Only When the Words Outdo the Silence

One of my favorite posters at a message board I’ve frequented since 2000 added a link on management to the business forum.  It covers a topic I’d like to see fully covered in a book and might have a title like: Drucker and Hume walk into a Starbucks: Management Explained through Philosophy.  The fellow who wrote the article, Michael Stewart, also wrote a book called The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza and the Fate of God in the Modern World (the title is a mouthful, but the actual writing and content isn’t as pompous as the title sounds) which is a solid read.  Here is an excerpt of the article entitled The Management Myth:

Beyond building skills, business training must be about values. As I write this, I know that my M.B.A. friends are squirming in their seats. They’ve all been forced to sit through an “ethics” course, in which they learned to toss around yet more fancy phrases like “the categorical imperative” and discuss borderline criminal behavior, such as what’s a legitimate hotel bill and what’s just plain stealing from the expense account, how to tell the difference between a pat on the shoulder and sexual harassment, and so on. But, as anyone who has studied Aristotle will know, “values” aren’t something you bump into from time to time during the course of a business career. All of business is about values, all of the time. Notwithstanding the ostentatious use of stopwatches, Taylor’s pig iron case was not a description of some aspect of physical reality—how many tons can a worker lift? It was a prescription—how many tons should a worker lift? The real issue at stake in Mayo’s telephone factory was notfactual—how can we best establish a sense of teamwork? It was moral—how much of a worker’s sense of identity and well-being does a business have a right to harness for its purposes?

“It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites — opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity — where energies flow smoothly in one direction — there will be much doing, but no music.”

-Eric Hoffer, The True Believer

Quoted in Beware the IN Crowd: Diverse Groups are Wiser, Kinder and Higher-Performing.