Latest / The Innovation Show / Henry Mintzberg: Who Ever Measured Management? | Bust Those Management Myths

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Henry Mintzberg: Who Ever Measured Management? | Bust Those Management Myths · The Innovation Show

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  the way I show strategy is as position and as perspective, and I show a position
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  pointing down to the X on the spot.
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  You know, that's where the market is.
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  The-- this is where the people who turn to your podcast are.
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  That's position.
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  Perspective is kinda what's the philosophy of this podcast?
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  What's, what's the, what's the worldview?
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  What are you trying to accomplish?
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  It's kind of, sorta, you know getting people who have developed interesting
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  ideas to, to express them here.
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  And, and that's your perspective, and that's kinda looking up broader
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  issues, and positioning is looking down.
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  Michael Porter I think to his credit looks at strategy as position,
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  has always looked at strategy as position, but not perspective.
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  But Drucker, with his theory of the business which is basically
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  perspective, vision, had that other view.
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  you've gotta keep your eyes open for where it doesn't apply, 'cause
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  no theory applies everywhere.
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  as I say you don't use the round earth theory to build runways in Holland
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  the myth, as I describe it, is this ridiculous comment that if you can't
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  measure it, you can't manage it.
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  Nobody ever measured management properly.
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  The effect of a manager.
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  I don't know anybody who ever even tried to measure the effect of
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  measurement and whether it always works.
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  Demythify, that's what today's guest does.
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  He has spent a lifetime trying to bust and burst every management
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  myth in sight, to take them out of sight for the sake of insight.
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  In the process, he has set out to reframe managing and measuring,
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  strategy and structure, lofty leadership and lowly politics.
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  If we can refresh our laptops, surely we can refresh our heads.
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  Hence, he offers today's book as a collection of corrections,
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  his freshest ideas so to speak, mostly exerted from his books and
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  articles and blogs and utterances.
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  Together, let's turn over the rocks that cover 10 myths.
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  We won't get through all 10 today, but we'll get through as many as we can to
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  understand what is happening underneath.
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  It is always a pleasure to welcome a man who's become a friend an author of
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  a plethora of titles, I think he's up around 30, y- you may correct me now
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  in a second, some of which adorn the shelves here behind me, others on my
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  Kindle on my machine in front of me.
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  He is with us to discuss his latest book.
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  He's still going, still writing every single morning.
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  Bust Those Management Myths, Henry "Mythburst" Mintzberg, welcome to the show
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  It's always delightful to be here,
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  Great to have you with us, man.
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  All the time I, I learn so much.
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  W- me and Henry have conversations and I'm like, "We should've recorded that.
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  We should've recorded that," because he's written for so long, so many ideas,
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  and we were talking about some of them.
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  I'll link to them in the show notes afterwards.
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  Stuff that's disappeared that was absolute gold, that just didn't catch on, and it
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  doesn't catch on not because it's good, it just doesn't fit the thinking at the time.
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  But Henry, I thought we'd begin with the mother of all myths.
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  So I reversed the order a little bit to try and get some of
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  the important stuff up front.
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  In management and elsewhere, that our own theory is true.
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  No theory is true, you say.
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  All are myths in one way or the other, although some can be useful,
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  and this is actually myth 10 from the book, our theory is true.
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  And the de-myth is no theory is true, but sometimes they're useful.
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  Over to you
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  Yeah, you know, no theory is true because theory is not reality.
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  Theory is in words and numbers and symbols and diagrams or whatever
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  it is on paper or on a screen.
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  That's not reality.
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  Theory is a simplification of reality.
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  Every theory is a simplification of reality.
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  You know, Columbus discovered truth.
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  The Earth is round.
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  Actually, it's not round.
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  It's a bit oblong, slightly.
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  And, and when I look out my window in the house on the lake, I see hills.
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  I mean, that's not flat.
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  That's not round.
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  It's neither flat nor round.
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  The lake is flat, but the h- but the-- what I see is not round.
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  Each hill is round.
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  so, so every theory is a simplification.
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  The flat Earth theory is perfectly useful for building runways in Holland.
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  You know, nobody corrects for the curvature of the Earth, you know,
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  adding a millimeter at one end to correct for the curvature of the Earth.
