in an iPod world

managing in a clumsy world, designing a better one

This is a summary of the lecture that I gave to my class last night.

Management is a noble profession. At least, that is what I believe it should strive to be. But, the reality is that we don't think of it that way. Instead, nowadays, it is easy to think of arrogant, self-centered, merciless, greedy, and overly compensated corporate executives who pay little or no regard to the environments and the well-being of labor and consumers when we think of management. Or, management often implies incompetent and bureaucratic paper-pushers who get in the way of getting things done. Indeed, management has a really bad name in our society. Therefore, it is almost scandalous to think that management is and should be a noble profession in the same way we think of educators, doctors and firefighters. But, I think it should be. In fact, I would argue that management is perhaps the most important profession in the 21st century. Why?

It has to do with the world in which we live. Increasingly, we are living in an artificial world. I use the word artificial in the same way Herbert Simon uses in his book, The Science of Artificial and Bo Dahlbom uses in his book, Artifacts and Artificial Science. The world in which we breath, eat, talk, see, touch, smell, and sleep is no longer shaped by natural environments only. It is populated and filled with the stuffs that we have created -- artifacts. These artifacts, particularly technology and organizations, play essential role in shaping our way of life in the contemporary socio-technical world.

Our bodily experience is no longer shaped by the natural forces alone. Although we are still subject to the force of gravity, we now fly with the help of an airplane. We paved high ways, built bridges and tunnels, and constructed cities. The air that we breath in is mixed with pollutants coming from cars and factories, and filtered through air purifiers with added scent of our choice. The water we drink is contained in bottles that we made, mixed with vitamins and "natural" flavors. We eat meats from poultry that were raised with artificial feed mixed with antibiotics and growth hormones.

Our social experience is not any different either. It is no longer confined with the biological connections or geographical constraints. We are enmeshed with nested set of relationships with organizations that were created specific purpose. These "artificial" organizations now define our relationship more than ever. Proliferation of social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace takes this phenomenon to another level. Our social relationship is constantly shaped by Facebook status change and the last Twittering friend.

The reason that management is the most critical profession in the 21st century is, then, simply because at the junction of these two important artifacts, technology and organization, we find management. Through management practice, we constantly tinker with technology and organizations. Management constantly invent new technology, new products, and seek better ways of organizing. Through management, we re-invent the (artificial) world that we inherit. The question is, do we make it a better place than we found it?

Here comes the crux of the management challenge in the 21st challenge. The artificial world is a clumsy place. It is never a neat place. Unlike natural world that runs like a clockwork, the artificial world is a heap of accidents. In the artificial world, there has never been a big enough intelligence to centrally plan and organize. As Beatles once said, "life is what happens while you are busy planning." The artificial world happens and evolves that way too. It is messy, ripe with tensions and contradictions. It ruptures and breaks down; yet, it goes on with fixes and patches sent from Microsoft.

As Karl Weick once writes, then, managers always find themselves thrown into this clumsy world. It is the articial world that needs more tinkering. The world needs some fixing, which will cause them to do more tinkering down the road. But, then they will never know which plumping pipe will burst next. But, as managers struggle to keep things in order and strive to make things better, they can turn this place a better place to live. Management thus is based on "unhappy consciousness" as Bo Dahlbom says. Management is an antidote to the clumsy artificial world.

This brings us to the key essential aspect of management that is critically missing in today's management education. That is, management is about seeing what is not there. Following the natural science model which follows the logic of discovery, we teach our MBA students to see what is out there. Through statistical analysis and focus group, our students are trained to collect data and analyze them to discover what is there. Yet, it is not enough. It is not enough just to see what is out there in this clumsy artificial world and analyze it. What we need is manager's ability to see what is not in this clumsy world and turn it into a better place to live. Managers need to be able to conceive and construct a plausible future through technology and organization -- the two most important artifacts at their disposal.

Information technology is advancing at a remarkably predictable pace. Moore's law has been proven to be very useful in forecasting the incredible developments in the computing power. If this trend continues, an average computer that costs $1000 today will only cost $10 by year 2020. Today, my colleague showed me a perfectly fine sub-laptop computer that costs only $250. He calls it a "disposable computing." At the price of $250, we are not there yet, but in ten years, we will be there. Digital technology is being embedded in our cloths, cars, buildings and streets, turning them into a part of a larger computer network, so to speak. This new technology in turn enables us to conceive new form of organizations. Open source, collective intelligence, crowd source, and many other new forms that we have not even thought about to mobilize and harness human creativity and power.

