The statement above is meant as a provocation, of course, but not a frivolous one. Here’s my thinking…
At the top, management (or leadership, if you prefer) is a matter of awareness of the total process; the whole entity, as it were. However, a consciousness of the “whole” of business – or commerce, or trade, management, leadership, or organisation, etc. – cannot be found in a consciousness of any of its “parts”.
What happens is that businesses like to focus on particular “problems” and then managers are trained to solve these by ‘seeing’ things selectively, and to do so in bits rather than wholes. The whole of our economy is predicated not just on growth but on the idea that we’re working our way somehow toward some kind of desirable end state or goal, with obstacles to control that are problems. There’s no doubt that technologically, at least, a lot has been achieved this way. So why do we never quite seem to get there? Our attempts to fix things always, ultimately, send us back to the drawing board; our careful, analytical reasoning and planning redundant and our short-cuts themselves short-circuited by unintended events (often of our own doing).
Whether by tradition or design, the MBA curriculum is also built around a categorisation, a selective sampling and division into parts. The names of those parts change over time, reflecting fashion as well as purpose, and overlap rather than integrate. This energy and intellectual innovation in business schools has undoubtedly led to many advances and successes at reaching goals. But my question is whether these amount more to a bag of tricks than they do to real insight or wisdom. In fact, how much of MBA output is indicative of the same short-term thinking that pervades corporate thinking, and which pervades it increasingly so? And this at the expense of the awareness of the ecological system that actually provides the boundaries.
People’s thoughts are welcome. Counter-positions particularly so.
Chris Dalton's Personal Development Blog 
A set of counter-suggestions, as a way to test out where the ‘truth’ might lie:
At the top, management (or leadership, if you prefer) is a matter of awareness of the political process: relationships.
A consciousness of the “whole” business can be found only in the ‘holographic’ organisation (See Gareth Morgan, Images of Organisation.) All organisations are partly holographic, in the sense that all departments contain an least an implicit understanding of the other departments with which they deal.
Managers are ‘trained’ to solve problems. They often do this by solving only parts, but it is possible to solve problems in a way that enhances the whole system.
The whole of our economy is predicated… on the idea that if each ‘actor’ acts purely in his own self-interest, driven only by money, then that is a good thing.
Each improvement creates a problem, because of unintended consequences, and also because of the ‘Escher Cycle’ of continuous evolution of processes.
The MBA curriculum is a categorisation, a selective sampling and division into parts. The names of those parts change over time, reflecting fashion, but also the evolving understanding of the global business culture of what works in a changing ‘environment’. Many of these elements will be replaced within a few years by the latest fad. But some underlying constants remain fixed, and it is possible to build business models, and management approaches based on these constants. The ‘Whats’ remain fixed, though the ‘Hows’ — the way the constants are expressed/get done in the world — may change.
Thanks for this critical comment!
I agree with the thought that delving into parts can lead to a state where managers forget the big picture: The business success as a whole, or its impact on the ecosystem etc.
But as an MBA student I can also give you some peace of mind. Studying particular disciplines has given me new insights about the whole of my business – and not only how to maximise profit. And my sense of the purpose of the company has also been sharpened, hopefully for the benefit of particular parts of the business.
So my concrete experience is that reality as experienced by a manager is heuristic, in the sense that the whole modifies its parts and vice versa.
The clue to the mindset issue is in one short phrase “fix things”.
There is a pervasive answer that there is one right way to do things.
Indeed it is what Business Schools, and indeed schools in general, are built on.
But schools quickly learned that training the mind so it can absorb knowledge, sift it and draw conclusions from it was much better than simply rote learning.
Having a model so that you can evaluate the new stuff against existing principles is an invaluable short-cut. Hence the bag of tricks.
In any organisation we need the Plant just as much as we need the Completer Finisher. Indeed, it is the continual to-and-fro between different ways of thinking which drives the enterprise forward.
I’ve been arguing this in terms of Business models and Business Plans.
My argument is that a Business Plan is a snapshot at a moment in time and always backward looking. But Porter’s Five Forces are still dragging that business in different ways.
What would be a better visual idea is a business trajectory. One where you can identify the trends and where they will take the business. And how you can maximise the effects of one and minimise the effects of another to set a direction.
Seen this way, of course, the journey is never ending. As it should be.
I’ve argued this for some time in setting business processes.
Commonly these are seen as projects and a guru comes in, takes inputs from all involved and comes up with “the answer”. This then goes off through a chinese whispers process (analyst=>architect=>developer) to be turned into software and when it comes back is imposed on the business.
The greatest benefit of software, however is the audit trail. You know exactly what happened, for how long and when. This gives a powerful set of analytics to improve a process.
So it is much better to set up a minimal working process, then apply Six Sigma principles to improve the biggest problem every day. Over time you end up with a much more powerful process and one much better aligned to what is actually going on. Indeed, since people and processes continually change, the process will evolve to take account of changing parameters and will continually improve to get ever closer to the perfect process for that task/organisation.
This is actually the underlying principle behind the Eric Ries’s Lean Startup – take a minimal model, then get customer feedback to evolve it.
The problem is the mindset. “A project”, “An Expert”, “A right answer”, “A sale”. That’s what we have to move beyond if we are really to progress.