I love The Economist, but sometimes...

...they do take on airs of the proverbial Seagull manager: Flutter in, squawk a bit, crap on a few things, and flutter out:

economist.com

Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People's Minds
THE “science” of management is largely derivative: a mix of military strategy, the economics of the firm and the engineering of processes. Less frequently than it should, it takes ideas from the field of psychology, and some of them have had considerable influence..... Two other influences may lie behind management's new-found enthusiasm for the science of Freud and Jung. The turmoil at the turn of the century, when stockmarkets' and businesses' fortunes rose and fell like boats in a force eight gale, increased managers' awareness that they live in a world that is not just ever-changing, but is changing ever more quickly too. “Change” is a buzzword in management literature today. Among other things, companies realise that they have to change, frequently and radically, the attitudes and practices of much of their workforce. For help they are turning to psychology.

The other influence comes from the spate of corporate scandals in America and Europe, and the subsequent soul-searching about the corruption of leadership. The study of leadership has, in the view of many of its more traditional exponents, gone “soft”. Out are the sturdy reminders of how the likes of Alexander and Shackleton led their men through impossible hardship; in are the exhortations to executives to examine their inner selves. “Get thee to a personal trainer,” is the fashionable advice.

A recent issue of the Harvard Business Review recommended that its high-flying readers “learn to navigate the twists and turns of their emotions”. (It is assumed that the leaders of Enron, Tyco and the like threw away their emotional compasses before they ever came close to a boss's chair.) “When there's dissonance between an executive's inside and outside,” the journal warned, “he's got trouble.”

Uhhh, Economist?

"Change" has been a buzzword since hair, one that's belatedly getting a serious look from some people because it keeps chopping them off at the knees.

The study of leadership has...gone Soft?

Jeebus. Leadership is precisely the study of how to get soft, squishy, self-interested things called people to commit "hard," worthy, unconventional acts of selflessness. Call it propagating courage and ambition. Unsolicited advice: You're posing. Supplement those World Bank seminars with one on Drucker or The Group Dynamic in Recruit Drill Instruction every once in a while.

Hmmm, what does Amazon's reference have to say:

Publishers Weekly: ....While the discussions and real-life examples are intriguing and do clarify Gardner's theories, the book doesn't fully deliver on its promise. Although Gardner does offer suggestions on how someone can influence others, he doesn't include a detailed prescriptive strategy for decision makers in the business world. Readers must draw out insights on their own, which, given the complexity of the material, may be difficult.

I bet I know why he doesn't offer up prescriptives. Here's another guy, Col. John Boyd, who worked to assemble a forest out of trees, much to the success of the American Military... and with the "Smart Set" kicking and screaming all the way....

[Boyd] absorbed the writings of great military theorists, like Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, and Jomini. He analyzed campaigns of the master practitioners, like Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Belisarius, Frederick the Great, Napoleon, Grant, Manstein, T. E. Lawrence, Lettow-Vorbeck, Mao, and Giap. Beginning with the Peleponnesian War, he studied conventional battles and guerrilla warfare.

....he [scoured] books on physics, mathematics, logic, information theory, evolutionary biology, genetics, cognitive psychology, cultural anthropology, sociology, political science, economics. Between 1973 and 1976, he poured his intellectual energy into producing a 16-page double-spaced, type-written paper describing his theory. Entitled "Destruction and Creation," this abstract treatise describes how a dialectical interplay of analysis and synthesis destroys and creates our mental images of the external world. It describes what pressures drive this mental process, and how internal phenomena naturally regulate it in a never-ending dialectic cycle, which takes on the outward manifestations of disorder turning into order, and order turning into disorder.

Boyd did not read books, he devoured them — marking them up, cross-correlating information in the front with information in the back, seeking out contradictions with every turn of the page, gleefully tearing each author's argument to pieces. After only six months, his copy of Clausewitz looked as if it were 100 years old. He never attempted to publish his work, but assembled all his research into a 15-hour briefing called a "Discourse on Winning and Losing." He gave the briefing to enlisted men and generals, congressmen, newspaper reporters, scientists, futurists, academics, anyone who would listen.

And the genuinely curious solution-oriented weren't yawning. I know Gardner's past work, haven't read this new book yet, but grew up Air Force, knowing "Ghengis John's" legend and learning a lot of the fact of his OODA loop. Guess what? Boyd's, like Gardner's work and approach, doesn't "bullet point" or fit on a te back of a napkin.

In that 15-hour lecture Boyd weaved an accellerated scientific, pyschological, cultural and historic tapestry. He slammed you through a true liberal arts approach to strategy, the world, it's inhabitants and their quirks. At it's conclusion, out pops you, a changed, chastened yet reeenergized individual with a new definition of clarity. And a broader understanding of the reasoning of people and their organizations. Boyd's ideas changed the way we think about situational awareness. He was a renaissance fighter pilot and the father of 4th Generation warfare and strategic thinking.

And he was a maverick. If you couldn't sit still to unlearn all the "mush" traditional, linear strategists like Clausewitz had palmed off on you--if you asked for bullets or an elevator speech--what I believe he termed "pre-chewing your food for you"--he'd butt his cigar out on your tie.

You don't intuitively "own" bulletpoints, was his message. And change makes those kinds of bullets moot the minute the crap hits the fan.

But--a strategic philosophical framework? Now, THAT you can own. And climb into. And fly.


Still need bullet points? Okay, I'm game. Or engaged. (Yeah, it's the second one.) More on this later.