The truth will set you free, but
first it will piss you off.
Gloria
Steinem
Even a wise man is wrong thirty
percent of the time. A fool at least seventy percent.
Taiichi Ohno
For most of my life, I thought storytelling was an ephemeral way of entertaining ourselves, something that only children and primitive people took seriously. It was quite a long time before I changed my view. I began seeing reasons to think differently in early 1996 when I noticed that a simple story—the Zambia story—seemed able to communicate the idea of knowledge management better than abstract propositions. When I told a story, my presentation would work. When I didn’t the presentation ended in turmoil and confusion. But I continued to think: “analytic is good—narrative is bad.” I began using stories as a matter of survival. But it really took me another eighteen months before the penny really dropped and I started taking seriously the idea: maybe my whole way of thinking about analysis and narrative is fundamentally flawed.
The catalyst for the change in my thought came for me at a presentation I gave in North Carolina at the end of 1997. People were pressing me to say why the World Bank, one of the stodgiest change-resistant organizations in the world, was making such rapid progress in knowledge management. So I put up a slide saying that “maybe it had something to do with storytelling”. Immediately after that, somebody from Harvard Businesss School Press came up to me and suggested I write a book about it. So I thought to myself: “If Harvard thinks there is something in this nonsense, maybe I should check it out!” And so began a journey that has led to the writing of five books and a whole new career based on leadership storytelling.
Why did it take me so long? Eighteen long months? For one thing, a big part of my whole self-image was the idea that I was a smart, analytic kind of person. I was good at analysis, and my whole experience at school, at university, and in the workplace had reinforced the idea that analytic was good, narrative was bad. To be a “storyteller” was the last thing I wanted to be seen as. For another, everyone in my milieu held similar views. Storytellers were good-for-nothing gadabouts, who had never gotten around to having serious jobs.
It took several years of direct daily experience that contradicted that view before I was willing to entertain the possibility of the opposite: maybe storytelling is a powerful tool for leadership communication? It took me another couple of years to think through the implications, which began to emerge in my book, The Springboard (2000), and several more years before I worked out the further implications in The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling (2005) and The Secret Language of Leadership (2007). Quite a journey.
What made it difficult, and take so long, was that my whole self-image was bound up in the idea of myself as a highly competent, analytic kind of person. Seeing through that illusion involved discovering the “conceptual spectacles” that I was viewing the world with and that I didn’t even know I was wearing. It also entailed creating a new set of spectacles through which to view the world. Overall: more than a decade of work.
New technology is easier
I have had similar reactions to new technology, although not to the same degree. When I first encountered the phenomenon of email, some thirty years ago, I asked: why would I need that? Same thing, when I encountered the web, blogs, Twitter, cellphones with cameras in them, and so on. Why, I would ask, would I need that? Eventually I came to see why I needed each of these things, but adopting them didn’t really involve a change in self-image. And besides everyone else was jumping on the bandwagon. So it was more like going with the flow than swimming against the tide.
Swimming against the tide
That’s what the shedding of deeply held illusions is like: swimming against the tide. Everything is pulling you to go in the opposite direction: the conventional wisdom, common sense, the education system, the financial reinforcements of doing what everyone else is saying and doing, universities, textbooks, the popular press—all these elements conspire to tell you: “Keep doing and thinking and speaking the way you always have because that’s reality. That’s the way things should be done.” It takes some courage to stand up and say, “No! That’s wrong. There’s a different way of looking at things. The rest of the world is out of step. Here’s how the music should be played.”
My First Encounters with Management
The idea that there is a fundamentally different way to think about management also took a very long while to germinate in my mind.
My first serious job was in a law firm in Sydney, Australia in the mid 1960s. It was the leading firm in Sydney, Allen Allen & Helmsley, but by today’s standards, it would be seen as a very small firm: around fifty lawyers. It was still run in a fairly collegial fashion, without much management at all. Lawyers did their own thing and the place bumbled along without much in the way of systems or processes or hierarchy. It wasn’t a bad place to work. A little claustrophobic and uncollaborative at times, perhaps, but overall, not too bad.
My first real encounter with traditional management was when in 1969, I joined the World Bank, a big international organization of which Robert McNamara had just become president. It sounded odd in those first few conversations when people spoke about “the front office” in hushed tones, and about McNamara as though he was some extra-terrestrial being. It was a steep hierarchy. It didn’t feel comfortable. I had an uneasy feeling that this wasn’t a very productive way to work. But everyone went along with it. And in time, I mastered the system and became a “chief”, then “an assistant director” and eventually a “director”.
As a chief or assistant director, I was in charge of twenty or thirty people and it didn’t feel much different from being a staff member. It was when I became a director with several hundred people under my sway that I became almost radioactive. I could see people fawning and bowing and scraping and keeping their distance. I told them to stop acting in such a silly way. But it made no difference. I was now, willy-nilly, part of the power structure, and I was as much a victim of it as those whom I supposedly “controlled”.
Of course, I wasn’t able to control them at all. They mostly did what the culture dictated. Initially, the most I could do was make marginal suggestions for change and hope that some of them would be adopted. Over time, I was able to develop a different way of managing and a different departmental culture that stood me in good stead when I became director of knowledge management and set about systematically persuading the whole organization to adopt knowledge management.
In all these change efforts, I was still thinking of the changes I was introducing as adjustments to the main corpus of management. I was assuming that if you made added some fixes (storytelling, knowledge management, teams, innovation) and made some adjustments to the standard way of managing, organizations would become more sensible and rational and better places to work. It never really dawned on me that the whole corpus of management was rotten to the core.
