Business Feel

Leading Paradigm Shifts in Organisations

S. Segal

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780230242791
• eBook ISBN: 9781137316271
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

through the use of examples of eminent CEOs, Business Feel for Leading in the Midst of Organisational Change outlines a variety of skills involved in the development of business feel. This new edition builds upon the ideas explored by the author in Business Feels (2004), featuring new material on leadership development and philosophy.

1

Leaders as Philosophers

Philosophical questions

The philosophical experience is vital in the world of management. Without calling it by name, managers engage in the activity of the philosophical process. They have moments that can be described as philosophical and that are central to their practices as managers, which gain and give perspective on situations in which they find themselves.

The philosophical event is not an everyday one. Rather, it becomes significant when we cannot take our habits of practice or our typical way of doing things for granted. It disrupts or jolts us out of our everyday complacency. Through disruption, we come to see the assumptions that have guided our worldview, but have, for the most part, been implicit. As such, philosophical experiences open up the possibility of seeing the world in new ways.

It is a common observation that we live in a world of disruptive change. The more things change, the less we can rely on our habitual ways of doing things, and the more we need to be able to think “outside of our boxes.” In fact, the original image for thinking outside of our boxes is derived from the philosopher Plato, who said that philosophy begins in the moment of learning to think outside of our “caves,” when we leave the “comfort zone” of the familiar.

According to Kotter (1999, p. 32), managers have not been trained to think outside of our caves or boxes, but under conditions of stability. “Too many people have been trained for and raised in a more stable world, a world that for the most part no longer exists. Too many people have been trained only to manage the current system or to make incremental shifts. They have not been shown how to provide the leadership necessary to make bigger leaps.”

Jack Welch, General Electric CEO, affirms that we are living in times where we cannot take the conventions of management for granted. In the context of arguing for the limitations of scientific rationalist approaches to management, Welch says that, “We have to undo a 100-year-old concept [of scientific management] and convince managers that their role is not to control people and stay ‘on top’ of things, but rather to guide, energize, and excite” (Lowe, 1998).

These assumptions, informed by the scientific tradition in management, are no longer appropriate to the everyday reality in which managers and leaders of organisations find themselves, which is one of questioning their habitual assumptions and conventions. In the terms of this book, they are in the middle of a philosophical experience in which the old assumptions are no longer valid but no new ones have yet taken root. If anything, there are a number of fads, none of which have been affirmed as an enduring foundation for management.

Whether they like it or not, those who experience the collapse of their old assumptions are in a process of questioning. This may not be something they asked for. It may not be something that they wish to do. Indeed, they may simply wish to carry on with their jobs. But once they have experienced the unviability of the traditional way of doing things, they are thrown into the uncertainty that questioning brings. They are thrown into a philosophical mode. In this space of uncertainty, we need to embrace and engage in the art of questioning. This is why Gerstner suggests that “Once you think you’re at the point that it’s time to write it down, build the manual, and document the formula, you’re no longer exploring, questioning, the status quo. We are constantly challenging what we do – building a culture of restless self-renewal” (Neff et al., 1999).

Philosophical questioning opens up new possibilities

The idea of building a culture of restless renewal through constantly questioning the status quo lies at the heart of philosophy. Socrates, the archetypal philosopher of the Western world, is famous for his process of constantly questioning everything, not for the sake of being clever, but because it always opened up new possibilities and ways of seeing things – just as is the case of Gerstner. Socrates is identified as a philosopher specifically because of his process of constantly questioning the status quo. Furthermore, he questioned the experience of being between the collapse of Athens’ traditional image of itself as a military empire and the not-yet-new way of being for Athens – one in which Athens would become a seat of learning that would influence Western thought for at least the next two thousand years.

Although it may come as a surprise to many, philosophy is not an abstract but a very concrete activity. Its concreteness is to be found in the mood of uncertainty. The insecurity and uncertainty experienced in between the old and not-yet-new is the mood that makes philosophy concrete and relevant. Philosophy is based on the ability to tolerate and embrace uncertainty instead of withdrawing or becoming paralysed in the face of it. Philosophy is the willingness to turn that uncertainty into a dynamic, questioning energy to find direction.

This is why Welch says that his success as a manager and leader lay in the development of a philosophy: “There is a philosophy that came out of my journey” (2001, p. xv). Through philosophy, Welch found direction in the face of the uncertainty of being caught between the collapse of the old conventions and the not-yet-new management conventions.

