‘problem’ is due to my deep conviction that the moment one labels something as a ‘problem’ that’s when the real problem starts.

  Source: Raymond Smullyan

  Accenture’s next champion of waffle words

  By Lucy Kellaway

  When one door closes, another one opens. On Thursday the prison gates clanked shut behind Martin Lukes in Florida but, in London, the door of an office inside Accenture swung ajar, revealing Mark Foster, a middle-aged white man with a long-winded title.

  Just as I was putting my final full stop to the story of the jargon-talking executive, someone forwarded me an internal e-mail sent by Accenture’s group chief executive for management consulting. Immediately I saw that this man could be a possible successor to Lukes. I don’t know if Mr Foster has Martin’s way with women or whether his golf swing is any good, as I have never met him. However, I have seen one of his e-mails and that is enough to convince me that, when it comes to world-class jargon, there is clear blue water between him and the rest – even at Accenture, where the bar, as they call it, is set so very high.

  This isn’t the first time I’ve singled out Accenture for its work in the jargon space. A couple of years ago, I wrote a column about its annual report, which was a perfect snapshot of the ugliest business language of the time. Inside was an orgy of ‘relentless passion’ and ‘delivering value’. The point, presumably, was to impress clients.

  Yet Mr Foster’s e-mail is more troubling as it shows top people write like this even when they think no clients are looking. His memo was addressed to ‘All Accenture Senior Executives’ – though title inflation being what it is, this probably stretches to include the cleaner. Indeed as ‘group chief executive’, Mr Foster is in a band of eight others with the same commanding title, and still has a couple of rungs to climb before reaching the very top.

  The memo starts with some background to the announcement: ‘…wanting to give you continued visibility of our growth platform agenda …’ it says. Visibility is the latest thing in business. Companies and executives all crave it but, until last week, I didn’t know that growth platform agendas were after it too. What is he saying here, I wonder? I think, though couldn’t swear to it, that he wants to tell his colleagues how the company plans to make more money.

  And so to the meat of the memo. ‘We are changing the name of the Human Performance service line to Talent & Organization Performance, effective immediately.’

  Before you marvel at the stupidity of the name change, note first that departments can’t even be called that: they are instead ‘service lines’. As for the name, the old one may have been no great shakes, but to take away the ‘human’ (which was surely the point) and replace it with ‘talent and organisation’ is not progress. As I’ve often remarked before, the word ‘talent’ is a hideous misnomer as most people aren’t terribly talented at all.


  Next comes the business rationale for the change. ‘With the rise of the multi-polar world, the task of finding and managing talent has become more complex, turbulent and contradictory than ever before.’

  This conflicts with two laws, the first of geography – there are only two poles – and the second of business – finding ‘talent’ has always been hard as there isn’t enough to go round. The only excuse for saying it is ‘complex, turbulent and contradictory’ is to make it sound so complicated that the services of Accenture must be needed to sort it out.

  Mr Foster says that what must be done is to teach organisations to ‘expand their talent management agenda from a narrow and tactical focus on human resources activities around the employee life cycle, to a broad and strategic focus on highly integrated systems of capabilities fundamental to business strategies and operations’. This is shameful, outrageous bilge. HR should be narrow. It should be specifically focused around the employee life cycle (if that means hiring, training, promoting, firing).

  His suggestion is frightening. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen quite so many waffle words crammed together in one sentence. Broad. Strategic. Focus. Highly. Integrated. System. Capabilities. Fundamental. Strategies. Indeed the only words here that are acceptable are ‘to’, ‘and’ and ‘on’.

  I will spare you further long quotes from this dismal memo, which contains much ‘stepping up’, ‘blue water’, ‘space’ and ‘walking the talk’. There is an obsession with capabilities. In four different places Mr Foster talks about ‘repositioning’ them, ‘differentiating’ them, ‘integrating’ them and ‘evolving’ them. This sounds like quite hard work, especially as I’m not quite sure what capabilities are anyway.

  There is only one sentence I like – ‘Already we are seeing great progress!’ – though it would be better still without the gung-ho exclamation mark.

  Alas, the claim turns out to be unsubstantiated. The only progress mentioned is that the head of the newly named service line has written a book called The Talent Powered Organization and, to celebrate, Accenture is inviting clients to a party on Second Life – which I suppose cuts down on the bar bill.

  How much does all this nonsense matter? Accenture isn’t selling pensions to widows; if its rich corporate clients are prepared to buy HR services designed for a multi-polar world, that is their lookout.

  However, there is something else about the memo that worries me more. Accenture’s website reveals that, unlike Martin Lukes, Mr Foster has a classics degree from Oxford. I had always thought the point of studying classics was that it trained your mind and your pen. What this memo shows is that two decades at Accenture have a more potent effect on befuddling the mind than three years of Aeschylus and Horace ever had on sharpening it.

  Source: Lucy Kellaway, Financial Times, 27 January 2008.

