Archive for the 'History' Category
OWL’S HOOTS NO. 2
Thursday, April 2nd, 2009
Hoots No. 2 - 2 April 2009: A renaissance quotation about critics which may be just as valid today, caterpillars welcomed into the nests of ants. And the value of an MBA and the nature of managerialism revealed.
Beware of Critics: In Ingrid Rowland’s book ‘Giordano Bruno Philosopher/Heretic’ (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 2008) there are two quotations from John Florio (1553 - 1625) who was an accomplished linguist and lexicographer, a royal language tutor at the Court of James I, a probable close friend and influence on William Shakespeare and the translator of Montaigne. Here is one:
“As for critiks I accompt of them as crickets; no goodly bird if a man marke them, no sweete note if a man heare them, no good luck if a man have them; they lurk in corners, but catch cold if they look out; they lie in sight of the furnace that ryes others, but will not come neare the flame that should purifie themselves: they are bred of filth, and fed with filth, what vermin to call them I know not, or wormes or flyes, or what worse?”
I have drawn attention to critics before.
Next week, Florio’s view of scholars.
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Managerialism buried (I wish): The second most important issue which surfaced this week, so far as I am concerned, is managerialism. (The first continues to be global climate change, carbon emissions trading and related matters, such as renewable energy and energy efficiency.)
ABC Radio National’s Stephen Crittenden reported an outstanding program on MBA’s (“Mostly Bloody Awful”) and along the way gave some references to outstanding research papers and popular articles on the subject.
The key points:
In the words of Henry Mintzberg, Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Montreal (and author with, Robert Simons and Kunal Basu of “Beyond Selfishness”, MIT Sloan Management Review, 44/1, Fall 2002),
“Management is not a science, it’s not a profession, it’s a practice; you learn it by doing it.” (Art Gallery of New South Wales director of 30 years Edmund Capon said as much a couple of years ago; what can one say about Mr Capon’s wisdom? Clearly he deserved to have that $16 million dollar painting by Cezanne bought to commemorate his 30 years at the Gallery!) However!
According to Professor Rakesh Khurana (of Harvard Business School), “Whilst university–based business schools started out with the intention of creating management as a profession, one in which managers would largely put the interests of society and the interests of the economic welfare of their firm before their own individual interests, this changed. Over a period of several decades this at first was neglected and then eventually abandoned. It was replaced by a very different type of orientation, shareholder maximisation. The manager became merely a hired hand of shareholders.”
According to Will Hopper, joint author with his brother of “The Puritan Gift”, the story of how the Puritans built America, the influence of Frederick Taylor (founder of Scientific Management theory, or Taylorism, and “the first management consultant”) led to business schools becoming obsessed with numbers and measurement. Management became a science that could be studied in a university.
“The emphasis in business shifted from people to figures and from quality to quantity. Talk was about the bottom line, employees became human resources, and the influence of the accountant increased dramatically. “Domain knowledge”, understanding of the business in all its facets (and the industry) was no longer so relevant. The business school MBA graduate emerged able to run any business. Companies are run through the accounts department. The characteristic of management became improving the numbers, not improving the product.”
All of this led to ‘heroic’ leadership, the view of humans as ‘economic man’ driven by self-interest, and therefore requiring oversight and ratings of performance, and the view that markets eventually resolved all conflicts involved in exchange of wants and needs: organisations only had utility if their costs in managing transactions were less than would otherwise obtain. In short wedges were driven between wants and needs and leaders and everyone else. Sets of fabrications, amongst other things about efficiency and effectiveness (which were conflated) and prosperity, rationalised the conduct of organisations.
In the view of management researchers Fabrizio Ferraro, Jeffrey Pfeffer & Robert I Sutton (in “Economics Language And Assumptions: How Theories Can Become Self-Fulfilling”, Academy of Management Review, 30/1, p8-24, January 2005), social science theories can become self-fulfilling by shaping institutional designs and management practices, as well as social norms and expectations about behavior, thereby creating the behavior they predict. They also perpetuate themselves by promulgating language and assumptions that become widely used and accepted.
An essay with more detail on this will follow.
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Caterpillars and Bowerbirds, evolution at work: The Science Show (on ABC Radio National for 21 March) dealt with caterpillars welcomed into ants’ nests and Satin bowerbirds singing and dancing to robot female bowerbirds.
