Blog: Simply Thinking

What is dumbing us down?

17 April 2023

What is dumbing so many of us down these days, “smart” people included (Elon Musk, in Twitter, if not Tesla)? This could be the question of our age, to answer before it’s too late.

My new article in CEOWORLD suggests five possible explanations. Two are social:  the pressures of contemporary life and the decline of community. As we race around madly, many of us feel isolated, disconnected from the social ties of traditional community. These are hardly conditions that encourage thoughtfulness.

What is dumbing so many of us down these days, “smart” people included (Elon Musk, in Twitter, if not Tesla)? This could be the question of our age, to answer before it’s too late.

My new article in CEOWORLD suggests five possible explanations. Two are social:  the pressures of contemporary life and the decline of community. As we race around madly, many of us feel isolated, disconnected from the social ties of traditional community. These are hardly conditions that encourage thoughtfulness.

Another two relate to the toxic stews in which we swim. Who knows what all the chemicals that we inhale, ingest, and absorb are doing to our brains, let alone our bodies? Even more intoxicating may be the electronic toxins—those weapons of mass distraction, with their billions of bits bombarding us like flickering films. No wonder we have so much trouble seeing the big picture. That both sets of toxins are having no effect on our brains is difficult to believe—unless, of course, they are having this effect.

The fifth, really an amalgam of the other four, is that the farther we get from nature, the more thoughtless we become. Hence, to smarten up, we shall have to revert from our frenetic networks into natural communities, from our polluted cities into fresh air, and from our relentless distraction to focused attention.

To read the full article on CEOWORLD, please follow this link.

Where has all the judgement gone?

19 February 2021

With Dulcie Naimer, and thanks to Pete Seeger (hear him or sing along)

Where has all the judgement gone?
Long time missing.
Why has all the judgement gone?
So much suppressed.
Where did all the judgement go?
Distraction took it every bit.
How will this ever turn?
Why do we never learn?

Why should any fact be fake?
So much lying.
Why is truth so hard to take?
Buried long ago.
Why so many facts are fake?
Millions made on every one.
When will we see the light?
When will we get this right?

With Dulcie Naimer, and thanks to Pete Seeger (hear him or sing along)

Where has all the judgement gone?
Long time missing.
Why has all the judgement gone?
So much suppressed.
Where did all the judgement go?
Distraction took it every bit.
How will this ever turn?
Why do we never learn?

Why should any fact be fake?
So much lying.
Why is truth so hard to take?
Buried long ago.
Why so many facts are fake?
Millions made on every one.
When will we see the light?
When will we get this right?

Where have half the voters gone?
Long time dumbing down.
Why have half the voters gone?
Short-term trusting.
Where did half the voters go?
To exploiters everyone.
Why can’t we ever hear?
Why is there so much fear?

Where has so much nature gone?
Long time warming.
Why has so much nature gone?
Short-term taking.
Where does all that nature go?
Gone to greed every tree.
When will we ever care?
Why can’t we learn to share?

Why did COVID-19 come?
Long time asking.
What else could be going on?
Answers ended long ago.
What do all our leaders see?
Six feet forward every drop.
That leaves us on the brink.
When will they ever think?

Now the smart new leaders come.
Long time waiting.
Will these smart new leaders lead?
So far to go.
What can smart new leaders do?
Facing crisis everywhere.
We will have to fix the past.
We must learn to do it fast.

________________________________________

© Henry Mintzberg and Dulcie Naimer 2021 under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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“Marketing Myopia” Myopia

15 August 2018

Years ago, Theodore Levitt, a marketing professor at the Harvard Business School,  published a popular article entitled "Marketing Myopia." Many people in business today, despite not having read the article, subscribe to the idea. It is that companies should define themselves in terms of broad industry perspective rather than narrow product position. To take Levitt's favorite examples, railroad companies were to see themselves in the transportation business, oil companies in the energy business.