The first inkling that I got was in early 2008 when it began
to dawn on me that these management fixes that I was pursuing—storytelling,
innovation, teams, knowledge management—weren’t holding. They didn’t sustain. With
luck, they flourished for a while, and then something would happen—a merger, a reorganization,
a new management, a cost-cutting drive, whatever—and the management adjustment would
be one of the victims. It would be back to business as usual. So I began trying
to figure out why this was so. It still hadn’t dawned on me that there was
something fundamentally wrong with the whole conceptual apparatus of
traditional management.
Radical Management
My new book initally started out as an effort to figure out how one could systematically and reliably create high-performance teams--something that traditional management textbooks said wasn't possible. When I had figured out how to do that, I was still thinking to a large extent that my book had made discoveries about high-performance teams. It was only later when I joined the dots that I saw that I had stumbled on something much bigger--a rethinking of the entire corpus of management thought.
It wasn’t until the August 2009 that that particular light began to dawn. I was having a meeting at my publishers, Jossey-Bass and I was describing the new way of working covered by my new book, and I was explaining that “everything was different.” One of the editors said, “It sounds like radical management.” That was really the first time that I discovered that what I was talking about was really a fundamentally different way of managing.
I went back and read the basic management textbooks and I suddenly realized: this is all wrong. These books are riddled with illusions and false assumptions that make no sense. The books sometimes mention the various management fixes that I was interested in, but in a dismissive way. The basic thinking at the front of these books was wrong. Footnotes at the back of these books about delighting clients and self-organizing teams needed to be at the front of the book in bold headlines, and many of the underlying assumptions thoroughly revised. It wasn’t any particular book that was wrong: they were all wrong. I could then see that radical management meant a revolution.
What was the intellectual basis for the revolution?
Fortunately, at this very moment, Deloitte published the Shift Index, which catalogued in detailed studies of 20,000 organizations over fifty years, and across all industries, and produced devastating evidence (e.g. ROA of US firms is one-quarter of what it was in 1965) that traditional management was systematically running big organizations into the ground. They examined all the main industries and the picture was consistent. Something was terribly, terribly wrong.
It was a crisis, although not a crisis with a big, obvious, singular, seismic event, like the financial meltdown of 2008 or the Gulf oil spill of 2010. Those events were symptoms of a deeper problem. So the government response of new financial regulations or a moratorium on off-shore drilling didn’t deal with the root cause.
The disease of traditional management was more like a cancer, steadily eating away the livelihoods and dreams of countless millions of people around the world.
The collective delusion of success
The illusion that traditional management is a success is held in place by a vast apparatus of habits, practices, corporate cultures, university teaching, management textbooks, and healthy helping of inertia. More important, the whole self-image of vast numbers of people is embedded in a way of working and managing that is unproductive, frustrating customers and creating disgruntled employees. The evidence is now plain, but still no one acts.
There is thus an unwillingness to take the evidence seriously, because doing so would put in question the self-image. Lang Davison, a co-author of The Power of Pull (2010) was telling me recently about the workshops that were run by the Deloitte’s Center for the Edge with their startling new findings, such as that the rate of return on assets of US companies is one quarter of what it was in 1965. The executives were unwilling to take the studies seriously. “They are living a delusion,” Lang said, “it’s all the more powerful as it’s a collective delusion, as reflected by the capital markets. We even heard executives say, in response to our findings about declining ROA, that it couldn’t be that bad if the equity markets still value corporate institutions so highly.”
So we now have an iron-clad case for change and a whole society that is now ready to address it. How will it happen? How long will it take?
The example of science
A similar awakening occurred in science in the early seventeenth
century when people like Francis Bacon started saying that we have to stop
taking on faith what Aristotle said and find out what actually happens. We had to
pay more attention to truth than to authority.
Initially there was resistance in the universities.
“In those times, the universities were teaching the wrong things. Neither Galileo nor Descartes, for example, was able to pick up the mathematical skills he so desperately needed during the course of his university education. Galileo had initially studied medicine at Pisa but left before completing his degree, and in 1583 started learning mathematics at his father’s house from the Florentine court instructor Ostilio Ricci, who taught military fortification, mechanics, architecture, and perspective. Descartes similarly learned his mathematics in a practical context: having studied law at Poitiers, he picked up and refined his mathematical skills in the armies of Prince Maurice of Nassau and Maximilian I, to which he was attached from 1618 to 1620.” Gaukroger, S. The Emergence of a Scientific Culture. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006.
It took decades before rigorous observation was embodied consistently in scientific practice. But eventually it happened. In science, truth generally triumphs over power. Scientists didn’t necessarily become paragons of honesty in all their dealings with other human beings, as Francis Bacon’s conviction for corruption in 1621 demonstrated. Scientists merely adopted certain practices to encourage openness in regard to scientific experiments and principles.
The Prospects for Radical Management
In the case of radical management, I believe things will happen more quickly, because the pressures of global competition will force the change. Other cultures such as China or India don’t have the same cultural baggage as US management. They are the upstarts and are willing to try doing things different with spectacular results, as in Vineet Nayar’s HCLT in India or Li & Phung in China. If US and European firms don’t change, their industries will be decimated.
The failing economics of traditional management will force a change, one way or the other.
In some firms, it will be a long drawn out battle, with the battlefield strewn with broken hopes, shattered careers and lost jobs. The economic loss and human suffering will be immense.
In other organizations, it will happen easily and quickly and intelligently, because the management is willing to re-examine even deeply held beliefs about how the world works and consider the possibility of thinking, speaking and acting differently.
Obviously I am doing my best to facilitate the latter outcome rather than the former. I hope others will join me.
To learn more about radical management go here:
I can't believe how much of this I just wasn't aware of. Thank you for bringing more information to this topic for me. I'm truly grateful and really impressed.
Posted by: Health News | March 16, 2011 at 03:26 AM