River of Judgement...

Murder, drink, divorce, bankruptcy and love threaten in the unfolding drama of a city-executive as he looses control of his business and his life.

Well, the first draft of River of Judgment is now complete and, having set a target of 80,000 words for this novel, I came in surprisingly close with 85000.

I have looked back over the statistics... outline of plot 30 August 08 - on a spread-sheet of all places – well I am an engineer! The outline was then developed, off and on, over September before I then started to write out a detailed plot treatment. The file date-stamps on my trusty lap-top tell me that I started to write the first chapter in anger on 11 October, and finished the first complete draft on 12 November.

I must add that I have had the advantage of being able to devote my full time to this project; otherwise I might still be writing the novel this time next year.

Apparently, having now read a bit about writing novels – as opposed to academic/non-fiction – there are two camps: the plotters and the non-plotters. Armed with my spread-sheet outline plot, with its section and chapter analysis, I must clearly be of the former persuasion. Without some form of plan I would have found great difficulty in ensuring that I had covered the various angles without veering off-course.

Has this anything to do with management? …Perhaps.

As I have covered in “Thinking the Art of Management”, in July 1994 the Chairman of The Walt Disney Company, Michael Eisner, struggled to fill the void of Disney’s President, Frank Wells’ unexpected and untimely death in a helicopter accident. Notwithstanding Michael’s overwhelming sense of sadness and loss, he told of his anger at Frank, for Frank’s death, for ‘…[Frank’s] not [being] around to help [him] deal with a very difficult situation…’ Indeed, less than 36-hours following Frank’s death, Jeffrey Katzenberg, the de facto Number 3 in the ranks of Disney executives, had apparently laid the ultimatum on Michael Eisner that ‘…Either [he got] Frank’s job as president… or [he was] going to leave the [Disney].’

[From Eisner, M. (1999) ‘Work in Progress’, New York: Hyperion.]

I have commented that, even under “normal” business conditions, within the managerial narrative the challenge of management and organizational practice is often about the introduction of change to achieve some vision, purpose or function. If we then consider the inevitability of unexpected management scenarios, such as that painted by Eisner, even the best efforts to manage effectively become prone to ambiguity, emotion and seeming irrationality.

Thus it is with River of Judgment where I explore the ambiguity, emotion and seeming irrationality that arises when a city executive is faced with an unfolding drama that is not of his choosing. SO! OK! The murder is a bit over the top… but then it is a novel and I have to appeal to a fictional readership!

From thinking management to creating management...

Well, here goes... I have decided on a career change - number ? in a series from 1 to ??

In Thinking the Art of Management I have written about the concept of fiction as a means of delivering new objective ideas into any real world scenario (and I use that word "real" with all the caveats imaginable - what is real?). Fiction is a powerful tool for communication: the creation of an imaginary idea that, with a process of socialisation, sets up a realm of the possible.

For example: where do we - or you - as an individual or corporate body want to be in five years time? That is fiction. A business plan is fiction. And, to me, the most successful fiction is that which I can relate to, get engaged with and so on. Fiction only works as a communication tool when its audience can engage with it. To Ruskin, the greatest art was that which conveyed to the mind of the audience, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.

So, my next project is an overt work of fiction: a novel. I am busy writing an 80,000 word suspense novel set in the world of management. It is, I have to admit, being written with commerciality in mind. I certainly do not intend to pass it off as some form of alternative management text. However, I hope that my work will stir the imagination in its final readership.

• River of Judgement
  
  Doing business in the city can be a dirty game – it is for FINN JACKSON, chief executive of Tiger Oil. When company chairman GRAYSON BARCLAY forces his exit in a board room coup, Finn’s world is turned upside down. Overnight Finn goes from entrepreneur on the brink of making it rich to near bankrupt and, faced with nothing else left to lose, he is a man backed into a corner. Finn has no plan and few friends in the city; he is learning every step of the way. Friends turn to enemies and new relationships are forged – including the beautiful Welsh litigation lawyer, LYNETH JONES, and ALEXA STUART, the gorgeous wife of his friend and business partner AARON PHILIPS. From the Peace River oilfields in Alberta to the City of London, Finn fights to regain control of what he has lost; he is a man with a mission -he needs to get even.

More later... But, as the saying goes, if any one is interested in learning more - drop me a note.

Dancing Organisations...

This is just a brief post to draw attention to a recently published paper in the Journal Management Decision.

Dancing “the management”: on social presence, rhythm and finding common purpose

In an early post last year - A View from Wien (2) - I drew attention to some work-in-progress. This was a conceptual essay exploring the concept of dance as it might be used (metaphorically) in exploring organisational management.

I merely draw attention now to its published status for those who may wish to read into this topic in more detail.

Kind regards

David

"A shark in formaldehyde?": With a title like that… …why "Change”?

I read with great interest the title of a recent column by James B. Rieley on Emerald Management First: “A shark in formaldehyde?” How could I resist such a title? I looked on in further interest as I read:

"And in the art world, it stimulated the question, “is it art?” A similar question arises from most change programmes; “when is a change effort really creating a new environment and not simply as effective as re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic?”...

However, while James Rieley provided a good call on the art metaphor in his column’s title and opening remarks, I felt that it did not capitalise on the value of the metaphor itself.

James’ use of the art metaphor was to adress a question posed by another reader of his column: "how can I show [my management] what they really need to do if they don’t see it themselves?’ The point being made is that there is a precursor to this question. The initial question to be asked is "how can I show them what I believe they need to see?" This is straight out of the art world - a question which artists, their critics, patrons and historians have struggled for many years to come to terms with.