The idea was a good one—like all good ideas, within reason. Why not open up perspectives, beyond existing positions: fast food beyond hamburgers (McDonald’s), delivering packages beyond selling books (Amazon), offering unassembled kitchens beyond unassembled tables (IKEA). Just so long as the competencies of the company are respected.

Years ago, Theodore Levitt, a marketing professor at the Harvard Business School,  published a popular article entitled "Marketing Myopia." Many people in business today, despite not having read the article, subscribe to the idea. It is that companies should define themselves in terms of broad industry perspective rather than narrow product position. To take Levitt's favorite examples, railroad companies were to see themselves in the transportation business, oil companies in the energy business.

The idea was a good one—like all good ideas, within reason. Why not open up perspectives, beyond existing positions: fast food beyond hamburgers (McDonald’s), delivering packages beyond selling books (Amazon), offering unassembled kitchens beyond unassembled tables (IKEA). Just so long as the competencies of the company are respected.

Many firms had a field day with Levitt’s idea, rushing to redefine themselves in all kinds of fancy ways—for example, the mission of a ball bearing company became "reducing friction." It was even better for the business schools. What better way to stimulate the students than to get them musing about how the chicken factory could be in the business of providing protein, or garbage collection could become beautification? Unfortunately, it was all too easy, a cerebral exercise that, while opening vistas, could detach people from the mundane work of plucking and compacting.

Often the problem came down to extravagant assumptions about the intrinsic capabilities of a company—namely that these are almost limitless, or at least highly adaptable. A prominent writer on strategic planning suggested, in apparent seriousness, that "buggy whip manufacturers might still be around if they had said their business was not making buggy whips but self-starters for carriages".1 But what in the world would have enabled them to do that? These two products shared nothing in common—no material supply, no technology, no production process, no distribution channel—save a thought in somebody's head about making vehicles move. Why should starters have been any more of a logical product diversification for them than, say, fan belts? "Instead of being in transportation accessories or guidance systems," why could the buggy whip manufacturers not have defined their business as "flagellation"?2

How can a few clever words on a piece of paper enable a railroad to fly airplanes? Levitt wrote that "once it genuinely thinks of its business as taking care of people's transportation needs, nothing can stop it from creating its own extravagantly profitable growth"3 Nothing except the limitations of its own distinctive competences.

Levitt's intention was to broaden the vision of managers. At that he may have succeeded—all too well. By elevating strategy from past position, to new perspective—from place on the ground to that in some stratosphere—he may have reduced its depth. Market opportunities got elevated past internal strengths. Products ceased to count (railroad executives defined their industry "wrong" because "they were product-oriented instead of consumer-oriented"), as did production ("the particular form of manufacturing, processing, or what-have-you cannot be considered as a vital aspect of the industry"). But what makes marketing intrinsically more important than product or production, or, for that matter, Ludvig in the laboratory? Companies have to build on whatever capabilities they can make use of, without being overwhelmed by weaknesses that they never considered, marketing ones included.

Critics of Levitt's article have had their own field day with the terminology, pointing out the dangers of "marketing hyperopia," where "vision is better for distant than for near objects"4, or of "marketing macropia," which escalates previously narrow market segments "beyond experience or prudence".5 I prefer to conclude that “marketing myopia” has often turned out to be myopic.

 

© Henry Mintzberg 2018. An earlier version of this appeared in my book The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, which Tom Peters called “my favorite management book of the last 25 years…no contest.”

Follow this TWOG on Twitter @mintzberg141, or receive the blogs directly in your inbox by subscribing here. To help disseminate these blogs, we also have a Facebook page and a LinkedIn page.

_______________

G.A. Steiner, Strategic Planning; What Every Manager Must Know (New York: Free Press, 1979).

Heller, quoted R. Norman (1977) Management for Growth, New York: Wiley (p. 34)

T. Levitt ,“Marketing Myopia.” Harvard Business Review  (July/August 1960, p. 53)

P. Kotler and R. Singh, “Marketing Warfare in the 1980s.” Journal of Business Strategy (Winter, 1981:30-41).

5 J.P. Baughman, Problems and Performance of the Role of the Chief Executive in the General Electric Company, 1882-1974 (working paper Graduate School of Business Administration Harvard University, 1974).