The question is, then, what can we do about all these possibilities. Who will make sure that we indeed create a better and more desirable artificial world using these new artifacts? Which profession and discipline is best positioned to provide the answer to this call? Can management be a part, in fact an essential part of this important challenge? I believe we can. Indeed, management is responsible to respond to this challenge in a meaningful way. But in order to do that, we must address two fundamental deficiencies in management thinking.

First, we must teach managers how to think what is possible. As I argued earlier, management should not be just about the past. Managers cannot be just geographers who are discovering the landscape of the nature. The geography of the artificial world that they want to discover hasn't been yet created. They need to be created. Thus, managers need to able to imagine what is possible.

Second, we must teach managers how to think what is desirable. Not everything that is possible is desirable. What is desirable is not always the most efficient or the most effective. What is desirable may not be even possible currently. That should touch deeply the unhappy consciousness of the managers.

If we can begin to train future managers to see what is possible in the future and help them not to be afraid of asking "what is desirable?", we can turn management as a noble profession. It can be a profession that can turn this clumsy artificial world into a better place to live. At least, that is what we all should try to aim for.

the power of theory in the construction of the world and the responsibility that comes with it

The last Friday was supposed to be a "Black Friday". And, yesterday was "Cyber Monday" . Black Friday means that this is the day when retailers finally turn to black for the first time in the year. Cyber Monday is supposed to be the busiest on-line shopping day in the year. Media said a large percentage of people would shop on-line at work on Cyber Monday. I don't know where they are coming from, but, somehow the news media treat them as if what these are true. Or, at least they treat this as if plausible theories of retail behavior.

As a result, retailers promote big sales and open the stores very early in the morning on Black Friday. Shoppers wait outside of the door in anticipation of big sales. They literally break into the door as soon as they are allowed. As a result, we get people stamped to death at Wal-Mart. On Cyber Monday, people who would not otherwise think about shopping on-line become intrigued about online shopping deal, as they constantly hear about this huge sales going on Amazon and eBay. I felt almost guilty not shopping online yesterday.

What is going on here is a social construction of reality in real time. One espouses a theory of Black Friday. Then, everyone begins to treat it as if it is real, adjusting their own anticipations and behaviors based on that espoused theory. And, we become very much a part of the newly constructed reality that looks just like what the theory anticipated.

We saw similar phenomenon during the dot.com bubble, financial derivatives, presidential politics and short-selling. A theory is espoused and circulated. As more people talk about it, it becomes a part of reality. And, in that process, we all participate the construction of social reality as we talk about that theory. Technology that we use are all the outcome of such theories (not necessarily social theories, however). They are put in practice, shaping what we do and how we live. Each time we fly in an airplane, we entrust our body to the theory of Bernoulli's principle. The theory has shaped the way we travel. So, there is no question that the theories have the power of shaping the world in which we live.

The question then is who bears the responsibility of the consequences of these theories, when they go wrong. As a default, the society as a whole seem to bear the consequences of the theories as it affects the reality, whether it is the three dead people, or trillions of dollars of lost wealth (whether they were ever created or not is another subject), and hopelessly depressed stock prices. What is striking here is that no one individual ever take the responsibility of the consequences of these espoused theories. In a way, whoever first came up with the idea of Black Friday is indirectly responsible for the death of three people on Friday. People who developed the theory of financial derivatives are at least indirectly responsible for the loss of life-long savings.

Scientists, social scientists in particular, tend to think that the sphere of influence of their theories are often constrained in the intellectual arena. Whether it is a marketing scholar who first coined the notion of Black Friday or the finance scholar who first developed option pricing model, or the technologies who designed new circuitry that enabled mobile phones, they are all responsible for the consequences of the theories that they developed. They are never just intellectual and academic exercise. We academics often strive to have relevance in our work. Yet, one must not lose the sight of the moral responsibility that comes with it. The theory that we build, hypothesize, prove and disprove has real social implications. It can kill people. Before we develop yet another theory, this is something to think about.