Reflecting on Practice: An interview with Nigel Laurie

He remarked that John Kotter’s What Leaders Really Do on the manager-leader distinction has influenced many managers he worked with. (Kotter 2001).

Appeals to evidence in terms of reputation and stakeholder relationships notwithstanding. Marketing experts will be able to suggest further reasons why nothing was achieved. It was the repeated, emphatic, categorical “does it pay?” concern that stymied dialogue.

One finding from Kathleen Vohs: “Research on the repercussions of studying economics dovetails nicely with our results. Frank, Gilovich, and Regan (13) reported that university students majoring in economics made self-interested moves in social dilemma games more often than students of other disciplines. Economics students also were more convinced than non-economists that their competitors would make self-interested moves, a result that echoes the present thesis that money evokes a view that everyone fends for him- or herself.” (Vohs 2006, pp. 1154-56).

Not inevitably, of course. My student was one exception and I know others first-hand.

“Constancy, like integrity, sets limits to flexibility of character. Where integrity requires of those who possess it, that they exhibit the same moral character in different social contexts, constancy requires that those who possess it pursue the same goods through extended periods of time, not allowing the requirements of changing social contexts to distract them from their commitments or to redirect them.” (MacIntyre 1999).

Also useful in teaching has been Alan Montefiore’s account of integrity (Montefiore 1999).

Addressed also by Montefiore: “…integrity as a state of perfect integration, of being wholly at one with oneself, may more easily be thought of as a goal at which to aim, even if it is one for which definitive achievement can never be finally assured” (Montefiore 1999 p. 8).

The managers were not alone. I encountered one philosophy professor who insisted the behaviour of creative artists was exempt from ethical judgement altogether.

Passion discovered in work – as elsewhere – can be exhilarating to experience and inspiring to others but the rhetoric that demands it may be oppressive and intrusive. If they are expected to “perform” it, people without it may feel obliged to fake it and, in my observation, risk burnout. Moreover, passion isn’t an absolute good. The Chief Engineer of a flight simulator company once told me of the problems posed by what he called a “passion for improvement”. A client airline would first approve the prototype of a new simulator and, once finalised, contract to purchase a quantity built to spec and budget. Teams working separately on each simulator sometimes treated “their simulator” spec as provisional, design in their own improvements and put costs and schedule at risk. “I had to step in and point out that such improvements to a contracted spec were not useful: ‘The client knows what they need, by when and at what cost. Stockpile the good ideas for Mark II. Good enough is perfect’.”

It’s instructive to compare this with Warren Buffet on successful investing: “The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect. You need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd nor against the crowd”.

Not least in earning trust: “…persons of integrity…are those who are ‘all of a piece’, who have sufficient stability or weight of character for others to be able to depend on the presumption that if they are their allies today, they will not have changed their opinions and their allegiances tomorrow – not, at any rate, unless they have very serious and well-thought out reason for doing so…In short, one may ‘know where one stands’ with such persons; one knows what their real commitments and principles are, they are people who may be trusted.” (Montefiore 1999 pp. 10–11).

See e.g. David Shaw’s comments on the freeze-unfreeze-refreeze metaphor for organisational change and its persisting hold over some consultants and managers. Students, I’ve found, are often quick to see its flaws but some need prompting to probe its assumptions (Vandekerckhove 2022).

“The purpose is to try to weaken the opponent’s concentration, thereby causing them to underperform or be more prone to error. It can be effective because the batsman stands well within hearing range of the bowler and certain close fielders, and vice versa. The insults may be direct or may feature in conversations among fielders which are intended to be overheard by the batsman…There is debate in the cricketing world as to whether sledging constitutes deliberately poor sportsmanship or is simply good-humoured banter. Sledging is sometimes interpreted as abuse, and it is widely acknowledged some comments aimed as sledges do sometimes cross the line into personal abuse.

Sledging can sometimes be a humorous attempt at distraction. Former Australian captain Steve Waugh referred to the practice as one of ‘mental disintegration’.” https://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​Sledging_​(cricket).

Golf has its “spirit of golf”.

Wisely, training in this as in other management areas uses video recorded mini-cases as well as verbal material. “…It is not easy to find a formula by which we may determine how far and up to what point a man may go wrong before he incurs blame. But this difficulty of definition is inherent in every object of perception; such questions of degree are bound up with the circumstances of the individual case, where our only criterion is the perception.” (Aristotle 1953, p. 75).