Judgment and Jack

31 March 2016

Remember judgment? It still appears in the dictionary (in my Oxford: “1 the critical faculty, discernment… 2 good sense”). Judgment used to be a key to managing effectively, even if hidden in the dark recesses of the human brain. And then along came measurement, in the dazzling light. It was a good idea, so long as it informed judgment. Too frequently, however, it replaced judgment.

In 1981, the Business Roundtable, a grouping of the chief executives of America’s leading companies, issued their “Statement on Corporate Responsibility.”

Remember judgment? It still appears in the dictionary (in my Oxford: “1 the critical faculty, discernment… 2 good sense”). Judgment used to be a key to managing effectively, even if hidden in the dark recesses of the human brain. And then along came measurement, in the dazzling light. It was a good idea, so long as it informed judgment. Too frequently, however, it replaced judgment.

In 1981, the Business Roundtable, a grouping of the chief executives of America’s leading companies, issued their “Statement on Corporate Responsibility.”

The shareholder must receive a good return but the legitimate concerns of other constituencies (customers, employees, communities, suppliers and society at large) also must have the appropriate attention. . . . [Leading managers] believe that enlightened consideration … will best serve the interest of [the] shareholders. (quoted in Beyond Selfishness; statement since removed from www.businessroundtable.org)

In 1997, the Business Roundtable issued another statement, entitled “Statement of Corporate Governance.” This one, about “Shareholder Value”, reversed the previous one, claiming that the paramount duty of management and boards of directors is to the corporations’ stockholders. It explained:

The notion that the board must somehow balance the interests of stockholders against the interests of other stakeholders fundamentally misconstrues the role of directors. It is, moreover, an unworkable notion because it would leave the board with no criteria for resolving conflicts between the interest of stockholders and of other stakeholders or among different groups of stakeholders. (www.businessroundtable.org)

No criteria indeed—except judgment! Somehow, between 1981 and 1997, America’s most prominent CEOs lost their capacity for judgment. If you want to understand what has been behind the problems of the American economy since then, here you have it, right from the horses’ mouths. (See mintzberg.org/enterprise.)

In 2009, Jack Welch, America’s superstar CEO (of General Electric, from 1981-2001), declared famously that “On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world.” But wait a minute Jack: you were a member of the Roundtable that issued that 1997 statement. In fact I have been told that you championed it (although this I cannot confirm, and you are presumably not telling).1

In any event, thank you Jack for your dumbest statement--after the damage was done, and continues to be done. Thank you on behalf of all the employees who were either “downsized” or shifted to lower wages, in the name of “productivity” (and so helped to bring on Donald Trump). Thank you on behalf of all the customers who have had to put up with appalling services and lousy products at higher prices since that 1997 statement. Thank you on behalf of all the decent companies that were destroyed so that a few CEOs could run off with “shareholder value.”

Where has all the judgment gone?

© Henry Mintzberg 2016. Follow this TWOG on Twitter @mintzberg141, or receive the blogs directly in your inbox by subscribing here.


1 Three years later, in 2012, the Business Roundtable issued this third, lame statement: “[I]t is the responsibility of the corporation to deal with its employees, customers, suppliers, and other constituencies in a fair and equitable manner and to  exemplify the highest standards of corporate citizenship.”

 

We live in times of great continuity

15 October 2015

This TWOG was first posted on 21 November, when @mintzberg141 had about 2000 followers. Now that number is approaching 7500, so this will be new to most of you and hopefully worth a revisit for some of the rest.

Actually, it’s “We live in times of great change.” Ever heard that? Or more to the point, have you ever heard a speech by a CEO, management consultant, or management professor that did not begin this way?

When you dressed this morning, as you buttoned buttons, did you say to yourself: “If we are living in times of such great change, how come we are still buttoning buttons?” After all, the modern version of the button has been around for seven centuries. And when you were driving to one of those speeches about living in times of great change, did you notice that the technology under the hood of your car was probably the same as that used in the Model T Ford (an internal combustion four-cycle engine)?

