The diligent administrative assistant moves up to supervisor but fails. The assembly line worker is promoted to foreman but cannot do the job. A teacher earns a deputy principal position in a school but falls flat on their face. Why is that? Why does this seem to happen across organizations?
In The Peter Principle, Lawrence J. Peter and Raymond Hull not only provides answers to these questions, they delve into all the possible implications. The Principle goes like this, “In a hierarchy, everyone rises to their level of incompetence.” How they derived this principle the subject of our conversation that explores one of the funniest but more insightful book on the perils of organizational life ever written.
Alfred Sloan was President, Chairman, and CEO of General Motors from 1923 to 1956. His memoir “My Years at General Motors” tells his story about how he took a corporation consisting of several disparate and competing companies and shaped them into division that manufactured cars tailored to different segments of society. He constantly pursued and integrated new technologies into the automobiles themselves while also shaping the buying experience through the introductions of different styles, improved relations with dealings, and financial services that rivaled banks.
The 2009 film Invictus tells the story of how the first post-Apartheid President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, used sports as a unifying force to overcome lingering and bitter racial divides in the nation. The movie and the real-life events that inspired it are powerful. We will look at it through an organizational lens and discuss insights related to leadership, team building, change and other management topics.
This month’s episode examines war and how principles derived from it are presently applied to other organizational and management contexts. Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is an ancient text that emerged from the Warring States period that lasted from the 5th through 3rd centuries B.C. and engulfed most of modern mainland China. It embraced the complexity of the environment of war, which therefore has allowed it to be adapted for navigating other forms of complexity such as business competition. We examine the text in its original context to illustrate the need to understand the purpose and utility of classic texts.
We discuss the life and works of Louis Brandeis who originated the term ‘scientific management’ that aimed at conserving effort and making work life more predictable, reducing worker stress and increasing satisfaction. He also advocated for a more altruistic and professionalized form of business leadership that served both the needs of customers or clients and those of the workers under their supervision. A collection of his lectures entitled Business – A Profession expounds on these ideas, and he includes a number of case studies and illustrations to show both the human and financial potential of his professed forms of management where profit would not be the only measure of a business’ success.
We discuss a critique of business education -- Sumantra Ghoshal’s article from the Academy of Management Learning and Education, “Bad Management Theories are Destroying Good Management Practices.” He describes a feedback loop between schools and practitioners that has led to theories based on a “pretense of knowledge” that assumes causality and predictability of the business environment and a “gloomy vision” that assumes the worst of human nature. In effect, theories are built around ideas that managers cannot be trusted and matters of complexity can be managed through mathematical models, setting ethics and morals aside. A great think piece for considering the roles of business schools and professional education!
We discuss a famous speech by Jane Addams titled, A Modern Lear, her reflections on the events leading to and during the infamous Pullman Railway Strike of 1894. Using ideas drawn from the emergence of classic pragmatism and Shakespeare’s King Lear as an analogy, Addams took both the ownership and workers to task for the violence and provides a way to avoid a recurrence of such a tragedy. What insights are applicable to today’s contemporary situation? Can pragmatism provide a way forward?
Alfred Chandler’s award-winning book, "The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business" provides an excellent summary of the history of American commerce from the pre-industrial era to the mid-20th century, and how new technologies and a changing society led to the creation of the modern industrial enterprise. The "visible hand" refers to the transparency and prominence of this new class of manager who coordinated and controlled these growing enterprises,
In Episode 56, we opened a window to the world of African-American studies in management studies when we discussed the work of Charles Clinton Spaulding. We now continue the effort to expand the canon of organization theory and management science, this time focusing on Latin America. Worldwide, much of the theorizing and publishing of research has been greatly influenced by a dominant mode of thought originating in western Europe, the U.S., and Canada. Mainstream journals and institutions located in these centers have produced great scholarship. But its perspective is frequently parochial. Or more specifically, it is assumed to be global despite being based on a particular reality of organizing and managing. Also, the political economy of knowledge is such that scholars in the periphery have been wrapped into colonial dynamics which prevented the emergence of a distinctive body of knowledge reflective of the richness of their contexts.
