The "primal" manager is alive and well. The manager who makes quick but not correct decisions, leads herself and perhaps not the team. The need to think and have a reasonable process is simply not prized in business circles.
Or at least one would think that of Lord Alan Sugar and some of the panel who critiqued Jason Leech’s departure from The Apprentice yesterday.
No doubt Jason has the popular vote. He’s a nice guy, he’s eloquent, he’s thoughtful, he is studying for a Ph.D. But ironically he is cast as simply way too clever, thoughtful, sensitive, and aware of a wider range of facts to survive in the corporate world.
Some management theorists talk of the "primal’ manager", the one that predominates in our business communities. They have to be robust, decisive, single-minded. They are fit for survival in a rough, tough business world with high levels of competition and rapidly changing business environments. The problem is when they evolve a bit, their ethics don’t evolve with them. Perhaps that’s why we are sitting with holes in the ozone layer started by entrepreneurial endeavour in the 60s, current double-dip recessions, a banking crisis and the more successful firms manipulating the benefit system to create part-time, not full-time jobs subsidised by the state! We also have multinationals controlling government in some cases with the aid of a substantially unregulated web that allows child porn and animal mutilation amongst, amongst other things. Who cares when, from the same process, billionaires are born from such primal activities?
Great stuff. This rapid decision-making, “suits you sir”!
There is without doubt the divide between the management world in the academic world. Business schools are often sidestepped from their higher qualification programmes because of industry’s inability to see the relevance of pure academia over the immediacy of the needs of the market and the survival of the company.
That’s the problem with thoughtful decision-making on reflective practice, nobody has time to do it, nobody has time to see that a balanced reasonable approach that is informed often will produce a better decision and can still meet deadlines. If the organisational culture supports it.
Jason was probably wrong in stepping down from his team leader role in The Apprentice. He has superb potential in an evolved organisation. The problem with evolved creatures as they will often sacrifice themselves, rather than become something that they are not. Jason is very much his own man, not some ego-hungry harpy lusting for power, caught up in their own egocentrism. The problem with those that push on regardless is that they are celebrated by society as wealth makers and so-called leaders. The darker sides of our ecological, social and political histories are often littered with the damage some of these people have wrought.
There is a real desire divide between our business schools and the market. Jason in sharing his world with The Apprentice, may have flaws, but he shines a light for the more thoughtful, sentience evolved business brains that often don’t get a word in edgeways and are simply too well-mannered to highlight the obvious ignorance of their detractors.
I know who I prefer. The public last night in disagreeing with the panel and choosing Jason to be “hired”, knew who they preferred but then, as the programme said, we shouldn’t really listen to our market research too much, or what people think, should we?