This TWOG was first posted on 21 November, when @mintzberg141 had about 2000 followers. Now that number is approaching 7500, so this will be new to most of you and hopefully worth a revisit for some of the rest.

Actually, it’s “We live in times of great change.” Ever heard that? Or more to the point, have you ever heard a speech by a CEO, management consultant, or management professor that did not begin this way?

When you dressed this morning, as you buttoned buttons, did you say to yourself: “If we are living in times of such great change, how come we are still buttoning buttons?” After all, the modern version of the button has been around for seven centuries. And when you were driving to one of those speeches about living in times of great change, did you notice that the technology under the hood of your car was probably the same as that used in the Model T Ford (an internal combustion four-cycle engine)?

The men who deliver such speeches wear ties. Do you know why? Not to keep their necks warm. It’s because such people have always worn ties. They, like the rest of us, are living in times of great continuity.

And while we’re on the subject of continuity, you should know that these claims about change haven’t changed for decades, although in the 1970s the fashionable word was “turbulence”, which in the 1980s became “hyper-turbulence.” I kid you not.1 Hyper all right, the claims at least.

With the coming of each new decade, the last one was dismissed as stable—the same one that had just been called hysterically-turbulent or whatever. But the prize for hyperbole in this regard has to go to Katz and Kahn, two otherwise intelligent professors, who wrote in 19782 that “Even before turbulence characterized many environmental sectors, organizations frequently faced new problems, for example, those created by war and economic depression.”3

Why all this nonsense? Because some people benefit from it. For the management consultants, it’s good for business: “CHANGE OR ELSE!” meaning that “for a price, we’ll help you (so long as you judge us by what we say, not what we do).” For the management professors, it’s “READ MY BOOK!” (but not my actions). And for the CEOs, it’s “I WILL LEAD YOU THROUGH THESE TURBULENT TIMES!” (as I collect my bonuses, no matter how I mess up). As for the rest of us, it’s a share of the glory: “WE’RE WHERE IT’S AT!” (not like those wimps of some previous generation who had to deal with nothing more than war and depression.)

So what are we to make of all this? Two things. First, that we can be awfully narcissistic, and boring—frozen in the past while making great pronouncements about the present. And second, that while we do notice what is changing—something’s always changing—we don’t notice the great many things that are not.4 But be careful of these, because we can’t manage change without managing continuity. There’s a word for change without continuity: anarchy. Would you like to live in times of great anarchy?

We might get the chance. As a management professor, I can at least end this rant where so many of my colleagues have started theirs. All this hype about change could well become a self-fulfilling prophecy. By believing that we are living in times of great change, we could be driving ourselves crazy, and so end up living in times of great anarchy. To escape this, don’t believe everything you hear. But do tell your friends to READ MY TWOG!

1 See my book The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning (Free Press, 1994), pages 203-209.

2 D.Katz and R.L. Kahn, The Social Psychology of Organizations (Wiley, 1978), page 132.

3 I began this TWOG by trying to adapt an op-ed piece that I wrote exactly 15 years ago—in December 1999—but never published. It was called “Marching backward into the new millennium.” I can’t resist including here an excerpt from the opening: “It has not been a bad millennium, as millennia go. True, we didn’t come up with anything big, like fire or the wheel. But the printing press wasn’t bad, not to mention computers…. Anyway, we have learned in the last moments of this millennium that the past is irrelevant. History is dead, gone finished…. Now the new millennium is upon us. TIME TO CHANGE. Again…. At the stroke of midnight January 1, 2000.”

4 Exception: there is one thing changing that we prefer not to notice—global warming—so that we won’t have to change our habits. Here the line is “Let the others live in times of great change.”