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  So the flat Earth theory is fine.
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  the round Earth theory proved to be really good for flying
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  airplanes and sailing ships.
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  And the oblong Earth theory, I have no idea what anybody does with that,
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  but it's also true in its own right.
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  So the trouble is when we take theories as true, we turn them into
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  dogmas, and then we stop thinking
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  One of the things I found interesting there was firstly in the book
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  you say also, I didn't know this, that the Earth actually bulges
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  a little bit at the equator, so it's actually not a round Earth.
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  So there, there is so- some truth to it not being a round Earth.
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  But one of the things you said really interesting, Henry, here was that theory
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  itself, it helps you get to another theory, and I thought deeply about this.
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  I was like, going, "It should do," but I'm sure you've seen this many times in your
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  own work in professorship, in working as a strategist, that companies have a theory.
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  It helps them get started with a business.
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  The m- world moves on, but they use the old theory.
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  They don't upgrade the theory, and you said that upgrading is absolutely key
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  Yeah, you know, you gotta-- So another way of putting that
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  is you, you've gotta nuance.
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  You, y- as, as things carry on, you've gotta nuance things.
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  So, you know, when you start off with some new form of retailing,
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  like IKEA, let's say, flat pack retailing new and it's, fairly general.
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  But as you go along and as competitors start catching up, you
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  gotta keep nuancing your approach, your theory of the business.
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  I think Drucker referred to it as the theory of the business -- And
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  you've gotta keep your eyes open for where it doesn't apply, 'cause
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  no theory applies everywhere.
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  as I say you don't use the round earth theory to build runways in Holland
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  You, you mentioned as well your former colleague in McGill, Donald Hebb,
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  and he explained it beautifully.
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  A good theory is one that holds together long enough to get you to a better theory.
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  And The reason I share that is the importance of learning as a leader cannot
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  be measured at all, and you talk a lot in the book about measurement, but it stops.
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  A- and many, many leaders have success, and that success
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  actually traps them in the past
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  Absolutely.
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  You know, you know I defy anyone to measure what a
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  child learns in a classroom.
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  and don't tell me it's some Mickey Mouse exam because there's
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  much deeper forms of learning.
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  And yet we measure like crazy.
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  The British are completely nuts about it, but they do it everywhere, I think.
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  They just measure, measure measure and drive… They, they destroy teaching
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  in effect by reducing it to measuring.
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  Measuring's good and measuring is important to keep on track and so
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  on, to understand what's going on.
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  But if you go crazy with measuring, then the myth, as I describe it, is
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  this ridiculous comment that if you can't measure it, you can't manage it.
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  Nobody ever measured management properly.
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  The effect of a manager.
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  I don't know anybody who ever even tried to measure the effect of
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  measurement and whether it always works.
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  I love what you say.
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  You say, "Learned people who insist on the supremacy of their own theory, no
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  matter what the circumstance, turn it into a dogma that suppresses thinking
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  in in favor of indoctrination." And then you couple it with a brilliant John Mar-
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  Maynard Keynes quip, "Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from
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  any intellectual influences are usually the slaves of some defunct economist."
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  … And they go so well together, both your quote and Keynes' quote.
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  But I share that to say, how many times have we seen this?
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  So consultants or authors, on the shelves here behind me, competing with each other.
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  And I wondered what your thought was.
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  Like, my, my thinking from learning this for a decade now, every week
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  studying this work, is that if a company brings in a framework that's
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  useful for them, that's the win.
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  Because now they have some place to take action from, and they may
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  discover that it's no longer useful, but at least they've got a start
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  Yeah.
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  Yeah, you need a-- you need kind of vision, some kind of sense.
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  You know, I, I-- the way I show strategy is as position and as
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  perspective, and I show a position pointing down to the X on the spot.
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  You know, that's where the market is.
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  The-- this is where the people who turn to your podcast are.
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  That's position.
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  Perspective is kinda what's the philosophy of this podcast?
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  What's, what's the, what's the worldview?
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  What are you trying to accomplish?
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  It's kind of, sorta, you know getting people who have developed interesting
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  ideas to, to express them here.