Such is the critique leveled by Eduardo Ibarra-Colado, whose famous 2006 work “Organization studies and epistemic coloniality in Latin America: thinking otherness from the margins” represents a manifesto and call to action by all scholars to consider how the current paradigm severely disadvantages scholarship in Latin America — a region that includes Mexico, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. This region is home to both global enterprises and deeply historic indigenous cultures, each with important stories to tell about organizations and organizing. Ibarra-Colado charges that the current approach to scholarship forces Latin American scholars to forgo their own identity and assume that of what he called the “Anglo-Euro-Centre” that disproportionately controls the generation of knowledge in unhelpful ways.
Joining Pedro, Leonardo, and Tom to discuss this text is our special guest Samantha Ortiz, who joined us for this episode from Mexico City. She is a PhD candidate at EM Lyon Business School and has conducted multiple research projects in Latin America. Samantha is familiar with the situation described by Ibarra-Colado and she shares her take on the matter in this episode.
Part 1. Analyzing epistemic coloniality in Organization Studies (released 10 September 2020)
Part 2. Pursuing a post-colonial research agenda with Ibarra-Colado (released 17 September 2020)
Read With Us:
Ibarra-Colado, E. (2006). Organization studies and epistemic coloniality in Latin America: thinking otherness from the margins. Organization, 13(4), 463-488.
To Know More:
Alcadipani, R., Khan, F. R., Gantman, E., & Nkomo, S. (2012). Southern voices in management and organization knowledge. Organization 19(2), 131–143.
Boyacigiller, N.A. & Adler, N.J. (1991). The parochial dinosaur: Organizational science in a global context. The Academy of Management Review16(2), 262.
McDonnell, E. M. (2017). Patchwork leviathan: How pockets of bureaucratic governance flourish within institutionally diverse developing states. American Sociological Review82(3), 476–510.
Ortiz, C. S. (2020). Caring as an organizing principle: Reflections on ethnography of and as care. Journal of Management Studies. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12614
Stark, D. (1989). Bending the bars of the iron cage: bureaucratization and informalization in capitalism and socialism. Sociological Forum4(4), 637–664.
American Factory is an important and powerful documentary, telling the story of cultural clashes and labor-management relations as a Chinese firm re-opened and re-purposed a close automotive plant in Ohio. Six years earlier, in 2008, General Motors (GM) shuttered its Moraine, Ohio automotive plant, rendering thousands of workers unemployed. Then in 2014, China’s Fuyao Glass Industry Group Co. Ltd. purchased the facility and sought to re-purpose the plant to manufacture automotive glass. With it came a bold vision, workers emigrating from China would pair up with re-hired GM employees. Despite a substantial pay cut, the re-opening of the factory signaled a new hope for the American workers.
Alas, it would not be easy.
Using a fly-on-the-wall style of documentary, directors Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert allow viewers an up-close look at both American and Chinese workers and managers as they struggled to bring the new plant to profitability. The camera was kept very close as workers formed, stormed and, to an extent, normed during the first couple years. But some cultural barriers proved too difficult for quick solutions. From differing conceptions of company loyalty to opposing perspectives on corporate values workplace relations, safety, compensation, and unionization, Bognar and Reichert showed how the Americans and Chinese faced and (only occasionally resolved) conflict.
We analyzed this film through the lenses of several important organization theories and management science classics. Among them are Herzberg’s two-factor theory covering hygiene and motivation forms of incentives and Maurice Halbwachs’ concept of collective memory and ‘spaces’ — such as how the American workers recalled the facility’s layout for automotive manufacturing and therefore struggled with the changes being imposed by the Chinese managers.
Part 1. A new factory; An emerging culture clash
Part 2. On incentives, leadership, and the future of work
Watch with us:
Reichert, Je. & Benello, J. P. (Producers), & Bognar, S. & Reichert, Ju. (Directors). (2019). American factory. USA: Higher Ground Productions.
To Learn More:
Halbwachs, M., (1992). On collective memory. University of Chicago Press. http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/hawlbachsspace.pdf
Herzberg, F. (1966). Work and The Nature of Man. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co.
Herzberg, F., Mausner, B. and Snyderman, B. (1959). The Motivation to Work. New York: Wiley
Weick, K. E., & Sutcliffe, K. M. (2011). Managing the unexpected: Resilient performance in an age of uncertainty (Vol. 8). John Wiley & Sons.
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