A quote for this TWOG (cover your eyes at the end):

“Few phenomena are more remarkable, yet few have been less remarked, than the degree in which material civilization—the progress of mankind in all those contrivances which oil the wheels and promote the comfort of daily life—has been concentrated in the last half century. It is not too much to say that in these respects more has been done, richer and more prolific discoveries have been made, grander achievements have been realized, in the course of the 50 years of our own lifetime than in all the previous lifetimes of the race. It is in the three momentous matters of light, locomotion and communication that the progress effected in this generation contrasts surprisingly with the aggregate of the progress effected in all generations put together since the earliest dawn of authentic history.” (This is from the magazine Scientific American—in 1868.)

© 2014, 2015 with minor editing, by Henry Mintzberg

 

The Extraordinary Power of Ordinary Creativity

5 March 2015

It is thrilling to listen to Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. The creativity is amazing; how many people are capable of that? But there is another kind of creativity of which we are all capable. It’s quite ordinary, in fact, although the results can be extraordinary: it can change the world.

Let’s start with a joke I heard. “I’d like to die like my grandfather died—quietly, in his sleep. Not like those other people in the car who died yelling and screaming.” We picture grandpa in his bed, but he was actually behind the wheel. It’s just a little switch really, as is found in many jokes.

Jokes, of course, don’t change the world. (Nor did Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto for that matter, although it has produced great joy in the world—as have so many jokes.) But how about this for a little switch:

It is thrilling to listen to Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. The creativity is amazing; how many people are capable of that? But there is another kind of creativity of which we are all capable. It’s quite ordinary, in fact, although the results can be extraordinary: it can change the world.

Let’s start with a joke I heard. “I’d like to die like my grandfather died—quietly, in his sleep. Not like those other people in the car who died yelling and screaming.” We picture grandpa in his bed, but he was actually behind the wheel. It’s just a little switch really, as is found in many jokes.

Jokes, of course, don’t change the world. (Nor did Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto for that matter, although it has produced great joy in the world—as have so many jokes.) But how about this for a little switch:

In 1928, Alexander Fleming was researching anti-bacterial agents in his London laboratory. Returning there after vacation, he noticed that mold had killed some particular bacteria in one of his petri plates. “That’s funny” he said. Standard practice was to discard such samples and carry on, which Fleming in fact did. But following a conversation with a colleague, he took that sample out of the trash, asking himself if this mold could be used to kill destructive bacteria in the human body. That was the critical moment, the key little switch. What was trash to other researchers suddenly became opportunity for him.

Fleming studied the mold and published an article about it a year later. But not much happened for a while, and then it took years of effort, by him and others, before what he initially called “penicillin” was used in the treatment of infections. Looking back on this, he said: "When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn't plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world's first antibiotic, or bacteria killer." But that is what happened, and it changed the world.

What made all this effort possible was that one little switch by one person—from the trash to the bench, and, in his mind, into the human body. It was a simple switch really, even if its consequences were monumental.

Here’s another simple switch, that changed an industry. A worker at IKEA had to take the legs off a table, to get it into his car. This switch was the realization that if this one employee had to do it, so did the IKEA customers. Consequently the company worked out a new business model: the selling of furniture unassembled so that people could take it home in their cars. And that changed the furniture industry.

By the way, this too required enormous effort, 15 years I’ve been told. But again, it all happened because of that one little switch, thanks to that one experience with a table.

Maybe you have never created a great violin concerto. But I’ll bet you have come up with your share of little jokes. Well then, by switching that talent to something more serious, you could start a process that might change an industry, even the world.

© Henry Mintzberg 2015

Global? How about Worldly?

30 January 2015

Do we need more globalization on this globe? Or more worldliness in this world?

In an earlier TWOG, I described our International Masters in Practicing Management (impm.org), comprising five 10-day modules, each focusing on a managerial mindset—for example the Reflective Mindset (the module held in England) and the Collaborative Mindset (the one held in China). There is also a module concerned with the social, political, and economic issues that surround organizations. We could have called it the Global Mindset. Instead we decided to call it the Worldly Mindset.

Do we need more globalization on this globe? Or more worldliness in this world?