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  And, and that's your perspective, and that's kinda looking up broader
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  issues, and positioning is looking down.
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  Michael Porter I think to his credit looks at strategy as position,
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  has always looked at strategy as position, but not perspective.
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  But Drucker, with his theory of the business which is basically
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  perspective, vision, had that other view.
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  And I use Egg McMuffin as an example that when McDonald's introduced Egg
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  McMuffin, it was to capture the breakfast market, 'cause even Americans weren't e--
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  weren't eating hamburgers for breakfast.
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  So they introduced this product.
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  And I say to the class of managers, "Was this a strategic change for McDonald's?"
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  And half say yes, and half say no.
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  You know, the, the half who say yes said, "Of course, new product.
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  New market, new product." And ha-- the other half say, "Come on, same old
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  thing." and I say, "You're both right.
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  You're-- one of you is defining strategy as position, the other is defining
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  strategy as perspective." This is new position in an old perspective.
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  McDuckling à l'orange would be new position in a new perspective
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  And I'm gonna link to the quotes and the many blogs where Henry has
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  this, and also MythSite.org as well, where you can find much more of this,
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  and indeed, the new book as well.
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  But myth number two that I pulled, so this is not in order at all,, which
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  is proper strategies are planned.
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  And I told you about the accompanying piece I wrote for this about this
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  idea of painting by numbers, and you said this is a widespread myth that
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  proper strategies are planned out.
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  And you counter it by saying, "Interesting strategies are learned,
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  and to make decisions, we're supposed to think before we act.
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  There are times, however, when you do better by acting in order to think, even
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  by seeing in order to act." Maybe you'll decouple what you're talking about there.
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  Well, I, I can decouple the second by talking about couples because h-h-how,
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  how do we, how do we find our mates?
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  First means you list all the possible mates that you could have.
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  You list the criteria you're looking for.
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  You rank each candidate on each criterion.
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  You add them up, and then you, and then you inform the lucky person who by this
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  time has gone off and gotten married.
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  That's not how we find mates.
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  I-in India, the families tend to try and find mates that way and it probably
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  works just as well, but we don't do that.
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  We typically do what's called seeing-- what I call seeing first.
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  Not thinking first, but seeing first.
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  You turn the corner, there she is, that's it.
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  You know, my father met my mother in New York and called his mother
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  the same day and said, "Today I met the woman I'm gonna marry."
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  There wasn't a lot of analysis or thinking in that.
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  was just seeing.
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  But sometimes when seeing or thinking doesn't work, you do first.
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  You try something.
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  I'll leave to the imagination of your listeners as to who as to what
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  that could mean in ma-in mating.
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  But, but basically you try something.
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  If it works, you do more of it.
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  If it doesn't work, you do left and less, and you kinda learn your way
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  a strategy, and that's doing first.
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  And often strategies emerge by this trial and error testing and testing
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  rather than this idea of sitting in an executive suite and thinking all the time.
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  That's the weakness of the Porter view.
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  It's all about analysis and calculation.
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  And Porter, it was quoted, I think in The Economist or somewhere, as saying " I
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  favor making strategy through a set of analytical techniques." And I maintain
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  that nobody in the history of the Earth has ever made a strategy through an
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  analytical technique because strategy is about synthesis more than analysis
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  speaking of playing the field, I'm, I'm just inferring that's
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  what you're talking about there
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  . A rugby player, you must know a lot about playing the field
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  I'm talking about sport here … I thought about this actually, 'cause
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  it, it really your, your image, your metaphor of flies and bees stuck in
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  the jam jar is brilliant, and I'm gonna let you share that with our audience.
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  But it made me think about how when you're, when, when, as a, as a pr-
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  professional sports person, sometimes people go, "You're thinking too much.
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  You're thinking too much." And as a kid, I remember being a, like a 19-year-old
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  kid being told that and having no idea what the coach was talking about.
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  And it's only later on, in retrospect, you look back and you go, I, I
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  was plan- I was, like, kind of going, "Okay, this'll happen, and
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  that'll happen, and this'll happen."
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  And actually, some of the b- the, the best players are unthinking in that they've
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  either processed thinking so well that they don't have to think, so they're
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  actually, it looks like it's instinct.
