The Capitalist Philosophers A book review by Bob Morris

The Capitalist Philosophers: The Geniuses of Modern Business–Their Lives, Times, and Ideas
Andrea Gabor
Times Business (2000)

A brilliant discussion of thirteen “geniuses of modern business”

While preparing questions for another interview, I recently re-read this book (published in 2000) in which Andrea Gabor focuses on Frederick Winslow Taylor, Mary Parker Follett, Chester Barnard, Fritz Roethlisberger and Elton Mayo, Robert McNamara, Abraham Maslow and Douglas McGregor, W. Edwards Deming, Herbert A. Simon, Alfred Du Pont Chandler and Alfred Sloan, and Peter F. Drucker. And frankly, until reading this book, I knew little (if anything) about Follett, Mayo, Simon, and Chandler and thus was especially eager to understand why Gabor included them with the others.

Also of special interest to me is how skillfully Gabor uses several themes that lend cohesion to the provision of her narrative. For example, she notes “the seemingly irreconcilable visions of management – the scientific and humanistic – that have battled fort hegemony both in the corporate workplace and in American society itself.” Gabor traces the development of both the scientific and humanistic traditions from the beginning of the 20th century and follows the battle of ideologies up to the present, 2000. A related theme involves various responses to this question: “What is the purpose of the business organization in American society?” Is it a “pivotal institution of democracy” with complex responsibilities to a host of constituencies (e.g. employees, customers, and the community) or is there “one primary corporate constituent – the shareholder – and a single purpose – profit making”?

Here in Dallas, we have a Farmers Market at which several vendors offer free slices of fresh fruit as samples. Following their example, I now provide a representative selection of brief excerpts from Gabor’s book to suggest the “flavor” of her analysis and writing style.

“Taylor’s greatest contribution was in recognizing that scientific method was the key to the success of industrialization, especially in running the new enterprises that were of a scale and scope heretofore unimaginable – factories so large they used small railroads to transport men around them, factories peopled by thousands of workers operating enormous, power-driven machines.” (Page 5)

“Although Barnard did not refer specifically to the notion of corporate culture, he recognized that the values of an organization reside in the informal organization. He saw that formal organizations generate `customs, mores, folklore, institutions, social norms, and ideals’ – in short culture. They are also a key to communication, which Barnard identified as one of the most important functions of the executive.” (Page 79)

Abraham Maslow coined the term `Eupsychia’ [introduced in his book Eupsychian Management and later reissued as Maslow on Management] to define a `culture that would be generated by 1,000 self-actualizing people on a sheltered island’ and help answer the questions that defined his core preoccupation: `how good a society does human nature permit?’ In the words of Warren Bennis, Maslow approached his material `like a swashbuckling Candide, that is with a powerful innocence that is both threatening and receptive to widely held beliefs.’” (Page 182)

Note: “eupsychia” was Maslow’s term for the ideal society or organization.

The importance of Deming’s philosophy to the information age “was its radical break with many accepted tenets of management: its insistence on constant change and flexibility, its implicit faith in the ability of individuals and the informal organization to generate new ideas, its opposition to hierarchy and its trappings, and its assumption that the greatest competitive advantage could accrue to companies that help employees achieve their full potential.” (Page 211)

“No revolutionary, Drucker is an apostle of great corporations. His great strength is his ability to absorb vast amounts of information, to see patterns in what would appear as a jumble of chaotic events, trends, and economic indicators, and to anticipate – and articulate – each new zeitgeist. His life is also a testament to the American Dream, the ability of an enterprising immigrant both to succeed in his adopted country and to reinvent t himself.” (Page 293

Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out Art Kleiner’s The Age of Heretics (Second Edition), Joan Magretta’s What Management Is: How It Works and Why It’s Everyone’s Business, Edgar H. Schein’s Organizational Culture and Leadership, Stuart Crainer’s The Management Century, and two books by Chris Argyris: Integrating the Individual and the Organization and Knowledge for Action: A Guide to Overcoming Barriers to Organizational Change.

