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
As I am writing this, I am sitting in a quiet, cleaned house. A few last remnants of months past remain visible upon close inspection (such as the cardboard boxes living under the staircase), but the tranquility is sublime. At long last, I can get some proper work done.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaah.
On Thursday, November 16, the second webinar will take place. The time slot will be the same as the previous: 10am CET (i.e., Central European Time).
We will cover the second part of the book, which deals with the manifestations of the past in the present. That is to say, we are going to discuss the practical problems that most of us face on a daily basis. What really is holding us, and our companies, back?
If you want to join, as ever, just send us your email and we will ensure that the link to the event makes its way to your inbox before it starts. A lot of you showed up for the last one, and feedback was excellent, so we will do our best to keep things up. Expect an even more pragmatic session, though, as we move beyond history and theory.
In the meantime, the recording of the first webinar is now live.
Moving on to a couple of random LLM-related observations:
It is rather revealing, to say the least, that some “strategists” argue that anyone not using ChatGPT to do their work is not doing their work properly. Per definition, only a below-average strategic mind would tell you to use a tool designed to draw generic conclusions from generic data to create a generic strategy.
Meanwhile, strategists who actually know what they are doing are using ChatGPT to illustrate what their clients’ strategies should not look like.
At any rate, why would anybody bother to execute a strategy that nobody could be bothered to create?
2024 keynotes
Every year, as alluded to above, I create three “main” presentation decks. Although we have a couple of months to go still until the new year comes around, I thought I would reveal the new lineup:
What to do when you don’t know what to do: Adaptive strategy in an age of uncertainty. (Yes. This is the new book presentation.)
Regression toward the meme: Why modern leadership falls into old traps. (Yes. This is an updated version of the popular and still very much relevant 2023 presentation.)
The efficiency illusion: Uncovering the hidden costs of digital commerce. (Yes. This is the 2024 Castlin and Hankins white paper presentation.)
As I have made publicly known before, I will be raising my prices on January 1. Thus, if you want to save a cool couple of thousand euros/dollars, now is the time to book me.
Where scientific management began
Central figures in relevant history, part II
Most people who have a business degree, or at least have a background in strategic management, have some form of relationship with Frederick Winslow Taylor. To some, he is the father of modern organizational theory and the man who introduced humanism into the organization. Others take a diametrically opposite view and consider him not merely someone who stripped humanity out of the workplace, but is also the root of evils such as performance management and efficiency optimization.
As so often is the case, the truth is more nuanced (though the evidence certainly is stronger for one side; see the book for the full story). But regardless of your personal stance, it is difficult to understate how important Taylor has been to our current view of the firm.
So, who was he?
Born into a wealthy Quaker family in 1856, Taylor was privileged in more ways than one; blessed not only with a family fortune that would open almost any door, but also a mind that could instantly impress almost any room. As one might expect, his eventual acceptance to Harvard was thus but a formality. Alas, it turned out it was not to be.
Whether poor eyesight due to night study (as claimed by his supporters) or a nervous breakdown (as claimed by his detractors) was to blame, Taylor ended up not a student at one of the most prestigious schools in the world, but a lowly apprentice in a local pump manufacturing company called Enterprise Hydraulic Works.
To his credit, he made the most of it. Over the next decade, as he rose in rank and progressed through his career, he began to introduce new methods, frameworks, and tools - some of which were ground-breaking not just where he worked but in management in general. In particular, stopwatch time study (which would later lay the foundation of so-called scientific management and his eventual venture into management consultancy, a profession that he invented) proved to have promise far beyond his immediate surroundings.
In short, Taylor hypothesized that productivity could be greatly improved by closely observing workers, breaking down their tasks into component parts, timing each, and eliminating any waste in performance. There were just two familiar problems.
First, in Taylor’s attempts to codify knowledge and turn management into a measurable, calculable, and optimizable science, humanity did have to take a back seat. Workers in the world according to scientific management could be no different to cogs in a machine.
Indeed, in The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), Taylor described the ideal workman as “so stupid and so phlegmatic” that they would resemble “the ox” in their mental make-up; they should be “unable to understand the real science” of doing their class of work, so dim-witted “that the word percentage [would have] no meaning”, and consequently have to be trained by “a man more intelligent” into the habit of working in accordance with Taylor’s laws if they were ever to be successful. Beyond being met with inevitable scorn by workers, this created the separation of thinkers and doers.
Second, Taylor shared Walras’ rather lax view on evidentiary support, seemingly having no qualms about using inaccuracies himself while expecting perfect accuracy from everyone else.
But - and this is an important but - the promise of a science of business was so alluring that far from everyone cared.
To illustrate, Louis Brandeis, a 53-year-old lawyer from Boston, had in 1910 been hired to oppose proposed freight rate hikes by the eastern railroads. In hearings before the Interstate Commerce Committee, he argued that the railroad companies should not be allowed to raise the rates as their reasoning for doing so was “arbitrary”. If only they had used Taylor’s methods of “scientific management”, he posited, they could have saved “a million dollars a day”.
This was an astronomical amount for the time and, predictably, therefore instantly made massive headlines. That there had never been any evidence to support the claim was neither here nor there; even though the number was, as a reporter noted at the time, “merest moonshine”, it got people’s attention.
One such person was an economics professor named Edwin Gay. He had been struggling to set up a business school at Harvard; it simply was, entrepreneurs would invariably tell him, an unteachable subject. Yet after a visit with the now famous Taylor, he became “convinced” that there indeed was a “scientific method involved in and underlying the art of business” after all.
Taylor had, of course, conveniently told him precisely what he wanted to hear. If there were a science to business management, selling it as an academic discipline immediately became significantly easier, externally as well as internally.
It proved true. Harvard Business School opened later that year, with Gay as its dean and Taylor as one its lecturers.
And so began the era of business physics – management thinking driven by efficiency, performance measurement, strategic planning, and causal determinism. That most of it had no relevance outside of a machine shop floor was given no heed; it was teachable, testable, and repeatable.
The echoes are felt to this day.
Next week, we will continue our summary look at central figures in the history of strategic management with Peter Drucker.
Until then, have the loveliest of weekends.
Onwards and upwards,
JP
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