Pushing On a Tao

I had one of Elliot Masie's emails this morning and, as usual, it points to some interesting stuff for educators. He quoted this however and it interests me.

In the current edition of Harvard Business Review by Peter Drucker, he outlined a very crisp view of what makes an effective executive. They ranged over a wide set of personalities and approaches.

However, Drucker found that they all tended to follow the same eight practices:
* They asked, "What needs to be done?"
* They asked, "What is right for the enterprise?"
* They developed action plans.
* They took responsibility for decisions.
* They took responsibility for communicating.
* They were focused on opportunities rather than problems.
* They ran productive meetings.
* And they thought and said "we" rather than "I."
And Drucker added a ninth practice, "Listen first, speak last!"

My kvetch about management gurus is that they observe patterns of behaviour in successful people, enterprises etc and then convert them into rules which other, less successful people or organisations are supposed to follow in order to be successful.

There is a massive hole in this process because it depends on them, or someone else, knowing the answers to the questions, making the appropriate decisions, pursuing the valid opportunities and knowing the difference between the good and bad. But the crucial point is that these observed patterns are the result of the processes that make an effective executive not the cause. But the Tao of organisations and business development is a string, you can't push on it. It is an intergating, one way stream, like eating a butterfly cake. (Grossout warning, neutralise the gag reflex)

The cake is the input and the output is, to put it bluntly, crap. What's more, you cannot take the output and make it an input and expect to get butterfly cakes after passing it through the system again. Nor can you reverse the process.

The rule set is not co-extensive with its reverse; effective executive all do this, but not all people who do this are effective executives and while anyone can imporve their performance that is different from creating a performance where there is nothing now.

3 months ago I decided I should get back to swimming for my health. When I first hit the water again it took me 15 minutes to reach the point where I couldn't haul myself out of the pool, in that time I did 3 lengths of the pool, 150 metres. Yesterday I swam for 25 minutes and did 800 metres, today I added another hundred in the same time. Things are going very well, my improvement is marked. But to swim 1500 metres would take me 45 minutes at my current fitness level. I am fiddling around the edges compared with the Olympic record of 14:43:48 and there is no way in my whole life that I could or should been in that race.

The difference between me and you and people like Ian Thorpe or Kieran Perkins is not dedication or skill. My freestyle stroke is pretty good, but Thorpe has hands and feet the size of dinner plates and a reach like an orangutan. If we had exactly the same training schedule I would never get within laps of him.

My daughter, like many girls her age, loved her ballet, she worked hard and, over the years I could see her getting better and better; but she was never going to be a ballerina because the length of her legs, the design of her torso, all the mechanics were against her.

Which brings me back to Drucker. Instead of trying to get people to shoehorn themselves into some executive straightjacket, we should be looking through our businesses for people in the ranks who display the characteristics he talks about. We should be encouraging and challenging and testing those people, just as we do with athletes, pushing them to push their envelopes to see if they can break through to become one of the "effective executives" and making sure that when they do, we have given them plenty of reason to be loyal, or at least grateful as they move on. And yes, we should be looking at our execs and askign whether, if they do not do these things, they can, or should, be retained and promoted.

Effective Executive are not a product that we can make, but an emergent property of correctly functioning organisations.

Then again, there are the innovators who will always drive the rest of us nuts because they want to break stuff all the time, and we need them as well, and there are the leaders, people who, dammit, break all the rules, do nothing that Drucker thinks they should, and succeed anyway. And any business that knows how to tap the last two will be out of sight before the starting pistol's echo has died.

Comments

[Russ Volckmann]

I found Earl's comments so compelling that I am using some pieces of them as the "Leadership Quote" for my epublication, The Integral Leadership Review. I will also use your introductory comments. It will be issued this month. I would like you both to have an opportunity to check it out. Subscribing can be done at mt url and unsubscribing also on the issue announcement email.

Thanks for your blog. I just found it and am fighting the temptation to cancel a weeklong trip just to stay and read what is here.

:-{)}
Russ