This paper subjects the management blockbuster 'Built to Last' (collins & Porras 1992) to paradig... more This paper subjects the management blockbuster 'Built to Last' (collins & Porras 1992) to paradigmic analysis through the medium of the Burrell & Morgan (1979) framework. The interest is to explore the extent to which such a popular text could equally appeal to both populist and evidence-based business academic audiences, and to explore how the authors' have engineered this dual appeal. The authors are explicit as to the research aims and research design underlying their inquiry, and are not reticent in making claims for the intellectual robustness and practical transferability of findings derived from their innovative research approach. This clarity of research purpose greatly facilitates the process of assessing the extent to which the authors satisfy their own criteria-an assessment which the authors themselves challenge the reader to engage with in their opening 'methods' chapter. Summary of 'Built to Last'. Since its publication in 1994, 'Built to Last' has sold 3.5 million copies worldwide, has been translated into 16 languages, and spent five years on the 'Business Week' best seller list. It summarises the results of a six year study examining the underlying factors contributing to the success of 'visionary' companies. Visionary companies are defined by the authors as widely admired industry leaders with a long term track record of survival and growth for a period of more than one generation. The research question the authors ask is 'What has enabled some corporations to last so long, while other competitors in the same markets either struggle, or disappear after a short period of time?' The authors found that the chosen companies operated differently from the comparison companies; and that the differences were as much to do with the companies' cultures and processes as they were to do with how they responded to their external environment. (The characteristics of these 'visionary principles' are summarised in appendix 1). Central to these characteristics was the need for successful companies to develop 'cult-like cultures'. Central to the survival of these visionary companies is adherence to a 'core ideology', and key to the preservation of this core ideology is the development of a 'cult like culture', which binds organisation members around that ideology. 'Built to Last' is nothing if not wide in its definition of its audience. The preface states that 'we believe that every CEO, manager, and entrepreneur in the world should read this book. So should every board member, consultant, investor, journalist, business student, and anybody else interested in the distinguishing characteristics of the worlds most enduring and successful corporations' (p 3). An interview with Who put the cult in culture?
author take control of her life story and discover meaning rather than try to make sense of the a... more author take control of her life story and discover meaning rather than try to make sense of the absurdities she encountered. Reflecting her own values, it offers the reader a slow and thoughtprovoking read. Unlike so many spin-offs of doctoral dissertations that bludgeon the reader into submission with a bombardment of references, this book invites the reader to become a fellowtraveller in a slow, deliberate and well-thought out journey and offers many fascinating discoveries along the way. In doing so, it makes severe demands on the reader. This is not a book that can be appropriated in a quick bout of scan-reading. Instead, it calls for careful and patient engagement. It would be a great shame if these demands (and the book’s hefty price) deterred scholars from reading it, especially those who are interested in understanding the quest for authenticity, resistance through distance, storytelling and narration as constitutive of identity construction and even the deskilling and proletarianization that afflict many of today’s professionals. In this last regard, the author’s voice joins those of writers like Sennett and Braverman who cannot help but look nostalgically at an age when hard but honest work could form the basis of rich life narratives. Nostalgia is indeed a major feature of this book and something the author seeks to legitimise and redeem through some interesting reflections. All the same, one cannot help but think that the past is here idealized as a compensation for the discontents of the present rather than for its own highly valued qualities. There are plenty of accounts of professional alienation from times past (think of Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich or Flaubert’s Charles Bovary, both useful counterpoints to McEwan’s Henry Perowne), just as there is ample evidence that professional authority of the past was a fig leaf for self-reproducing and hardly accountable elites. It seems to me that in seeking to reintroduce the idea of alienation as an explanation for the malaise of today’s middle class, the author may overestimate the impact of markets and consumerism, underestimating Marx’s insight that, under capitalism, all labour, even labour that seems creative and rewarding, is alienated and alienating. The very idea of escape (and let us not forget that Victorian capitalism offered its own range of escapes, not least religious ones) is, in Marxist terms, not a cry against alienation but the very seal of alienation. Self-actualizing subjectivities (including novel-writing, which is currently blossoming, and autobiography) may be less rearguard actions against rampant consumerism and more the products of a pervasive narcissism that seeks to raise itself above the vulgarities of ‘common’ consumerism. Indeed, it could well be argued that in selfactualizing escapism, narcissism has discovered a viable form of consumerism entirely in tune with the unconscious dreams of those who were once touched by the spirit of the hippies. Where is all this downshifting, self-actualization and search for creative escapes leading? It would probably take a gifted novelist like McEwan to offer us some insights. Maybe it is time that he revisited Henry Perowne on the 10th anniversary of his first outing.