Professor Jeremy Thomas, Professor of Ecology & Professorial Fellow of New College University of Oxford UK was interviewed by Chris Smith (the BBC’s “naked scientist”). Thomas has found that invading caterpillars, normally snapped up with relish by ants, have managed to con their hosts. They have produced a chemical which mimics that produced by the ants. This is so successful that the ants carry them into he nests and feed them, Indeed in times are really tough, the ants kills their own grubs and feed the caterpillars. But they do better than that: the caterpillars produce sounds which are the same as those produced by the queen ants. Thomas and his team were able to place tiny microphones inside ants’ nests in t eh laboratory. “when we played back the sounds of the chrysalis to the ants, we found that the ants were reacting to the miniature speakers in exactly the same way as when we played queen ant sounds. In fact, if anything, they were behaving in more extreme forms and it attracted more ants and they sat on it and behaved almost as if they were super-queens.”
On the same program Robyn Williams interviewed Dr Gail Patricelli, Assistant Professor at the University of California, Davis “who has designed robots to look very much like satin bowerbirds. At Wallaby Creek, near Brisbane, she dressed her robots to look like female birds. The males then sing and dance around the robot. This enables Gail to observe and study the signals exhibited by the male as they try to win the hand, or wing of the female. In order to be successful in courtship, it’s not just show, but the ability to interact socially and adjust behaviour in response to female signals and other behaviour during courtship.”
By the way, Professor Rick Shine (Sydney University) has found that (native Australian) Meat Ants are voracious predators of baby Cane Toads but pose no threat to other native frogs. What was the response of the Northern Territory? A spokesman on the news said, “This is nothing new! What we need is research which shows us how to put a gene for eating toads into Monitor Lizards”. Right!
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Next week: John Florio on scholars, museums in North America coping with financial turmoil, exploiting new buildings and revamping websites. And (held over) the British Government’s enquiry into the invasion of Iraq and possible consequences for the BBC.
This page, which should appear weekly, is an addition to the blogs page.
OWL’S HOOTS
Thursday, March 26th, 2009
Hoots No. 1 - 26 March 2009: Museums have become “our home from home”, Barrack Obama’s work schedule has large gaps in which he sets aside time to step back and think or make calls or read and the late Bill Stanner’s essays published by Black Inc. Australia will support the UN Indigenous Rights Convention which the former government voted against in 2007.
Museum are not much like museums anymore: In “Why museums have become our home from home” (The Times March 14, 2009) Hugo Rifkind writes that “People are visiting our galleries and museums at a startling rate. Is it the cafés, the absence of swearing… maybe even the art?”. Rifkind suggests some reasons: that museums “are the best public space we have” and that museums are safe places. Of course they are free but more people may be visiting “because people are getting cleverer”. But first of all he says it is because “quite suddenly, museums aren’t much like museums”!
Leadership lessons: Writing in the New York Review of Books (”The Thirty Days of Barack Obama”, March 26, 2009) Elizabeth Drew observes the following:
“As carefully as Barack Obama prepared for it, the presidency has held some surprises for him—some foreseeable, some not, and some of his own making. Seeking to avoid the mistakes of the early Clinton era, Obama concluded that, unlike Clinton, he didn’t want to hold the numerous meetings that can chew up so much of the president’s time. Instead, according to his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, Obama’s style is to drop by an aide’s office—a restless man, he roams the White House corridors—or stop an aide in a hallway and ask, “How are you coming on that thing we were talking about?” Gibbs says, “The worst thing is not have an answer.” Asked what happens then, Gibbs replied, “He gets that disappointed parent look, and then you better go find an answer.”
“Obama’s publicly announced schedules have large gaps; he makes it a point to set aside time to step back and think—sometimes going for a long, solitary walk around the White House grounds—or make calls, or read. A night owl, he usually takes work home, to be studied after he’s tucked his daughters into bed. Aides say he turns around paperwork fairly quickly, responding to and signing off on their memoranda.”
Stop Press: Barrack Obama is to read from his book “Dreams from my Father” on ABC Radio National’s First Person (weekdays 10:45am) which is part of the Book Show starting 10:00am, from Monday 30th March. (The readings can usually be listened to or podcast.)
Books: Robert Manne, Professor of Politics at La Trobe University in Melbourne, persuaded Black Inc to publish the essays by Professor W.E.H. (Bill) Stanner (under the title of “The Dreaming & Other Essays”) by this distinguished Australian anthropologist and has written the introduction. An edited extract from it appeared in The Australian 14 March 2009 (doubtfully available on the web). There are other articles about Stanner and the essays including one by Professor Marcia Langton also in The Australian on March 4 (on the web).