Philosophy and manuals

It is important not to miss the significance of Welch’s point as he highlights a philosophy and not a manual or a technique. For it is a philosophy that gives the flexibility of thought and vision to be able to respond in proactive ways to changes that may be unanticipated. Because we cannot always predict what changes will take place, we cannot always have “the plan” to deal with change. Rather, we need to have the flexibility of mind that is able to adjust to changes. This flexibility comes from engaging in the activity of philosophising.

As such, Welch points to shifting the emphasis of management education away from an exclusive reliance on technique and formula to one that takes the discipline of philosophy seriously. In fact, Welch institutionalised practices at GE for thinking in the face of disruption. His educational style is based on the ability to turn what he calls experiences of the “vortex” into learning opportunities. In vortex experiences, managers, because of crises in their practice, begin to doubt their management styles. They lose confidence in their way of doing things. From Welch’s perspective, these doubts provide opportunities to reflect on and challenge our habitual ways of doing things so as to develop new possibilities for our management practices.

Philosophy questions the status quo

Like Socrates, questioning the status quo was essential to Welch’s management style. He often stood outside of the conventional or habitual ways of doing things, challenged people to see in new ways, and was more than able to withstand the pressure to conform coming from the herd. The first time he spoke to Wall Street market analysts, Welch did not give them the message that they wanted to hear. In fact, he challenged the very terms in which they analysed the financial data of organisations. Instead of giving them hard facts, he gave them a lecture on the value of soft skills in organisations. They could not make sense of anything that he was saying, and in turn, he felt they looked at him as though he was crazy. Yet rather than turning away from his message, it made Welch (2001) more determined to challenge their assumptions by clarifying his position.

Over a 20-minute speech, I gave [Wall Street analysts] little of what they wanted and quickly launched into a qualitative discussion around the vision for the company. ... At the end this crowd thought they were getting more hot air than substance.

One of our staffers overheard one analyst moan, “We don’t know what the hell he’s talking about.”

I left the hotel ballroom knowing there had to be a better way to tell our story. Wall Street had listened, and Wall Street had yawned. (p. 105)

The idea of being able to withstand the pressure of standing outside of the status quo has always been at the centre of philosophy. Socrates saw his role in ancient Greece as that of a gadfly to the state, constantly interrogating it in order that it would be aware of the assumptions guiding its way of doing things. No matter how much he was pressured into adopting a conformist position – “failing to acknowledge the gods that the city acknowledges” he had the will and resolve to stand outside of the masses. His resolve to continue asking philosophical questions eventuated in a conviction of impiety and his death in 399 BCE.

Another corporate CEO who learnt the art of philosophical questioning at the time of a painful disruption is Andrew Grove of Intel. For Grove, the process of “philosophical questioning” became part of his leadership approach. When confronted with situations that threw his habitual assumptions into question, he was not overwhelmed or flummoxed but turned these experiences into opportunities for seeing in a new way. An example that he gives concerns the significance of Netscape.

I remember being shocked by the Netscape IPO. I was quite familiar with Netscape, and for that company to be valued at $4 billion or $5 billion after it came out – that stunned me. But that shock had a positive impact, because it made me think, Hey, you better rethink your prejudices, because people are seeing something here that you are not seeing. I mean, I thought the browser was an interesting piece of software, but not a life-altering or strategy-altering technology. (Heilemann, 2001, p. 33)

Here we see how Grove is able to turn an experience of being shocked into an opportunity for questioning his assumptions and how through questioning his assumptions he is able to see something in a new way: that is, he begins to see the browser in a completely new way as a strategy-altering technology. This is practical philosophy: the activity of questioning assumptions. Existential philosophy questions assumptions in the face of a shocking, disturbing or jarring experience, in those moments that we experience that reality is not the way we thought it was. It is not inevitable that shock will lead to an educational attunement. It can, and often does, lead to a sense of defensiveness, where we remain blinded by our inability to move beyond our habitual ways of seeing things.

Dangers in not questioning assumptions

Charan and Useem (2002) highlight the danger of not being sensitive to assumptions that need to be questioned in their analysis of failure at Cisco. Cisco, they claim, had developed a system that would enable them to predict the future. However, the future did not turn out as the system predicted. In coming to grips with why it did not turn out as predicted, Cisco had to contend with the fact that it had not questioned key assumptions in developing its predictive system. As Charan and Useem maintain, “Cisco’s managers, it turned out, never bothered to model what would happen if a key assumption – growth – disappeared from the equation. After all, the company had recorded more than 40 straight quarters of growth; why wouldn’t the future bring more of the same?”