This paper constitutes an autoethnographic account of one’s delegate’s inner process post partici... more This paper constitutes an autoethnographic account of one’s delegate’s inner process post participation in the September 2016 Art of Management and Organisation Conference (AoMO) in Bled, Slovenia. This account troubles issues concerning the persistence of learning and social connection post the ‘island’ experience of a conference itself. It charts the ‘call and response’ patterns of written exchange between the autoethnographer and his respondents, relating the effects of this reflexive ‘call and response’ on both parties sense of self and sense of professional direction. The paper suggests that through this written exchange the conference experience ceases to be a nostalgia infused island and instead becomes a generative archipelago that clusters learning and propulsive action towards itself.
This statement has been coordinated together with other disciplinary statement by Dr. Jeroen Veld... more This statement has been coordinated together with other disciplinary statement by Dr. Jeroen Veldman, Modern Corporation Project, which is hosted by Cass Business School, City University, London to support the Purpose of the Corporation Project: purposeofcorporation.org. It may be endorsed at: themoderncorporation.org The Modern Corporation Statement on Management BACKGROUND The rise of modern corporations has been accompanied by an expansion of salaried executives who have replaced owner-managers. With this expansion, the new class of managers/executives came to regard themselves as stewards of large and complex corporations, and not principally or exclusively as agents for the owners. Emerging as a self-styled 'profession', there was a continuous debate around the necessity for the corporation to be responsible to the collective and to its stakeholders. During long parts of the twentieth century the professed intent was to balance and synthesize a plurality of interests in order to ensure the long term survival and success of the corporation, pursue national strategic interests, create employment, support networks of suppliers, develop new technology as well as create an adequate or satisfactory return for shareholders (Marens, 2012; O Sullivan, 2001).
Reflective practice is in vogue as a tool in many parts of the educational economy, though the ef... more Reflective practice is in vogue as a tool in many parts of the educational economy, though the efforts to support its development often lag behind the promotion of the practice itself. Some of the issues relating to the development of this competency, and barriers to the same, are covered in my Teaching and Learning Optional Paper 'Teaching and Supporting the Development of Reflective Practice'. As momentum builds for the introduction of reflective practice, the educational and management worlds need to look to ways to enhance this capacity quickly, and to do this at an economic price. This paper addresses these twin issues. It achieves that purpose through examining a number of historical case studies, then moves onto a description of a number of contemporary experiments, reflecting upon the lessons learned from these experiments, and the implications of those lessons for future practice.
Philosophy of Coaching: An International Journal, 2016
This largely autoethnographic paper explores the early trajectory of one consultant's career thro... more This largely autoethnographic paper explores the early trajectory of one consultant's career through the seventies and eighties, seeking to detect the point at which this practice took the 'coaching turn'. The purpose of conducting this piece of personal exploration is to discover what the core of a 'coach approach' might have comprised before coaching become professionalized and codified; and perhaps to ask what of the original inspiration behind the coaching impulse might have been lost in the process of professionalization. Comparisons are then drawn between this historical evolution of coaching practice and the choices facing coaches currently setting out to establish their practice in a contemporary setting; and to ask what they might take from this history.
This account of practice charts one organisation development practitioner's experience of the inf... more This account of practice charts one organisation development practitioner's experience of the influence of action learning (AL) at various points in his career, from the early 1970s to the present day. It explores the impact of AL upon his practice over the years, chronicling various episodes which had strongest impact. It contrasts AL as it was in its formative years in the UK with how it is now, asking some questions as to how the early pioneering spirit might sustain the face of forces for commoditisation.