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  Or there's the opposite side, where actually they're not very
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  clever at all, and they just do.
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  And because they do, they're there a split second before everyone else
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  because they're just doing all the time.
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  And I often think about if you look like at American football or if you look at
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  soccer, where, say, there's a, you know, a big Hai- Hail Mary pass thrown, and
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  you have somebody running for that pass.
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  And they're not thinking, and they're putting their body on the line.
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  They're not thinking about, oh, is there somebody gonna be
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  there that's gonna smash me?
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  I'm just going for that ball.
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  And I thought about the, the power of just doing in those moments,
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  and I, and this reminded me then of your flies and bees metaphor
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  Well, you know, e- experience and intuition kind of go together in a way.
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  You c- you, you can't be intuitive about things f- about
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  which you have no experience.
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  I have no intuition about landing on the moon.
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  I have no experience about landing on the moon.
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  So, so you build up experience, and that enhances your ability to
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  be intuitive rather than analytic.
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  Rather than calculating and doing it, somehow you're pros-
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  processing this stuff implicitly, subconsciously but it's not calculated.
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  So, so, you know, Wayne Gretzky has a, a famous quote about, "I skate
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  to where the puck is going to be." He's the greatest hockey player
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  probably of all time, and, "I skate to where the puck is going to be."
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  Really interesting.
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  know, intuition is not hunch.
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  is not speculation.
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  Intuition is you know, just don't know why it is or why you know it.
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  So when Gretzky says, "I skate to where the puck is going to be," he's
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  not saying, "I skate to where I think the puck is going to be." He's skating
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  to where the puck is going to be.
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  He knows.
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  As far as the bees and flies I don't take credit for that.
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  It was in Peterson and Waterman's famous book of years ago , and by a guy named
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  Liu, I think, who came up with this.
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  But I extended it a bit.
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  So the, the metaphor is if you put bees and flies into a bottle and leave the
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  closed end open, take the cap out of the bottle, and then you put the closed
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  end of the bottle against the window,
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  , You'll see something interesting.
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  The bees are smart.
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  They know about light, and they know they think well, that if the … there's a
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  crisis in the nest, head for the light.
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  If the nest is catching on fire, head for the light.
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  They don't know about glass.
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  They have no experience with glass.
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  They're not intuitive about glass.
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  And, and it's fascinating to watch a bee on a window.
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  They just don't get it.
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  They just … They keep buzzing and buzzing.
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  The flies are stupid.
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  flies don't know about glass.
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  The flies don't know about light.
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  So the flies are going every which way, and inside of a few minutes,
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  the flies have liberated themselves because they happen to reach the outlet,
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  and the bees are committing suicide.
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  And this is where I add, the moral of the story is we have too many bees
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  making strategy and not enough flies.
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  and that's my thing about the rugby players.
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  The f- the fly that just keeps battering his head against the wall
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  will eventually find a way out there.
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  Yeah, yeah.
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  I heard another lovely one, actually.
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  Well, it's, it's actually quite tragic, which is for 100 million
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  years, sea turtles had this overarching strategy which is when you hatch,
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  head for the brightest light.
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  And for 100 million years, that brightest light was the moon, and then along cames
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  elec- comes electricity, and we build beautiful hotels with brilliant lights on
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  the beach, and they head towards those.
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  They head inland towards the hotels.
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  And I thought about how the same thing here about this in- this embedded way
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  of doing things that was successful for such a long time now changes because
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  of some new technology, and you're stuck with the old way of doing things.
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  And you beautifully say, "Strategic planning, for example, may be fine
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  when an organization needs to program a strategy that is working well,
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  just as communityship," we'll talk about that in a moment, "should be
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  suspect when it encourages groupthink.
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  We have to keep our minds open for the next good theory that comes along,
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  bearing in mind that it, too, could eventually turn out to be mythical."
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  There's a lot in there, but this idea of there's a shift,
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  and the shift needs an update.
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  It needs a software update, a, a mindware update, and we don't do it
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  And, you know, somebody somebody new comes along and says, "How about this
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  way?" And somebody old says, "No, no, I've been here 50 years and I know how
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  to do it." And the other person responds, "You don't have 50 years of experience.
