There’s a difference between looking at something and doing it. B-school professors pride themselves on scientific methods and empirical research. Their expertise is in objectively observing business, rather than subjectively doing business. The approach is therefore vicarious, detached, data-driven, and so on.
So are their books. This one, what really works is actually based on a formula -“4+2”. The approach is in keeping with their philosophy: Years of data, a 5 year study, and their claim: They have nailed the secret of ‘sustained business success’.
The book reveals something about the math and science mindset that dominates our schools and the business culture. It’s filled with facts but empty of judgment, personal experience, or humanity. It’s generic and interchangeable so it can scale, and it’s typical of a million other publications. It’s also endorsed by some really big names.
And it’s completely useless in any real sense, unless you think the 4 platitudes that form its argument are news: ’Make your strategy clear and focused.’ ‘Eexecute flawlessly.’ ‘Build a performance-based culture.’ “Make your organization fast and flat’.
I happened to choose this particular book as an example, but in fact it’s pretty typical. Business lit has become a deterministic, over-analytic, parody, the equivalent of listening to the sports results to enhance your game. They treat business as if it were physics, where all you have to do is learn the laws.
You can certainly observe business using scientific principles, but to try to do business in what was (falsely) seen as a ‘scientific’ process required that you ignored the people involved. It’s simply the wrong paradigm and it wasnlt scientific anyway. (There is no end of room for real science, of course, like neuroscience, for example.) The book, like so many others, has no relevance whatsoever in real life and I challenge anyone, using their own empirical standards to show that it has. It’s passionless, vicarious, voyeurism. It qualifies, to my mind, as leadership porn, or something even worse — it’s a report.
But it is also a very strong indicator of just how far we try to remove people from our understanding of business. This is where leadership must take up the slack and a topic I plan to explore in the next few posts.
Ken Carroll
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