Managing Leadership^®

We have seen that philosophers of all ages have sought both to understand how the world works, and to discover the key that explains it all – better yet, that unlocks it all; that enables us to manipulate the laws of physics at will. We seek the secret core at the center of all the complexity, the buttons we can push that will  unfailingly produce the results we want, so that we can go back to ignoring all the impossibly convoluted unfolding of events between the pushing of those buttons and the emergence of the consequences we desire.

These instincts run so deep in all of us that we typically either pursue them or cheer on those who do. The truth is, actually, that they run even deeper than that: we are so anxious to believe in the veracity of our world view, so eager to see everywhere evidence of it, that we can sometimes deceive ourselves with the most extraordinarily self-manipulative glibness – often reinforced with subtly oppressive intimidation – for generations or more.

Eventually, the evidence just becomes too much to resist. We are forced to revise our world view. And then we start all over again.

We certainly aren’t immune to that sort of thing in management, are we? We want desperately to see the organizational world one way or another, and we endeavor desperately – even artfully – to interpret or create facts that support our view. Those apparent facts that don’t do that – well, we say dismissively, everyone knows they’re irrelevant; essentially just background noise struggling vainly to obscure the signals only we have the wit and insight to make out.

It surely can easily be said, though, with respect to the physicists, that however much like the rest of us they ultimately are revealed to be, they have done much real, measurable good. They have improved the lot of us all.

How about us in management? As we struggle to understand the world of organizations, even while we sometimes stretch the limits of our conceptual models beyond their capacity to explain what we’re doing, do we not nevertheless manage to do some good after all?

Physicists and philosophers have created enduring systematic changes in our world view – and thus in the way we live our lives – that redound to the benefit of us all. Most of us can count off a number of these that have been developed over recent centuries and decades. For all the silliness that still occurs on the margins of modern science (indeed, for all that those margins sometimes become quite crowded with marginal thinkers), the great bulk of this extraordinarily beneficial work is demonstrably uncontroversial.

Can you do that for management theory – or for that grotesque carbuncle opening up from within it with horrifyingly wide-eyed relentlessness: “leadership theory” – can you count off a number of universally acceded-to, empirically reliable “advances” in organizational practice over the past century or years? What are the books widely accepted as documenting these “facts.” Who are our Newtons and Einsteins, whose insights have revealed the vein of management truth that the rest of us mine today?

Or, for all our arrogant posturing on the topic – and, it must be said, the widespread “physics-envy” plaguing the field – are we still just sending out scouts into the wilderness and receiving wildly confused and unreliable reports from those who find their way back?

Honestly. What do you think?

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Note: The Managing Leadership Blog is very proud to have been selected as one of the top 40 leadership blogs for 2010. The selections were made by the Online MBA, a site dedicated to helping people looking for post-graduate business education locate quality online educational venues. This is a valuable undertaking, one among many that foreshadow an important and much-needed sea change in how education at all levels is conceived and conducted. Please stop by to visit their site – and also view the listing of the top 40 leadership blogs for others well worth your time!

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Today’s Tips: Speaking of sea changes, Bill Gates is at the forefront of those arguing that brick-and-mortar educational institutions are losing their relevancy in the near future. Please see why he thinks the best education will come from the internet within the next five years.

Maybe it already is. Surely many of you have suspected that the quality of “traditional” education has never been quite what it has traditionally been reputed to be. Please see this WSJ book review that explains just why, among other things, the “mediocrity” of the education available at the presumptive flagship of US college education is an “open secret of the Ivy League.”

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