In an earlier TWOG, I described our International Masters in Practicing Management (impm.org), comprising five 10-day modules, each focusing on a managerial mindset—for example the Reflective Mindset (the module held in England) and the Collaborative Mindset (the one held in China). There is also a module concerned with the social, political, and economic issues that surround organizations. We could have called it the Global Mindset. Instead we decided to call it the Worldly Mindset.

Why? Because we want the managers to come out of our program more personally worldly than commonly global. Global implies a certain cookie-cutter conformity—everyone subscribing to a common set of beliefs, techniques, and styles. Is this any way to foster the innovation needed by so many organizations? In our classrooms, the managers learn by reflecting on their own experience and sharing their insights with each other. We celebrate their uniqueness, not their sameness.

Consider the definitions of these two words, from The Pocket Oxford Dictionary:

global : adj. 1. worldwide (global conflict). 2. all-embracing

worldly : adj. 1. of the affairs of the world, temporal, earthly (worldly goods). 2. experienced in life, sophisticated, practical.

Global may be “all-embracing”, about the whole world, but worldly digs into the experiences of this world, bringing together the “sophisticated” with the “practical”--a most interesting combination of words. That’s the difference between a Masters in Business Administration and a Masters of Practicing Management. One claims to teach wannabe managers to see the big picture—at least from on high—while the other encourages practicing managers to construct these pictures from their own experiences on the ground. Which would you like to be running your company?

The Worldly Mindset takes place, not coincidently, at the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore. India is another world for the non-Indian managers in the program; indeed in some sense India is otherworldly. Arriving at the first running of this module, in 1997, I shared a taxi from the airport with an American manager who worked for Lufthansa. Judging from her reaction to that ride, it was a good thing that we were not in a rickshaw! A few days later she asked one of the professors “How can you possibly drive in this traffic?” He replied nonchalantly: “I just join the flow.” Welcome to the Worldly Mindset! That’s not chaos out there, but another world, with a logic of its own.

At this module, the mangers are not voyeurs, touring some foreign country. They are hosted by colleagues from that country, just as they host these colleagues at modules in their own country (including Rio in Brazil on the Action Mindset and Montreal in Canada on the Analytic Mindset). Two weeks ago, at this module in Bangalore, Professor Srinivasan started her presentation on The Cultural Dimension of Doing Business with: “I want you to see this through my eyes!” That’s the spirit of the worldly mindset!

We may talk a lot about “global”, but most managers are firmly local— rooted in their own cultures. That includes many of the most international companies, not to mention the headquarters themselves. Businesses today need people to be more worldly—down the hall as well as around the globe. Why impose conformity when so much can be learned from diversity?

But we cannot stop with instilling a better sense of other people’s worlds. More important is the use of that insight to instil a more profound sense of our own world. We don’t need managers who roam the globe to spread a single perspective. We need managers who appreciate different worlds because of how deeply they understand their own world. T.S. Eliot put it marvellously in his most famous lines of poetry:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

So let’s encourage all of us, managers included, to know our world for the first time.

© 2015 Henry Mintzberg

We live in times of great continuity

21 November 2014

Actually, it’s “We live in times of great change.” Ever heard that? Or more to the point, have you ever heard a speech by a CEO, management consultant, or management professor that did not begin this way?

When you dressed this morning, as you buttoned buttons, did you say to yourself: “If we are living in times of such great change, how come we are still buttoning buttons?” After all, the modern version of the button has been around for seven centuries (and the previous versions much longer). And when you drove to one of those speeches about living in times of great change, did you notice that the technology under the hood of your car was probably the same as used in the Model T Ford (an internal combustion four-cycle engine)?

The men who deliver such speeches wear ties. Do you know why? Not to keep their necks warm. It’s because such people have always worn ties. They, like the rest of us, are living in times of great continuity.

Actually, it’s “We live in times of great change.” Ever heard that? Or more to the point, have you ever heard a speech by a CEO, management consultant, or management professor that did not begin this way?