This paper subjects the management blockbuster 'Built to Last' (collins & Porras 1992) to paradig... more This paper subjects the management blockbuster 'Built to Last' (collins & Porras 1992) to paradigmic analysis through the medium of the Burrell & Morgan (1979) framework. The interest is to explore the extent to which such a popular text could equally appeal to both populist and evidence-based business academic audiences, and to explore how the authors' have engineered this dual appeal. The authors are explicit as to the research aims and research design underlying their inquiry, and are not reticent in making claims for the intellectual robustness and practical transferability of findings derived from their innovative research approach. This clarity of research purpose greatly facilitates the process of assessing the extent to which the authors satisfy their own criteria-an assessment which the authors themselves challenge the reader to engage with in their opening 'methods' chapter. Summary of 'Built to Last'. Since its publication in 1994, 'Built to Last' has sold 3.5 million copies worldwide, has been translated into 16 languages, and spent five years on the 'Business Week' best seller list. It summarises the results of a six year study examining the underlying factors contributing to the success of 'visionary' companies. Visionary companies are defined by the authors as widely admired industry leaders with a long term track record of survival and growth for a period of more than one generation. The research question the authors ask is 'What has enabled some corporations to last so long, while other competitors in the same markets either struggle, or disappear after a short period of time?' The authors found that the chosen companies operated differently from the comparison companies; and that the differences were as much to do with the companies' cultures and processes as they were to do with how they responded to their external environment. (The characteristics of these 'visionary principles' are summarised in appendix 1). Central to these characteristics was the need for successful companies to develop 'cult-like cultures'. Central to the survival of these visionary companies is adherence to a 'core ideology', and key to the preservation of this core ideology is the development of a 'cult like culture', which binds organisation members around that ideology. 'Built to Last' is nothing if not wide in its definition of its audience. The preface states that 'we believe that every CEO, manager, and entrepreneur in the world should read this book. So should every board member, consultant, investor, journalist, business student, and anybody else interested in the distinguishing characteristics of the worlds most enduring and successful corporations' (p 3). An interview with Who put the cult in culture?
author take control of her life story and discover meaning rather than try to make sense of the a... more author take control of her life story and discover meaning rather than try to make sense of the absurdities she encountered. Reflecting her own values, it offers the reader a slow and thoughtprovoking read. Unlike so many spin-offs of doctoral dissertations that bludgeon the reader into submission with a bombardment of references, this book invites the reader to become a fellowtraveller in a slow, deliberate and well-thought out journey and offers many fascinating discoveries along the way. In doing so, it makes severe demands on the reader. This is not a book that can be appropriated in a quick bout of scan-reading. Instead, it calls for careful and patient engagement. It would be a great shame if these demands (and the book’s hefty price) deterred scholars from reading it, especially those who are interested in understanding the quest for authenticity, resistance through distance, storytelling and narration as constitutive of identity construction and even the deskilling and proletarianization that afflict many of today’s professionals. In this last regard, the author’s voice joins those of writers like Sennett and Braverman who cannot help but look nostalgically at an age when hard but honest work could form the basis of rich life narratives. Nostalgia is indeed a major feature of this book and something the author seeks to legitimise and redeem through some interesting reflections. All the same, one cannot help but think that the past is here idealized as a compensation for the discontents of the present rather than for its own highly valued qualities. There are plenty of accounts of professional alienation from times past (think of Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich or Flaubert’s Charles Bovary, both useful counterpoints to McEwan’s Henry Perowne), just as there is ample evidence that professional authority of the past was a fig leaf for self-reproducing and hardly accountable elites. It seems to me that in seeking to reintroduce the idea of alienation as an explanation for the malaise of today’s middle class, the author may overestimate the impact of markets and consumerism, underestimating Marx’s insight that, under capitalism, all labour, even labour that seems creative and rewarding, is alienated and alienating. The very idea of escape (and let us not forget that Victorian capitalism offered its own range of escapes, not least religious ones) is, in Marxist terms, not a cry against alienation but the very seal of alienation. Self-actualizing subjectivities (including novel-writing, which is currently blossoming, and autobiography) may be less rearguard actions against rampant consumerism and more the products of a pervasive narcissism that seeks to raise itself above the vulgarities of ‘common’ consumerism. Indeed, it could well be argued that in selfactualizing escapism, narcissism has discovered a viable form of consumerism entirely in tune with the unconscious dreams of those who were once touched by the spirit of the hippies. Where is all this downshifting, self-actualization and search for creative escapes leading? It would probably take a gifted novelist like McEwan to offer us some insights. Maybe it is time that he revisited Henry Perowne on the 10th anniversary of his first outing.