Questioning axioms is not an elementary process. Assumptions do not just show themselves or present themselves for questioning. We need to be able to notice that we are making assumptions that, as we see in the case of Cisco, we are not always aware of. We are usually blind to the assumptions that we make. And because we are blind to them, we cannot question them. By definition, that which we are blind to is outside of the scope of what we can see, and we need to be able to make it explicit for ourselves.

How do we go about doing this? How would Cisco be able to sensitise itself to the fact that it is making assumptions? And how would the organisation work with the assumptions once it had made them explicit? These questions require development of a philosophical discipline.

Socratic humility

The examination of experience requires what has come to be known as “Socratic humility”. This is the humility of being attentive to what is taken for granted in our own opinions and perspectives. Indeed, it is the humility to treat our perspectives as opinions, as views open to doubt and not as knowledge that is beyond doubt. This allows us to not only examine the others’ perspectives but our own. Socrates’ personal view that he knew nothing (thus the questions) led to the notion of Socratic humility. Because he believed he knew nothing, he took less and less for granted, and so was able to see and examine more and more. He never took his own or others way of framing experience for granted, and so was able to examine the assumptions hidden in experience. The resolute acceptance of not-knowing is the basis of Socratic reflection.

Mandela had Socratic humility. He would interrogate himself through his secretaries. The human side to Mandela’s stumblings is revealed by an account one of his private secretaries gave of his recent visit to Scandinavia. It seems that every night, after retiring, he would summon his three secretaries to his bedroom where he would ask them,

“Now tell me what I have done wrong today, because I don’t want to make the same mistakes tomorrow!” (Andrea Brink, Management Today 10 February 2014)

Turning experiences of not-knowing into opportunities for insight

Philosophy is concerned with the awareness that we are not always aware of our assumptions. The role of Socratic philosophy is to become sensitive to that which we are not aware of in our way of experiencing the world so that we are able to catch sight of the beliefs, worldviews, paradigms and assumptions in which we make sense of experience. To understand ourselves as leaders and managers, we need to understand the frameworks in which we carry out our day-to-day activities in the workplace. We come to understand our own assumptions not by theories, but by developing a way of examining our own experiences. Only by understanding them can we come to terms with blind spots in ourselves and create the opportunity for excellence in our professional practices.

Ricardo Semler (1993) was brought up with a scientific management view of organisations. Only when he experienced a personal crisis did he begin to question the assumptions that regulated Semco, his company’s, activities. He saw that the routines of organisational management practice had deprived Semco of its vitality, and he sought to return the vitality to Semco by questioning all of the old practices and developing new practices.

One of my first acts at Semco was to throw out all the rules. All companies have procedural bibles. Some look like Encyclopedia Britannica. Who needs all those rules? They discourage flexibility and comfort the complacent. At Semco, we stay away from formulas and try to keep our minds open ... All that new employees at Semco are given is a 20-page booklet we call “The Survival Manual.” It has lots of cartoons but few words. The basic message: Use your common sense. (p. 3)

The challenge of questioning the status quo is a deeply emotional one, one that often means standing alone, outside the herd of common sense opinion, having the resilience to trust one’s perspective even when others do not. It is a position shared with Anita Roddick, who was always bumping up against and challenging conventions. “[Y]ears ago (1988) when I lectured at Harvard about social responsibility, it was like I had just walked off the bloody moon. Now I have hundreds of letters saying, ‘Tell us more about socially responsible...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Leaders as Philosophers
• 2  Models for Questioning while Leading
• 3  Why Philosophy in Leadership Studies?
• 4  Leadership Philosophy in the Context of the Tradition of Philosophy
• 5  Authenticity in the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger and Jack Welch
• 6  The Role of Frustration in Developing Leadership Vision
• 7  From Intuition through Doubt to Vision in Jack Welch and Martin Heidegger
• 8  Fear and Existential Anxiety as the Basis of Vision at Intel
• 9  The Practical Basis for Developing a Philosophy of Leadership
• 10  Stress as the Basis for Leadership Philosophy
• 11  Philosophical Journeys of Leaders
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index