Manne writes, “In 1968 Stanner was invited to deliver the ABC’s Boyer Lectures. In them he talked of the persistence of “the great Australian silence” concerning the Aboriginal dispossession; the belated recognition in Australia of the genius and the strangeness of the indigenous culture the British had so light-heartedly set upon destroying; the emerging possibilities of a racial composition if we could only see that our problem with the Aborigines was less important than their problem with us; the arrogance and certain failure of the policy of assimilation that was inviting the Aborigines to relinquish what it was that made them a distinctive people or, in Stanner’s biting phrase, was asking them to “un-be”; and, finally and tentatively, the question that came more and more to obsess him, the possibility of a historic act of reconciliation through a willingness to contemplate some new deal over the question of the ownership of land.”
Stop Press: Australia will next week officially back the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, reversing the Howard Government’s vote against it in 2007. (the US, New Zealand and Canada also voted against it in the General Assembly.) Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin will make a statement on Australia’s change in position on April 3 at Parliament House in Canberra.
Music: Tapestry is a vocal ensemble founded in 1995 by Laurie Monahan, Cristi Catt, and Daniela Tosic. Based in Boston, the ensemble made its concert debut in its hometown with performances of Steve Reich’s Tehillim. The group has established an international reputation for its bold conceptual programming which combines medieval and traditional repertory with contemporary compositions. Their album “Faces of Faces of a Woman” weaves together a mix of tales, music and poetry to reveal the many faces of a woman, ranging from 12th century nun Hildegard von Bingen to 16th century Irish pirate Grace O’Malley to 20th century Russian poet Anna Akmatova together with music of female troubadours, traditional songs, and lullabies including “Careless Love”. Astonishingly wonderful!
Next week: A quotation about critics from someone who knew heretic and philosopher Giordano Bruno (whose biography by Ingrid Rowland has recently been published), burned at the stake in Rome in February 1600, and two amazing biological stories about caterpillars being welcomed in the nests of ants and the courtship of Bower Birds - if you haven’t heard them already on the Science Show with Robyn Williams. And an inquiry into Britain’s invasion of Iraq: what might the consequences be?
This page, which should appear weekly, is an addition to the blogs page.
Tom Flynn and the Parthenon Sculptures and other outrages
Wednesday, April 9th, 2008
artintelligence.co.uk
is the website of Tom Flynn Art Advisory Services. There are a large number of very interesting essays on a number of differnet issues facing museums including return of cultural property, the Churchill Museum at the War Cabinet Offices and so on. The blog and the website both have lots of interesting commentary, including (April 2008) commentary on the Parthenon sculptures and the UNESCO conference in Athens in March 2008 on the Return of Cultural Objects to their Countries of Origin. Tom has a post “Parthenon Marbles Case Overshadowed by Iraq Looting” on the museum security network about the Sculptures also.
This is a copy of the updated entry in the Links page of this site.
Generalisations and Transformations
Sunday, January 20th, 2008
In seeking to understand complex issues, we need rich data sets, not broad generalisations. So says Bill Lewis, founding director of McKinsey Global Institute, just a few years ago in “The Power of Productivity” (McKinsey Quarterly 2004 number 2).
Lewis asserts that the consensuses about economics at the end of the Second World War and at the fall of the Soviet Union have proved wrong. These consensuses at the end of the Second World War concerned infrastructure, technology, education and health care. After the fall of the Soviet Union the consensuses focused on inflation, price control, privatisation and corporate governance. In both cases it was believed resolution of these issues would advance economies, in particular the economies of poorer countries. In considering these “failures” Lewis draws an analogy with astronomy and cosmology.
The problem was, according to Lewis, that the consensuses were grounded in an analysis of economies at the aggregate level. That was like trying to learn about the physical universe by using only the telescopes of astronomy. Most real understanding in physics, however, has actually come from studying the interaction of the tiniest particles in the universe. In economics, Lewis says, it is necessary to understand why individual companies operate as they do, not national data sets and complex econometric tools that yield qualified answers at best.
Lewis proceeds to analyze some of the productivity data from around the world, drawing some challenging conclusions, particularly that economic growth principally flows from competition, not from education or technology or better governance and so on. The data which Lewis analyses comes from studies by the McKinsey Global Institute of individual companies.
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Of more specific interest are two articles in the McKinsey Quarterly in 2006 dealing with change management and managing organizational performance on the basis of evidence. Both are topics which I have previously dealt with. Both articles contain information of relevance to museums. (There are also interesting conclusions in a number of papers in the 2007 issues of the McKinsey Quarterly and these will be summarized in a forthcoming post.)
The McKinsey studies show that the most successful transformations of business performance occur when executives mobilize and sustain energy within their organizations and communicate their objectives clearly and creatively.