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  You have one year of experience 50 times." On the other hand, the young
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  upstart could be all wrong anyway because they're probably coming
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  in with some analytic approach compared to an intuitive approach.
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  There is a section in the book where I talk about different
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  forms of organizations.
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  And I have a wonderful quote from Mesopotamia which shows that
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  the machine bureaucratic way of organizing is very, very very old.
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  That's the way they organized in ancient Mesopotamia, and it worked fine for them.
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  But it doesn't work so perfectly fine if you're playing rugby and and you
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  see an opening, and you just dive through it rather than going by the book
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  And you've teed us up beautifully for myth number two from the book, which
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  is there's two myths of organizing.
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  Which is organizations have tops, middles, and therefore bottoms, and the Demyth
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  is beyond hierarchical leadership, organizations need engaged communityship.
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  I said we'd come back to that.
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  So in here, you introduce beautiful language, slabs and
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  silos, webs, et cetera, et cetera.
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  I'll hand it over to you, and I have diagrams here if you
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  wanna speak to those diagrams.
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  I'll pull them up on the screen
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  Yeah.
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  The, the first part of that is simply that we're so obsessed with control
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  and hierarchy and it's, articulated most commonly in these boxes.
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  So you have top management and middle management, and of course you have
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  bottom management, but nobody ever dares to say bottom management.
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  You mustn't say bottom management.
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  But you can say-- we always say top and middle management.
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  Well, top of what?
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  of the pay scale?
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  Sure.
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  Top of the salary?
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  Top of the building?
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  Sure.
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  But, but is seeing yourself on top of things, like everything down there,
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  does that enable you to be on top of what's going on in the organization?
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  So -- first of all, these are metaphors.
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  Top and middle are not reality, they're metaphors, and
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  they're dangerous metaphors.
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  They distort.
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  And then we talk a lot about silos, and you just showed that the diagram of silos.
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  But these are slabs.
• 22:01
  So silos are vertical renditions of this, again, hierarchy.
• 22:06
  But I introduce slabs, are horizontal renditions of hierarchy,
• 22:13
  where top management's on the top and middle management's in the
• 22:17
  middle, and everybody's on a slab.
• 22:19
  And it keeps people apart.
• 22:21
  Just like silos keep departments apart way, so slabs keep people apart.
• 22:28
  And especially when you put people on floors -- not according to who
• 22:33
  they need to work with or talk to, but according to where they are.
• 22:36
  So all the Cs, you know, chief operating officers and chief technology officers
• 22:42
  they all sit on one floor, so they can't talk to anybody but themselves, which
• 22:46
  is the worst way to run an organization.
• 22:50
  And, and you know, some of the newer high-tech companies
• 22:54
  don't have in towers at all.
• 22:57
  Like Apple, they have flat buildings where people will go a mile horizontally,
• 23:02
  and they won't go a floor vertically.
• 23:04
  You know?
• 23:04
  It's just more natural to spread out horizontally.
• 23:07
  They feel more comfortable.
• 23:08
  They're more connected
• 23:10
  And , you introduce, Henry, a whole new vocabulary for thinking about this,
• 23:15
  which is chains, hubs, webs, and sets.
• 23:19
  And maybe you'll share these, but the metaphor of the
• 23:22
  wedding was quite useful for me
• 23:24
  So, we're obsessed with chains these days.
• 23:26
  We talk about value chains and chains of command, which is a vertical chain
• 23:31
  that sits over a horizontal chain, but it's still a link down and that's
• 23:36
  a very linear view of the world.
• 23:40
  So in a wedding, for example we f- we form a chain when we go to the buffet table.
• 23:48
  We form a line, and we eat in order, and we take our food in order.
• 23:52
  So we pick up a bit of salad first, and then the main course, and then the rice,
• 23:57
  and so on, and everything's very linear.
• 24:00
  But when we go to sit down at our table, if you look at the hub, we sit
• 24:05
  down at our table, that's a kinda hub.
• 24:08
  That's a place where we've all gotten together.
• 24:12
  And a hospital is a hub where patients and doctors and
• 24:16
  nurses come in and, and go out.
