Discourse & Discontent
It is time for a change
Friends,
I hope that all is well with you and yours, and that this e-mail finds you on a boat with shoddy connection, in the tropics, three months after I sent it.
Now accepting keynotes for 23Q4-24Q2
Every year, I create three main presentations. For 2023, they are:
Delusions of determinism: Why planning for success leads to failure
Regression toward the meme: Why modern leadership continues to fall into old traps
Under pressure: Retail in a new financial era
If you want to book me for your event, workshop, or corporate speaking slot, just send me an email. To make sure I am available, however, please do so at your earliest convenience; my schedule is filling up fast - and I will be raising my prices at the end of the year.
More information can be found here.
A couple of updates before we go-go
Starting today, what was at one point in time known as the cardboard fortress will return to its papery past. That is right, we have builders, painters, electricians, the Devil and his aunt on their way. The webinars will take place as planned - the upstairs office ought to be done by then - and there will be no pause in newsletter content (well, one or two may be slightly late, ahem). But I do expect to grow ten years older in the next ten weeks.
Although I have not yet decided on what I will call them, I will soon announce the 2024 keynote presentations. James and I are currently working on our next big (emphasis on big) eCommerce undertaking, and there will be at least one on adaptive strategy.
As always, if you want to book me, now is the time. I have already accepted bookings as far into 2024 as early Q4 and my dates will be limited, partly because we are releasing the book and the “tour” will take precedent, but also because I made the conscious decision to limit travel once we had our daughter. Even though I remain a consultant, I will not be a father who is never at home.
We all deserve each other’s best
In fact, we deserve to demand it
Although I had intended to write about the letter B in ABCDE today, something happened on Tuesday that made me postpone it for a fortnight (next week, we will take a needed refresher on complexity). And so, if you would please indulge me, we are today going to have an open, honest conversation.
Steve and I have done a lot of research for the new book – and I do mean a lot. It is for this reason that it is at times very slow to write; we want to make sure that that quotes are properly attributed, that claimed-to-be evidence truly holds up, and so forth. The book covers a wide range of topics, all with the intention of explaining why and how we got where we are today, what the present entails, and how we might deal with it to the best of our abilities. Unlike many already successful business authors, we do not skip the parts that contradict our narrative, but instead show how we have reached our conclusions so that you may make up your own.
That is not to say that we are, by any stretch of anyone’s imagination including our own, perfect. For obvious reasons, one cannot be an expert in every pertinent field (well, I cannot, anyway), nor is there be enough space to deal with every topic as it perhaps deserves. But the work should nonetheless meet what one might call an acceptable relevant standard, that is to say, a subject matter specialist should be able to read the text and state that it is true at least in principle.
We have genuinely done our best for that to be the case – and imposed precisely the same levels of scrutiny upon ourselves as we have done upon others. Not only is it the only intellectually honest approach, but anything less would be insulting to the reader. Which brings me to the events of a few days ago.
While doing research on a very prominent figure in strategic management history, I was struck by how utterly disingenuous much of their work appeared. Time and again, they would twist the truth, make up facts, and demand evidentiary standards from others that they themselves had never come close to. In particular, one paper was so self-aggrandizing, condescending, and, quite frankly, bullying, that it made me close my laptop out of sheer annoyance.
And the more I thought about it, the more peeved I became.
For some reason, we have reached a point in the evolution of our discourse where we no longer ask for even ordinary evidence for extraordinary claims. As long as whoever is making them is a supposed authority, we accept utter nonsense. A lack of data? Oh, well. They are saying it, so it must be true. Data availability, but no data transparency? No matter, they probably did their homework.
I try to maintain neutrality when I do my research; I dig deep into all kinds of sources, good and bad, positive and negative, empirical and philosophical. But even with the benefit of doubt, the only conclusion I can reach is that most of what ails companies and their employees to this day is a direct result of individual desire to improve the business of management, not the management of business. While that drive is fair enough in isolation - we all have bills to pay - it habitually comes at the cost of unfeigned evidentiary support.
It must be said: the history of firm strategy is full of shortcuts, cut corners, half-truths and whole lies.
And nobody seems to give a shit.
To illustrate, in a keynote to an extraordinarily senior audience, I saw another very famous management thinker demonstrate the superiority of his own brand of strategy by juxtaposing it against emergent strategy. “Users of my approach take strategic action”, he mused, “while those who do emergent strategy wait around until the present is less messy and they can plan”. It was a jaw-dropping misrepresentation of Henry Mintzberg’s decades long work – if anything, emergent strategy is the opposite of that described – but nobody spoke up. In a room full of supposed strategy leaders, where the word was free, not a single person called into question what they must all have known to be completely untrue.
We have to collectively get over this enabling silence and feeble acceptance of whatever is thrown at us on the shallow grounds that it originated from a professor at a prestigious school, a popular columnist, or a best-selling author. We have to stand up for ourselves and say, “hang on, do you have anything to back that up?”. Because if we do not, we will continue to get taken advantage of by those with stronger wills and weaker morals.
Yes, I know. In the grand scheme of things, I am a nobody, the humblest of field mice compared to the giants about which I write. They are all more successful, better published, richer, held in higher regard, and more frequently cited. But I am fucking done being spoken down to.
I cannot promise that our new book will completely change how you see the world or how you work, though that remains our aim. But I can promise that there is a fire in my belly – and that we will do our absolute best to break the pattern that has been so common in popular business discourse.
You may not agree with our conclusions, but hopefully you will at least respect the effort that we put in out of respect for you, our potential reader. Something which clearly cannot be said for all authors.
Until next time.
Onwards and goddamned upwards,
JP
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