Managing Leadership^®

That’s what scientists are: the myth-makers of today. Strings and quarks, anti-matter and boson particles: what are they but the earth, wind, water, and fire of our age – speculated entities imagined precisely in order to resolve gaps in our theories. They represent magically endowed values reinforcing our expectations and hopes, or, more prosaically, laboratory-concocted guesses about the mysteries lying behind real-world dissonances.

We imagine that we are opening new frontiers with these investigations. But if we look more closely, we sometimes find ourselves merely giving surface expression to deep cultural undercurrents carrying us, unaware, pell-mell along with them.

Does God rule, or Chance, Marcus Aurelius asked, and if the latter, by what standards shall we guide our actions? That becomes the real question we ask today, and it points to the real stakes hanging on the answer.

And the truth is that we needn’t be quantum or particle physicists to find ourselves grappling with these profound uncertainties, or gambling with the equally profound consequences of the conclusions we propose for them. We can be doctors and lawyers, police and politicians, diplomats and soldiers. We can be anyone, in any field of life.

We can be, indeed, managers and executives. The assumptions we make about our roles and how they ought to be carried out are quite as momentous in our own lives and those of  our contemporaries as those made by any philosopher or actor in any field. But, it is worth remembering, they also are just as provisional.

Dissonances, as it happens, are much like questions: we usually discover that the very effort to resolve any one of them has, perversely, raised more.

So, let’s take a look at what this might mean for us in management – how the dilemma might affect us, our colleagues, our enterprises – and even our societies.

See you tomorrow!

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Today’s tip: Speaking of uncertainty, please see Fred H. Schiegel on how to deal with the paradoxes it presents.

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