The point about precision is particularly banal, but not apparently to all. As reported in the Financial Times: “…cost–benefit analysis can be a useful tool. It forces decision makers to think about the real-world effects of policies. The state should have to make a case when imposing new restrictions. In financial regulation, it amounts to asking whether the extra insurance that you’re telling society to buy against consumer harm or financial instability, say, is good value for money. The danger is that analysis that is something of an art becomes held up as a pseudoscience, or a way of getting at The Right Answer.” (Thomas 2022).

Reported in 2015 by an English ex-cricketer, Simon Jones, whose book contains interesting reflections on sportsmanship (Jones 2015).

The Boston Consulting Group – contra Marx as one would expect – once claimed leadership is like playing in a jazz band. An interesting analogy to pair with Marx.

A famous conductor in North America took a different approach, once shouting at his orchestra “not spontaneous enough. Now we rehearse the spontaneity”. I think he missed something there.

Other conductors he cited include Wilhelm Furtwangler and Bernard Haitink. An oft-repeated Furtwangler story: his orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic, was rehearsing with another conductor. Suddenly its sound changed markedly and it was then noticed that Furtwangler had just entered the hall.

What leaders bring can be negative; one I observed brought his anxiety with him to disturbing effect.

Prayer of Saint Francis: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace…”.

“Some students were in pyjamas, some were eating breakfast and others had turned their cameras off.”.

George Soros, a fan of Popper, once called for “institutionalised uncertainty” so I suspect he saw the value of it too.

I do quote it at the end of programmes.

Compare F. Scott Fitzgerald: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function”. (Fitzgerald 1936, p. 41).

“Company founder Thomas J Watson remarked to a sales-force meeting: ‘The trouble with every one of us is that we don't think enough. We don’t get paid for working with our feet – we get paid for working with our heads’. He then wrote THINK on the easel.” (Belden and Robins 1962, p. 157). For the THINK sign see https://​americanhistory.​si.​edu/​collections/​search/​object/​nmah_​690192

As I recall, no more than two out of three people in a reporting line could fly together and when large groups travelled they were broken into smaller units in different planes. Consider the outcome of the Mull of Kintyre Chinook RAF helicopter crash in 1994 which killed all 29 on board, including almost all the United Kingdom's senior Northern Ireland intelligence experts.

And very much in the spirit of Peter Drucker’s quasi-Kantian approach to decisions: “All events but the truly unique require a generic solution. They require a rule, a policy, a principle. Once the right principle has been developed, all manifestations of the same generic situation can be handled pragmatically, that is, by adaptation of the rule to the concrete circumstances of the case…The effective executive does not need to make many decisions.” (Drucker 1967, pp. 104, 108). Early in his career Drucker was a professor of politics and philosophy at Bennington College from 1942 to 1949.

According to The Times of London, “Tim Davie…told a leadership conference that ‘proportionality’ was crucial when leading the BBC, which meant being able to distinguish between genuine issues and noise generated by the press….Daily, we are on the front pages of the papers. You have to judge where something is serious, and it’s not necessarily what is the biggest press headline. I might get an email now that’s genuinely a problem that hasn’t got any press…you don’t want to surround yourself with people who flap and generate all this, ‘Oh it’s really serious’ It’s not. I’m exhausted by all of that and I find it slightly pathetic…People are quite shocked that I just disappear to a café for an hour and just map stuff and think. I think people confuse busyness with productivity in quite a profound way’.” (Kanter 2021).

For a possible coffee shop agenda see Joseph Badaracco’s discussion of building character (Badaracco 1998).

The MBA course at the University of British Columbia to which the philosopher Wayne Norman contributed (Norman 2004).

See European Philosophical Enquiry Centre whose former Director is Catherine McCall, a member of the Philosophy of Management editorial board. https://​epic-international.​org/​services/​ Also the brief report A Workshop that Worked (Kakkuri-Knuuttila and Trezise 2004).

Compare, too, political philosopher John Dunn: “To understand a human being as a human being is to understand them as an actual or potential speaker, in terms of what, speaking honestly and with due attention, they would have to say.” (Dunn 1993, p. 79).