When you dressed this morning, as you buttoned buttons, did you say to yourself: “If we are living in times of such great change, how come we are still buttoning buttons?” After all, the modern version of the button has been around for seven centuries (and the previous versions much longer). And when you drove to one of those speeches about living in times of great change, did you notice that the technology under the hood of your car was probably the same as used in the Model T Ford (an internal combustion four-cycle engine)?

The men who deliver such speeches wear ties. Do you know why? Not to keep their necks warm. It’s because such people have always worn ties. They, like the rest of us, are living in times of great continuity.

And while we’re on the subject of continuity, you should know that these claims about change have haven’t changed for decades, although in the 1970s the fashionable word was “turbulence”, which in the 1980s became “hyper-turbulence.” I kid you not.1 Hyper all right, the claims at least.

With the coming of each new decade, the last one was dismissed as stable—the same one that had just been called hysterically-turbulent or whatever. But the prize for hyperbole in this regard has to go to Katz and Kahn, two otherwise intelligent professors, who wrote in 19782 that “Even before turbulence characterized many environmental sectors, organizations frequently faced new problems, for example, those created by war and economic depression.”3

Why all this nonsense? Because some people benefit from it. For the management consultants, it’s good for business: “CHANGE OR ELSE!” meaning that “for a price, we’ll help you (so long as you judge us by what we say, not what we do).” For the management professors, it’s “READ MY BOOK!” (but not my actions).” And for the CEOs, it’s “I WILL LEAD YOU THROUGH THESE TURBULENT TIMES! (as I collect my bonuses, no matter how I mess up).” As for the rest of us, it’s a share of the glory: “WE’RE WHERE IT’S AT! Not like those wimps of some previous generation who had to deal with nothing more than war and depression.”

So what are we to make of all this? Two things. First, that we can be awfully narcissistic, and boring—frozen in the past while making great pronouncements about the present. And second, that while we do notice what is changing—something’s always changing--we don’t notice the great many things that are not.4 These are very dangerous to ignore, because we can’t manage change without managing continuity. There’s a word for change without continuity: anarchy. Would you like to live in times of great anarchy?

We might get the chance. As a management professor, I can at least end this rant where so many of my colleagues begin theirs. All this hype about change could well become a self-fulfilling prophecy. By believing that we are living in times of great change, we could be driving ourselves crazy, and so end up living in times of great anarchy. To escape this, don’t believe everything you hear. But do tell your friends to READ MY TWOG!

1. See my book The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning (Free Press, 1994), pages 203-209.
2. D.Katz and R.L. Kahn, The Social Psychology of Organizations (Wiley, 1978), page 132.
3. I began this TWOG by trying to adapt an op-ed piece that I wrote exactly 15 years ago—in December 1999--but never published. It was called “Marching backward into the new millennium.” I can’t resist including here an excerpt from the opening: “It has not been a bad millennium, as millennia go. True, we didn’t come up with anything big, like fire or the wheel. But the printing press wasn’t bad, not to mention computers…. Anyway, we have learned in the last moments of this millennium that the past is irrelevant. History is dead, gone finished…. Now the new millennium is upon us. TIME TO CHANGE. Again…. At the stroke of midnight January 1, 2000.”
4. Exception: there is one thing changing that we prefer not to notice—global warming--so that we won’t have to change our habits. Here the line is “Let the others live in times of great change.”

A quote for this TWOG (cover your eyes at the end):

“Few phenomena are more remarkable, yet few have been less remarked, than the degree in which material civilization⎯the progress of mankind in all those contrivances which oil the wheels and promote the comfort of daily life⎯has been concentrated in the last half century. It is not too much to say that in these respects more has been done, richer and more prolific discoveries have been made, grander achievements have been realized, in the course of the 50 years of our own lifetime than in all the previous lifetimes of the race. It is in the three momentous matters of light, locomotion and communication that the progress effected in this generation contrasts surprisingly with the aggregate of the progress effected in all generations put together since the earliest dawn of authentic history.” (This is from the magazine Scientific American—in 1868.).

© 2015 Henry Mintzberg