This paper constitutes an autoethnographic account of one’s delegate’s inner process post partici... more This paper constitutes an autoethnographic account of one’s delegate’s inner process post participation in the September 2016 Art of Management and Organisation Conference (AoMO) in Bled, Slovenia. This account troubles issues concerning the persistence of learning and social connection post the ‘island’ experience of a conference itself. It charts the ‘call and response’ patterns of written exchange between the autoethnographer and his respondents, relating the effects of this reflexive ‘call and response’ on both parties sense of self and sense of professional direction. The paper suggests that through this written exchange the conference experience ceases to be a nostalgia infused island and instead becomes a generative archipelago that clusters learning and propulsive action towards itself.
This statement has been coordinated together with other disciplinary statement by Dr. Jeroen Veld... more This statement has been coordinated together with other disciplinary statement by Dr. Jeroen Veldman, Modern Corporation Project, which is hosted by Cass Business School, City University, London to support the Purpose of the Corporation Project: purposeofcorporation.org. It may be endorsed at: themoderncorporation.org The Modern Corporation Statement on Management BACKGROUND The rise of modern corporations has been accompanied by an expansion of salaried executives who have replaced owner-managers. With this expansion, the new class of managers/executives came to regard themselves as stewards of large and complex corporations, and not principally or exclusively as agents for the owners. Emerging as a self-styled 'profession', there was a continuous debate around the necessity for the corporation to be responsible to the collective and to its stakeholders. During long parts of the twentieth century the professed intent was to balance and synthesize a plurality of interests in order to ensure the long term survival and success of the corporation, pursue national strategic interests, create employment, support networks of suppliers, develop new technology as well as create an adequate or satisfactory return for shareholders (Marens, 2012; O Sullivan, 2001).
Reflective practice is in vogue as a tool in many parts of the educational economy, though the ef... more Reflective practice is in vogue as a tool in many parts of the educational economy, though the efforts to support its development often lag behind the promotion of the practice itself. Some of the issues relating to the development of this competency, and barriers to the same, are covered in my Teaching and Learning Optional Paper 'Teaching and Supporting the Development of Reflective Practice'. As momentum builds for the introduction of reflective practice, the educational and management worlds need to look to ways to enhance this capacity quickly, and to do this at an economic price. This paper addresses these twin issues. It achieves that purpose through examining a number of historical case studies, then moves onto a description of a number of contemporary experiments, reflecting upon the lessons learned from these experiments, and the implications of those lessons for future practice.
Philosophy of Coaching: An International Journal, 2016
This largely autoethnographic paper explores the early trajectory of one consultant's career thro... more This largely autoethnographic paper explores the early trajectory of one consultant's career through the seventies and eighties, seeking to detect the point at which this practice took the 'coaching turn'. The purpose of conducting this piece of personal exploration is to discover what the core of a 'coach approach' might have comprised before coaching become professionalized and codified; and perhaps to ask what of the original inspiration behind the coaching impulse might have been lost in the process of professionalization. Comparisons are then drawn between this historical evolution of coaching practice and the choices facing coaches currently setting out to establish their practice in a contemporary setting; and to ask what they might take from this history.
This account of practice charts one organisation development practitioner's experience of the inf... more This account of practice charts one organisation development practitioner's experience of the influence of action learning (AL) at various points in his career, from the early 1970s to the present day. It explores the impact of AL upon his practice over the years, chronicling various episodes which had strongest impact. It contrasts AL as it was in its formative years in the UK with how it is now, asking some questions as to how the early pioneering spirit might sustain the face of forces for commoditisation.
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