Strong organizational performance is really fueled not by isolated interventions but by a combination of three or four carefully selected complementary ones, what McKinsey calls management “practices”. Managers, according to McKinsey researchers, should concentrate most of their energy on a small number of practices that, introduced together, typically produces the best results. Doing more doesn’t add much value and involves disproportionate, not to mention wasted, effort.
Many executives struggle to design structures, create reporting relationships, and develop evaluation systems that make people accountable—in other words, that require them to take responsibility for the results of the business. However “companies seeking to improve in this area are much more likely to succeed if they concentrate on giving individuals clear roles rather than resorting to other options, such as consequence management.”
“… executives who set broad, stretching aspirations that are meaningful to their employees have a better chance of achieving the outcome they want than do executives who resort to conventional, dominant, or detailed top-down leadership… the best way to promote high-performance behavior in organizations is to emphasize openness and trust among employees.”
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There is an important point relevant to these findings. It is that if we are going to be concerned about understanding the workings of individual enterprises and we are gong to demand management based on evidence, as indeed we should, then the ongoing dominance of what is called New Public Management (NPM), needs to be more than seriously questioned. NPM seeks to have public activity decreased and, if at all, exercised according to business principles of efficiency. It is based on the belief that all human behaviour is motivated by self-interest and, specifically, profit maximization. Governments pursuing NPM have failed to deliver a more effective state better serving the citizenry, they have failed the accountability test! One of the bases of NPM is self-interest. Self interest was one of the three key themes of eighteenth century Scottish moral philosopher and pioneering political economist Adam Smith. But this term is used in the context of NPM in a way quite different from that in which Adam Smith employed it in his treatise, “The Wealth of Nations“.
The reaction to the run down in services, the decline in infrastructure and the perceived problems of the State’s infrastructure which we see in many western industrialised countries outside continental Europe, derives, it is asserted, from the failure of the bureaucracy to function effectively and of politicians to correct the failures. This affects the majority of museums as well as arts and heritage organizations. The translation of the best of business practice to nonprofits, not the translation of the profit-making motive of business, has been a central theme in the pages of this site.
Making government more businesslike has simply involved a set of assertions, not any real understanding. That is not the approach Atul Gawande, award-winning professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, surgeon and author, took in exploring what makes a good doctor and how hospitals can be improved. Gawande says, “I would love to know who really are the best in the kinds of operations I do, who had the lowest complication rates, the highest survival rates? And if I knew that, I would go and watch them and I’d learn from them”.
The problems with NPM and the mistranslation of Adam Smith’s work will be taken up in a forthcoming short note.
Continue to article.
Enterprise Systems: Centralized control or Let genuine expertise flourish
Friday, November 16th, 2007
Despite the evidence to the contrary, some people still believe that leadership means giving direction rather than putting in place the processes which encourage above average performance by staff.
Centralized control is based on the proposition that people generally can’t be trusted and that only those at the top of the hierarchy have the knowledge and experience to make the right decisions. However, those at the top frequently do not have the most up-to-date information and what information they do have may not be relevant to the local situation at all. It turns out that co-ordination is most successfully achieved, not by managers enforcing rules and regulations, but by managers attending to building the organization’s culture, by emphasizing trust and seeking above average performance. Increasingly, flexible teams are recognized as necessary, indeed as the only workable proposition The standards in such groups are set by the members of the group themselves on the basis of what they understand to be best practice from their own observations. Remember the exhortation from James Collins and Gerry Porras that successful organizations build strong cultures.
In recent discussions I had with museum people in Australia about relations between museums and indigenous peoples the issue of centralized control – the unreasonable expectations of politicians and senior bureaucrats – was brought to the fore. Government representatives expect that once material like human remains is returned, the job has been completed and the responsibility of the museum has been met but indigenous people consider this to be the start of a relationship which stretches into the future. Governments obsessed about control rather than values will never succeed!
These issues are dealt with by Simon Head, Senior Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University. His most recent book is The New Ruthless Economy: Work and Power in the Digital Age. (August 2003).
(The audio of an interview on the Brian Lehrer Show on New York Public Radio with Simon Head can be heard here.)
In the New York Review of Books for August 16, 2007 (“They’re Micromanaging Your Every Move”) Head reviews three books, The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid (Harvard Business School), Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream by Barbara Ehrenreich (Owl Books) and The Culture of the New Capitalism by Richard Sennett (Yale University Press).
Head reminds us of issues dealt with in his book which centres on the use of what are called “Enterprise Systems” or ES to control the work even of professionals such as computer specialists and doctors. ES is the method used to run call centres and retail stores like Walmart. (There are numerous articles about Walmart and its management practices.) Continue to essay.