The Learning Illusion – a Challenge for 2012

I think we need to make 2012 a year of learning – but, it won’t be easy.

I believe in life-long learning.  I am a big fan of every effort to keep learning.  Our monthly First Friday Book Synopsis is designed to whet the appetite of such life-long learners.  I like to read, I like to hear new things, read new ideas, “stretch” a little.

But – do we actually learn very much?  (Do I actually learn very much)?  Not all that much, I suspect.

(Quick – find me a dozen people who believe that Jerry Jones has learned anything in recent years about more effectively running the Dallas Cowboys).

I wish it were otherwise.  I wish that we learned, and then did these new things we learned.  Now, some new learning is easy.  I have learned/can use most of the apps on my iPhone.  I can do a couple of things around the house that I could not before.  But, for the most part, though I read words, and can “recite back” the concepts, I still pretty much function the way I have been functioning for quite a while (as in, years!).  I haven’t changed much – I haven’t learned much.

These thoughts always bring me back to the great quote by John Henry Newman:  “To grow is to change, and to have changed often is to have learned much.”  But what really prompted this blog post was this paragraph, which I read in Tyler Cowen’s blog post The Danger Of Storytelling, (from his TED talk):

One interesting thing about cognitive biases – they’re the subject of so many books these days. There’s the Nudge book, the Sway book, the Blink book, like the one-title book, all about the ways in which we screw up. And there are so many ways, but what I find interesting is that none of these books identify what, to me, is the single, central, most important way we screw up, and that is, we tell ourselves too many stories, or we are too easily seduced by stories. And why don’t these books tell us that? It’s because the books themselves are all about stories. The more of these books you read, you’re learning about some of your biases, but you’re making some of your other biases essentially worse.

So the books themselves are part of your cognitive bias. Often, people buy them as a kind of talisman, (emphasis added) like “I bought this book. I won’t be Predictably Irrational.” It’s like people want to hear the worst, so psychologically, they can prepare for it or defend against it. It’s why there’s such a market for pessimism. But to think that buying the book gets you somewhere, that’s maybe the bigger fallacy. It’s just like the evidence that shows the most dangerous people are those that have been taught some financial literacy. They’re the ones who go out and make the worst mistakes. It’s the people that realize, “I don’t know anything at all,” that end up doing pretty well.

Look again at these words:  “I bought this book. I won’t be Predictably Irrational.”  How many books have you read, and at the end of the day, you tell yourself (deceive yourself?):  “Well, I’ve learned the stuff in this book,” – but, you don’t actually implement any of the wisdom that you read in the book?

Maybe we all need a new discipline:  when we finish reading a book, attending a seminar, attending any presentation, watching any TED talk, then — right then! – we set aside a chunk of time – a noticeable chunk of time – and ask, “so, what will I do now with this new information/insight/wisdom?”  And then, write it down, and start doing it.  And keep doing it.  Quit being irrational; quit ridiculing your team members; quit being so self-centered…  quit the bad things, and then add the good things.

Without this “after we’ve learned” step, then, in reality, we haven’t learned at all…  Without this next step, then learning is just an illusion.

Why Are We Bad at Picking Good Leaders? A book review by Bob Morris

Why Are We Bad at Picking Good Leaders? A Better Way to Evaluate Leadership Poitential
Jeffrey Cohn and Jay Moran
Jossey-Bass (2011)

How and why to cope with a leadership evaluation and development crisis to produce more effective leaders

As Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis suggest in Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls, leaders define themselves by their choices. They assert that what really matters “is not how many calls a leader gets right, or even what percentage of calls a leader gets right. Rather it is important how many of the important ones he or she gets right.” They go on to suggest that effective leaders “not only make better calls, but they are able to discern the really important ones and get a higher percentage of them right. They are better at a whole process that runs from seeing the need for a call, to framing issues, to figuring out what is critical, to mobilizing and energizing the troops.”