  Mana-gems

  One of us, Henry, collects typographic errors – ‘typos’, as they are called. (It’s easier than collecting antique cars.) He writes his books and articles – literally, badly. So when they get typed, almost anything can happen. And now, with the use of email, and him banging away madly at the keyboard, more carnage appears on the screen. A sampling of all this follows. Be prepared: there is a lot of wisdom in serendipity. (Henry would like to express his deep appreciation to his assistants over the past 16 years, Santa Balanca-Rodrigues and Kate Maguire, for their profound contributions to what follows.)

  Leadership curse typos

  Brief executive

  Chief existence

  The marketing vice pediment

  The CEO must be an infirmed generalist [informed]

  Busimanship [from a Swedish colleague]

  Bust [Bush]

  Confidence [competence]

  He just wants to be sure he can add volume [value]

  The meeting of the Co-operative Hospital Committee should not be chained by the president of the board of directors [chaired]

  Reading this, you may consider yourself a leader, or on your way to becoming a leader, or at least working for a leader. You pretty well know what leadership is: Stimulating teamwork. Taking the long view. Engendering trust. Setting curse [course]

  Marginal typos

  Crass-cultural management

  Stiff management [staff]

  Distracted management [distributed]

  Marginal work [managerial]

  Managerms

  Autistic administration [artistic]

  Models of mingling [managing]

  Direct suspicion [supervision]

  The hole question of management [whole]

  Panning typos

  Strategic panning

  Strategic pleasing

  Strategic peas

  Stuff planners [staff]

  Plain things [plan]

  Addressing key pissues

  Destructive competences [distinctive]

  Diversifiction [what a difference an ‘a’ makes]

  Planning can be a means to knit desperate activities together [disparate]

  The strategies that result from anxious thought [conscious]

  Students do a course in business stripping [strategy]

  ‘I wish to look at the liturgy – I mean literature – in strategic management’ [courtesy of Pierre Brunet, during his thesis defence]

  Rumelt calls the traditional view of strategy formation ‘a set of constricts’ [constructs]

  Only those who have the wisdom to see the pat are able to imagine the future [past]

  We too typos

  Toos [tools]

  The statistics quo [status]

  Add a feedback leap [loop]

  Levels of obstruction [abstraction]

  Formal confrontation [financial information]

  The anus is on the specialist to investigate the relevance of his own science [onus]

  There is wonderfully little synthesis in the world of analysis [woefully]

  Consultants tend to come at times of charge [change]

  We could have just taught about technique and be undone with it [done]

  Based on the belief that high market share is per se more profile [profitable]

  A little model of decision making: defying the issue, designing courses of action, deciding on the final outcome [defining]

  Better description in the hands of the intelligent practitioner is the most powerful prescription tool we have, for that is what enables him or her to change the word [world]

  Subject: new element for Periodic Table

  The heaviest element known to science is Managerium. This element has no protons or electrons, but has a nucleus composed of 1 neutron, 2 vice-neutrons, 5 junior vice-neutrons, 25 assistant vice-neutrons, and 125 junior assistant vice-neutrons all going round in circles.

  Managerium has a half-life of three years, at which time it does not decaybut institutes a series of reviews leading to reorganization. Its molecules are held together by means of the exchange of tiny particles known as morons.

  Source: Unknown.

  PowerPoint is evil

  By Edward Tufte

  Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that promised to make us beautiful but didn’t. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: It induced stupidity, turned everyone into bores, wasted time, and degraded the quality and credibility of communication. These side effects would rightly lead to a worldwide product recall.

  Yet slideware – computer programs for presentations – is everywhere: in corporate America, in government bureaucracies, even in our schools. Several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint are churning out trillions of slides each year. Slideware may help speakers outline their talks, but convenience for the speaker can be punishing to both content and audience. The standard PowerPoint presentation elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.

  Of course, data-driven meetings are nothing new. Years before today’s slideware, presentations at companies such as IBM and in the
military used bullet lists shown by overhead projectors. But the format has become ubiquitous under PowerPoint, which was created in 1984 and later acquired by Microsoft. PowerPoint’s pushy style seeks to set up a speaker’s dominance over the audience. The speaker, after all, is making power points with bullets to followers. Could any metaphor be worse? Voicemail menu systems? Billboards? Television? Stalin?

  Particularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our schools. Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials. Elementary school PowerPoint exercises (as seen in teacher guides and in student work posted on the Internet) typically consist of 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation of three to six slides – a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to the Exploratorium or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something.

  In a business setting, a PowerPoint slide typically shows 40 words, which is about eight seconds’ worth of silent reading material. With so little information per slide, many, many slides are needed. Audiences consequently endure a relentless sequentiality, one damn slide after another. When information is stacked in time, it is difficult to understand context and evaluate relationships. Visual reasoning usually works more effectively when relevant information is shown side by side. Often, the more intense the detail, the greater the clarity and understanding. This is especially so for statistical data, where the fundamental analytical act is to make comparisons.