• 24:20
  And patients are hubs within hospitals because all the services are-- or most of
• 24:25
  the services to a patient come to them.
• 24:28
  They don't go out, you know?
• 24:30
  Except for maybe fancy equipment, X-rays, the rest comes to them.
• 24:34
  The physician comes to them, the nurses come to them, the
• 24:37
  food comes to them, and so on.
• 24:39
  So they're a hub within the organization that's a hub.
• 24:43
  And of course, we use that word for airports too, where planes come and go and
• 24:48
  connect to take people to other places.
• 24:51
  But then when you start dancing, I mean, look at these four diagrams.
• 24:54
  It's quite clear what happens when you start dancing.
• 24:57
  That's, that's a web.
• 24:59
  Everybody's interacting every which way and chatting every which way
• 25:02
  and moving around every which way, and that's a research organization.
• 25:08
  , And then there's sets where it's everybody for themselves and and
• 25:16
  everybody apart from everybody else.
• 25:19
  And this is like baseball everything that happens in baseball happens separately.
• 25:26
  People are completely separate.
• 25:28
  It's a great sport for COVID because you don't risk getting
• 25:32
  infected from every- anybody else.
• 25:34
  The scrum in rugby is the worst place for COVID.
• 25:39
  You can imagine the guys would never wear masks anyway, right?
• 25:43
  So, so the scrum is a classic example of a hub where you put the ball in and
• 25:50
  a head comes rolling out, whatever.
• 25:53
  I once covered rugby for the McGill Daily Newspaper when I was a student,
• 25:58
  and I published a cartoon of a head rolling out of a scrum, instead of
• 26:03
  Not, not far wrong, Henry.
• 26:05
  Not far wrong
• 26:07
  But so anyway, football is, is so linear.
• 26:10
  Football is so incredibly linear.
• 26:12
  Not soccer, but American football is the ultimate linear sport.
• 26:16
  Everything is linear.
• 26:18
  Everything, everything is programmed.
• 26:20
  I read that in the book and I was like, exactly like the, the plays.
• 26:24
  And I read about one of the great case studies.
• 26:27
  It was one of the top coaches, and they won the NFL because this guy did something
• 26:32
  off the cuff because he'd studied video.
• 26:35
  And he goes, "I know what that guy's gonna do."
• 26:36
  And he didn't do what the coach wanted, and they won the
• 26:40
  Super Bowl because he did it.
• 26:41
  And the coach marked him down, gave him a bad mark bec-
• 26:44
  so.
• 26:45
  How dare them?
• 26:46
  Yeah
• 26:47
  That's hierarchy.
• 26:48
  Yeah, the deviance, like don't deviate from the plan
• 26:52
  I mean, in rugby, I, I, I, I never played it.
• 26:57
  That's why I'm so healthy today, but you're pretty healthy, too.
• 27:00
  But I never played it, but I can't imagine a coach in rugby
• 27:05
  doing something like that.
• 27:06
  They want the unexpected, don't they?
• 27:08
  The best teams are actually the teams, I played for one of the best teams.
• 27:12
  It was such a gift.
• 27:13
  Stade Toulousain, a, a French team, and everybody thinks they play this style.
• 27:19
  You speak French, so jouer, which means to play just it's like off the cuff.
• 27:24
  But , they work so, so hard to make it look that way,
• 27:28
  and I think that's the thing.
• 27:29
  Like, you, you work the skill for a long, long time, and then it looks
• 27:35
  effortless, or it looks like you're playing off the cuff, but you're
• 27:37
  actually, you've honed those senses you talked about earlier on, the intuition.
• 27:42
  It's because I have been on the moon many times.
• 27:45
  I've practiced being on the moon, or I've simulated it.
• 27:48
  Now, I can do it.
• 27:49
  And I, I wanted to bring this maybe full circle and, and we- my finish on
• 27:53
  this, and you and your friend Danny Miller talked about this before.
• 27:58
  He wrote the book, The Icarus Paradox, about how many, many people
• 28:03
  in university and management schools are, trained in the old way, and
• 28:09
  you say management is not a science.
• 28:11
  Science is about the development of systematic knowledge through research.
• 28:16
  Management schools do much research, but surprisingly little of it has anything
• 28:20
  to do with the management process itself.