Compare David Hockney: “Reflecting when people remark that his latest work does not look like a Hockney [he replies] that ‘it will’.” (Gayford 2021, p. 12).

Although some classic philosophers broke free of traditional forms, of course.

And increase our chances of helping, in George Orwell’s words from Why I Write, to “push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after”. (Orwell 1946b). https://​www.​orwellfoundation​.​com/​the-orwell-foundation/​orwell/​essays-and-other-works/​why-i-write/​

There are more complex issues of grammar and sentence construction, of course, but my experience with managers suggests tackling the basic choices resolves many of these other difficulties as Daniel Oppenheimer’s research confirmed: “While word length is not perfectly interchangeable with sentence complexity – for example, complexity can come from grammatical structure or infrequent words as well – it is a useful proxy. Using length as a manipulation of complexity allows for a simple, easily replicable word replacement algorithm. By keeping content constant and varying the complexity of vocabulary, it was possible to investigate the effectiveness of complexity.” Oppenheimer’s experiments involved Stanford students and one featured Descartes’ Meditation IV (Oppenheimer 2006).

Bryan Magee remarked of the style of some of his fellow philosophers: “The truth is that many of today’s leading philosophers are privately the subject of complaint from their own professional colleagues for the unwelcomingness (sic) of their writing.…One of them has given his name to a mode of writing in which the further the writer advances into each sentence, the more remote the end of it seems to become.” (Magee 2000).

http://​gunning-fog-index.​com/​ where you can upload text for a rough and ready score. Note the site disclaimer.

For an account of the serial (mis)interpretations see Miriam Green’s book (Green 2019) and her earlier papers in Philosophy of Management (Green 2005-2016).

“All in all, the effect is extremely robust: needless complexity leads to negative evaluations.” (Oppenheimer 2006).

For a selection of management author voices see Laurie and Cherry (2001, pp. 8–11).

https://​womeninblack.​org/​ Such protests are now new. Compare for instance the French Revolution and the role of “collective silences…as a mode of political action with a rhetoric of its own”. (Jung 2017). https://​doi.​org/​10.​1093/​fh/​crx062

Alice de Jonge’s abstract Political silencing and the power of AI in the July 2021 ABEN workshop: Business ethics scholars in China face “a series of dilemmas. First, there is the dilemma of establishing a scholarly ‘voice’ increasingly defined by state-controlled media outlets and networks like Weibo or RenRen or Wechat while seeking to ‘pierce the veil’ created by that same media in a search for ‘truth’. Second, there is the tension between the desire for ‘truth telling’, uncertainty about what the truth actually entails, and the need to survive within a system that increasingly demands varying degrees of self-censorship and self-monitoring”.

In a different setting, the Philosophy department at my old university – Guelph in Canada – has an Activist-in-Residence: https://​www.​uoguelph.​ca/​arts/​philosophy/​faculty

And in classroom experiments I’ve found most business students prize agency over mere experience of life “from the inside”, declining to enter Nozick’s experience machine in Anarchy, State and Utopia. They typically want “to make a difference in reality” sometimes specifically “to do some good in the world”. Giving up agency would frustrate them too (Nozick 1980, pp. 42–45).

At roughly the same time in the UK a performance bonus scheme for nurses showed how flawed assumptions about the link between bonuses and performance can be. Nurses protested at the implicit “insult” to their professional dedication.

Professor Andrew Wiles pursued a comparable strategy when solving Fermat’s Last Theorem. Wanting to work in isolation and secrecy, he “devised a cunning ploy which would throw his colleagues off the scent. During the early 1980s he had been working on a major piece of research on a particular type of elliptic equation, which he was about to publish in its entirety, until the discoveries of Ribet and Frey made him change his mind. Wiles decided to publish his research bit by bit, releasing another minor paper every six months or so. This apparent productivity would convince his colleagues that he was still continuing with his usual research. For as long as he could maintain this charade, Wiles could continue working on his true obsession without revealing any of his breakthroughs”. (Singh 2002, pp 229–230).

See e.g. https://​www.​timeshighereduca​tion.​com/​features/​academy-i-dreamed-20-years-no-longer-exists-and-i-am-waking

See e.g. https://​www.​newappsblog.​com/​2014/​06/​philosophers-who-work-outside-of-academia-part-1-how-and-why-do-they-end-up-there.​html