Jeffrey Cohn and Jay Moran suggest that many (if not most) organizations define themselves (for better or more often worse) by their evaluation and development of effective leaders, by how many of the important calls their leaders get right when deciding whom to hire, whom to promote, and whom to support. As they explain in the Introduction, they devoted decades of research to develop a model for effective leadership. They share in this book their response to the question posed by the title. More specifically, they identify and then rigorously examine seven leadership attributes that are the most vital: integrity, empathy, emotional intelligence, vision, judgment, courage, and passion. No news there. What caught my eye and what, I think, will be of greatest interest to other readers is what Cohn and Moran offer when explaining “how to decode and connect these attributes…how they fit together. Our breakthrough insight is an overall framework for making leadership selection decisions.” These are among the “smart calls” to which Tichy and Bennis also refer.

Think of the challenge as a “puzzle” and the attributes among the most important “pieces.” How to put all the pieces together? Cohn and Moran devote a separate chapter to each of what they characterize as the seven “building blocks,” then reveal in Chapter 8 “A Better Way to Choose Leaders.” The information, insights, and recommendations provided within the book’s narrative are research-driven, primarily by interviews of more than 100 CEOs and other leaders. For example, those among the “A-C group” include Lance Armstrong, Jeff Bezos, Bono, Richard Branson, Michael Capellas, Richard Clarke, Jerry Colangelo, and Delos (“Toby”) Cosgrove.

Other resources include decades of research conducted by James Kouzes and Barry Posner;also, various leadership development programs (e.g. AT&T, Allianz SE, McKinsey & Company, “New CEO Workshop” at Harvard Business School, Harvard’s Kennedy School, and Team USA). They also picked the brains of thought leaders such as the aforementioned Tichy and Bennis as well as James MacGregor Burns, Daniel Goleman, K. Anders Ericsson, and Roger Martin.

Of course, it remains for each reader to determine what is most relevant among the abundance of material provided by Cohn and Moran in their book. The same is true of another recently published book that I also hold in very high regard, The Rare Find: Spotting Exceptional Talent Before Everyone Else, in which George Anders focuses on expert talent spotters in three broad sets: the public performance worlds (e.g. sports, arts, and entertainment), high stakes aspects of business (especially finance and the information economy), and “heroic professionals” of public service (e.g. teaching, government, and medicine). “It’s easy to see how they operated, but it took a while to understand why.” What he learned is shared in this book. For example, with people as with organizations, “the gap between good and great turns out to be huge,” perhaps as much as a 500% difference. The financial implications are vast and substantial.

All organizations needed leadership at all levels and in all areas. Although the two books take different approaches to an immensely complicated and critically important subject, executive talent evaluation, each can be of incalculable value to those who are guided and informed by the material provided. In fact, I highly recommend that both be read and (preferably) re-read, then frequently consulted by every one involved in an organization’s recruitment, hiring, onboarding, and leadership development initiatives.

4 Steps to Delivering Helpful Feedback

 

Here is another valuable Management Tip of the Day from Harvard Business Review. To sign up for a free subscription to any/all HBR newsletters, please click here.

Feedback is problematic. Managers often dislike giving it and direct reports rarely get enough to change their behaviors. But feedback, both positive and negative, is an important tool for learning and career growth. Next time you have to talk with someone about their performance, follow these four steps:

1. Be specific. Feedback needs to be actionable. Use concrete examples to back up your conclusions. Avoid generalized character attacks. Instead, describe the behavior.

2. Explain the impact. Tell the person how his behavior is affecting you, the team, or the organization.

3. Prescribe. Be specific about what needs to change. Often employees won’t know what to change unless you tell them.

4. Do it often. Get in the habit of praising good performance and identifying troublesome behavior.

Today’s Management Tip was adapted from Guide to Giving Effective Feedback.

To read that article and join the discussion, please click here.

Also, you may wish to check out the new book, Management Tips from Harvard Business Review, based on HBR’s Management Tip of the Day by clicking here.