My own argument, which I do not see as contradictory to the point James was making, is that the art metaphor can be used to examine "how we see". How do we (...or at least some people!) come to see Damien Hirst's shark as art? Can we use the same reasoning that an "Artworld" might use to persuade us that the Hirst "shark" is Art to adress this precursory question of “what should we see”?

The danger, from my own writing, is that once something like Damian Hirst's Shark is accepted as an "Artwork" by the established "Artworld" it gives licence to the phenomenon that copies of Damian Hirst’s Shark Set in Formaldehyde sell at multiples of the original’s value (see quote below). And there we have, I suggest, part of what is wrong with much of the consultancy industry, and the notion of change for change's sake.

Indeed, when I asked James about this he was kind enough to largely agree with me, particularly on the point about the consultancy industry. As James expressed it to me, he saw the goal of many consultancies as being to “breed an addictive environment, in which the client begins to believe that its only sound option is to keep the consultants onboard.”

The answer to the question “how can I show them what they need to see” provides a scource of potential realisation, overcoming the problematic of “how can I show them what they need to do”. This is, however, not simply a matter of adopting some pre-determined “cultural change” practices in order to manage change. Unless a vision for change is, first and foremost, both rooted and cultivated within the present culture, no amount of subsequent consultancy will persuade some organisational doubters that the emperor now has new clothes.

The Sunday Times, March 19, 2006: ‘Hirst earns £2m at the shark factory’. It was reported that Damien Hirst is to earn £24m [sic] by turning out versions of the works that made his name in the 1990s as the leader of the Young British Artist movement. A version of the “pickled shark”, 1/3 size, sold for £2.28m, 45 times more than the artist first received for the original work.

Does business ignore the business schools?

The following blog is based on a letter I wrote to the Financial Times newspaper on 16th January – though it was not published by them.

Following an article by columnist Michael Skapinker (January 7), I ask the question: does “…business [really ignore] business schools”? Or is it simply that business merely ignores such academic outputs as at suggested by the title “A multi-level investigation of antecedents and consequences of team member boundary spanning behaviour”. After all, MBAs are products of business schools, and these are simply not ignored by business.

The issue Michael writes about is a perenial one within the area of management research and education. There is a perceived gap between the usefulness of much management education emanating from the academic business schoole and the application of that research in management practice. The same gap is not perceived to exist in other professional fields such as engineers, doctors and lawyers – where the academic output of their schools is understood to be of greater relevance to practice, with journals avidly read by practioners.

However, following a response by Rita Gunther McGrath’s in “The upside to business schools” (January 14), I also ask: is it a little too reactionary and simplistic to cast aside such insight as Michael Skapinker’s observation on law versus management as a professional occupation? A counter argument based merely on the apparently different career structures of lawyers v business people misses, I believe, an opportunity to build on Mr Skapinker’s observation.

Key, I think, to Mr Skapinker’s argument lies within the closure of his piece.

“The reason that real-life lawyers, doctors and engineers have no problem with their research is not because they are smarter than business people, but because the research assists them in what they do. Lawyers and doctors proceed from a corpus of knowledge and build on it. They look at what their colleagues do and try to do it better.” With this premiss, I – as an ex-engineer – heartily agree.

However a second premiss concerning the predictability of material is, I believe, somewhat flawed. One can look at the entertainment value in the medical television series “House” to see the plausibility of a certain medical unpredictability, with symptoms and causality being difficult to correlate. Also, the nature of much that is legal work is dealing with exceptions, arguing new conclusions from both extant precedent and new evidence. Mysteries as challenging as the social phenomenon that is management practice, can, in practice, be found in all professional walks of life.

Here we can perhaps note what most “historically” established professions appear to have understood, for some time, is that while many of the essential skills of a profession – be they medical, engineering or legal skills – can be readily taught in a classroom, the “qualified practioner” requires both structured practical training and professional experience. While it may be common to site the 6 or so years it takes to qualify as a medical practioner, certainly in the UK it can also take some 6years to gain status as a Chartered Engineer. Lawyers too, also require to sit professional exams based on practice and gain experience under supervision before being qualifed to practice.

Much of what is achieved in developing professional capability is the application of a body of aquired knowledge to a situation at hand to achieve a desired outcome. This capability requires attention to reason, logic and argument – all skills grounded in philosophy and embedded in the study of the law, medicine and engineering. In short, professional practice requires the learning of how to create new knowledge on the fly. Doing becomes epistemic.

“Managers tend to be practical…” yes! But, I argue, so are practioners of medicine, law and engineering. Management practice can build on “competitors’ achievements”, and the best doctors, engineers, lawyers and managers will also often seek to do something different. The difference, I argue, between managers and others is that the relatively young “profession” of management (both those that aspire to it and those who aspire to teach it) have not accepted, to the same degree as the others, that achieving professional competance is a greater matter than the mere acquisition of knowledge.

Those in Management Academe who are concerned (for not all are) that work on such esoteric micro-concerns as “a multi-level investigation of antecedents and consequences of team member boundary spanning behaviour” must understand that there is much that can be done, academically, to develop the knowledge of practice rather than mere knowledge itself.

Does business ignore business schools? I would argue not. Business merely ignores what does not appear useful to them in practice. The development of an understanding of epistemic practice requires, however, such “backward-looking” analysis as “Harvard’s case study method”. The challenge is therefore not for academe to “struggle to tell us what innovators will do next”, and neither should business require that of academe. The challenge is, rather, for academe to also develop knowledge about how others can arrive at their own new knowledge through practice. Managers also need to “proceed from a corpus of knowledge and [to learn to] build on it”.

David