• 28:23
  It's mostly about the business functions, and especially about how
• 28:27
  they use the scientific disciplines.
• 28:29
  For example, economics and finance and psychology and marketing, and
• 28:33
  many business schools barely even teach management, perhaps because
• 28:37
  they are so busy teaching leadership.
• 28:39
  So, maybe you'll unpack that for us because it was an incredibly
• 28:43
  insightful piece, and I didn't wanna miss it for today's episode.
• 28:47
  Well, you can't teach leadership, you can't teach intuition.
• 28:52
  I, I describe management as the, as a, in a triangle where art and s- and craft
• 28:59
  meet science in the form of analysis.
• 29:02
  Except in management, the art is often the case, but not always.
• 29:08
  Sometimes some managers are more artistic, more visionary, more
• 29:12
  insightful, is art, than others.
• 29:16
  But there's not much science because, you know, there's not a sort of
• 29:20
  playbook where you go and say, "Here's the best way to do whatever it is
• 29:25
  you're doing." We don't have that.
• 29:27
  But, but craft is central.
• 29:30
  Craft is experience.
• 29:32
  Cra- A- And, and that's the single most important dimension.
• 29:36
  Too much craft, of course, and you're at nothing but experience.
• 29:39
  Too much science, and you're a technocrat.
• 29:41
  We got lots of that.
• 29:43
  Too much art, and you, you'll go off and be crazy like Mr. Musk.
• 29:48
  But some place where art, craft, and science meet with a lot of craft, some
• 29:52
  science, and whatever art is necessary is really what we need in organizations.
• 29:59
  But , we can't teach the art.
• 30:04
  And you can't teach the craft with people who don't have experience,
• 30:08
  which are most of the people in MBA programs who don't have much
• 30:11
  managerial experience, or if any.
• 30:14
  And so we teach the science.
• 30:15
  We teach analysis in marketing and finance and so on.
• 30:19
  And then they graduate as technocrats.
• 30:22
  They think it's all about analysis, and so they measure like mad
• 30:26
  maybe we'll have a final message to leaders out there.
• 30:29
  So many of the listenership of the show are the people who are struggling
• 30:33
  from all the stuff you talk about, Henry, which is the overly measured.
• 30:38
  Myself working as a head of innovation before, it was like, "Give me a
• 30:41
  number for what that idea that has never been done before will
• 30:45
  achieve for us in the business."
• 30:47
  And I used to call it the innovation auction, because it
• 30:49
  was like, I'd go, "10 grand?" And they'd be like, shake their head.
• 30:54
  And I go, "20?" "No, no." And then you go, "100?" And then they go,
• 30:58
  "Yes." And it was like you're bidding against yourself to get the idea over
• 31:02
  the line, the innovation auction.
• 31:04
  But then you have a target on your back, and the target's plucked from the air,
• 31:09
  so it's not real, but it just gets the CFO or the, whoever this person putting
• 31:14
  the number on your back off your back for a little bit of time, but now you're
• 31:18
  on the green mile and you're in trouble
• 31:21
  , You know, personally I often get asked about the book is what's my
• 31:25
  favorite myth or what's the worst myth or what's the most serious myth?
• 31:30
  And the first time I asked that, I looked over all the myths and I said, "You know
• 31:33
  what? Eight of them are all about the same thing." They're all about disconnect.
• 31:37
  That's the big myth in a way.
• 31:39
  And they're about disconnecting management from the subject of
• 31:43
  management in, in one way or another.
• 31:46
  Being on top, strategic planning, decision-making is thinking they're
• 31:51
  all disconnect from reality, from implementation or from, from activity.
• 31:57
  And so a- and that's the big problem.
• 32:01
  And of course, then we have management by targets.
• 32:05
  If you don't know what's going on, then you wanna measure, so as you say,
• 32:08
  you force people to give you a measure and you hold them accountable to it.
• 32:12
  Well, granddaughters, you know, are 20 and 15, they could do that.
• 32:17
  I mean, that's not very hard to get people to give numbers and then hold
• 32:21
  them accountable to those numbers.
• 32:24
  But that's hardly nuanced managing and there are managers who don't meet
• 32:29
  the numbers and are hugely successful because they're in a terrible market.
• 32:33
  And there are other managers who glide through the numbers and should be
• 32:37
  fired because the market was so good, they should've done twice as well.
• 32:41
  Always in context.
• 32:42
  And for much more context, I'm gonna link to all Henry's books.
• 32:45
  Don't forget as well, Rebalancing Society, we covered that on this show
• 32:48
  before, because that idea of balance is at the heart of so much of Henry's work.
• 32:54
  I'm also gonna link to, maybe you'll say a word on this, Henry,
• 32:57
  the brilliant article you wrote about the left brain in business.
• 33:00
  It must have been 30 years ago you wrote that article in HBR.
• 33:04
  I've resurfaced it in my writing for this episode, but I thought it
• 33:08
  was a, a magnificent article, and it kinda got missed in some way
• 33:13
  Planning on the left side and managing on the right.
• 33:17
  Yeah, I read a book by Ornstein called The Psychology of Consciousness,
• 33:20
  which talked about the research where they had to cut the connection
• 33:24
  between the two halves of our brain and discovered all kinds of things
• 33:27
  about what happens in each hemisphere.
• 33:30
  And that described to me the managing I saw in practice more
• 33:33
  right hemispheric, left arm, right hemispheric, and the management I saw
• 33:38
  in in the books, in literature, which is very s- analytic, systematic, very
• 33:45
  left brain, analytic, technocratic.
• 33:49
  That sort of got lost.
• 33:50
  Well, the article maybe has gotten lost, but the whole concept of split brain,
• 33:55
  I think, is somehow-- isn't talked about as much as it was a while ago.
• 34:00
  Maybe it'll come back
• 34:01
  Let's bring it back, man.
• 34:02
  Let's bring it back.
• 34:03
  And it's, Henry, so grateful to have you on the show.
• 34:08
  There's also a website that goes with this book, like there is
• 34:11
  with many of your books as well.
• 34:12
  You're very generous with so much of your blogs.
• 34:15
  You continue to write every day, as I said as well, and I said this
• 34:19
  to Henry as well, he's a great man for paddling his own canoe.
• 34:22
  Still goes out in the canoe, dragging that canoe in, behind him.
• 34:25
  He's like, "Oh, Aidan, you're a bit of an idiot here. Of course I paddle
• 34:29
  my own canoe, otherwise it won't move." And, and again, context,
• 34:34
  it's an Irish saying, to paddle your own canoe is to go your own way.
• 34:39
  You know, I hurt my wrist dragging my canoe through the forest a few weeks
• 34:43
  ago so we gotta be careful about things.
• 34:46
  But yeah, we paddle our own canoes, and even the person in
• 34:50
  the front we expect to paddle.
• 34:52
  I mean, if you're in the back, it's probably your
• 34:54
  canoe and you're steering it.
• 34:56
  You steer from the back in a canoe.
• 34:57
  But the person in the front has to paddle too, so everybody paddles the canoe.
• 35:02
  You know, it reminded me of the, maybe because it's close to your
• 35:06
  world, closer to mine, we, we have wol- wolves over there.
• 35:09
  We don't have many wolves in Ireland, but I l- I read this beautiful thing
• 35:12
  about wolves that the leader of a wolf pack is actually at the back, and they
• 35:16
  put the sick and the injured at the front because it's safer for them, and
• 35:21
  the, the leader wolf goes from the back first and minds the whole lot be- for…
• 35:25
  So it might be a nice metaphor for the canoe as, as well.
• 35:28
  You steer from the back
• 35:31
  Yeah, I've never seen wolves close to here.
• 35:35
  There's a quotation that I heard, I think in Japan, "There they go. I've got to
• 35:40
  follow them because I'm their leader."
• 35:43
  Nice, nice.
• 35:45
  Love that.
• 35:45
  Love that.
• 35:47
  Henry, absolute pleasure.
• 35:49
  I'm gonna link to the book, author of Bust Those Management Myths, Henry "Myth
• 35:54
  Burst" Mintzberg, thank you for joining us
• 35:57
  Okay, Aidan.
• 35:58
  It's always delightful
• 36:00
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• 36:03
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