Consider an important and intriguing table of survival rates for those with cancer relative to those without cancer for the same time period. Some 196 numbers and 57 words describe survival rates and their standard errors for 24 cancers.
Applying the PowerPoint templates to this nice, straightforward table yields an analytical disaster. The data explodes into six separate chaotic slides, consuming 2.9 times the area of the table. Everything is wrong with these smarmy, incoherent graphs: the encoded legends, the meaningless color, the logo-type branding. They are uncomparative, indifferent to content and evidence, and so data-starved as to be almost pointless. Chartjunk is a clear sign of statistical stupidity. Poking a finger into the eye of thought, these data graphics would turn into a nasty travesty if used for a serious purpose, such as helping cancer patients assess their survival chances. To sell a product that messes up data with such systematic intensity, Microsoft abandons any pretense of statistical integrity and reasoning.
Good
A traditional table: rich, informative, clear
Bad
PowerPoint chartjunk: smarmy, chaotic, incoherent
Presentations largely stand or fall on the quality, relevance, and integrity of the content. If your numbers are boring, then you’ve got the wrong numbers. If your words or images are not on point, making them dance in color won’t make them relevant. Audience boredom is usually a content failure, not a decoration failure.
At a minimum, a presentation format should do no harm. Yet the PowerPoint style routinely disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content. Thus PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play – very loud, very slow, and very simple.
The practical conclusions are clear. PowerPoint is a competent slide manager and projector. But rather than supplementing a presentation, it has become a substitute for it. Such misuse ignores the most important rule of speaking: Respect your audience.
Reprinted by permission, Edward R. Tufte, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (Graphics Press, Cheshire, CT, September 2003), as appeared in Wired magazine.
Planning as Public Relations
By Henry Mintzberg
Some organizations use planning as a tool, not because anyone necessarily believes in the value of the process, but because influential outsiders do. Planning becomes a game, called ‘public relations’.
Thus ‘city governments hire consultants to do “strategic planning” to impress bond rating agencies (Nutt, 1984a: 72) and ‘what is frequently called a ‘plan’ by a university is really an investment brochure;’ (Cohen and March, 19). In government, leaders who ‘wish to be thought modem … have a document with which to dazzle their visitors.’ And why shouldn’t they? After all, ‘capitalist America insisted upon a plan’ in return for its foreign aid to poor countries: ‘it did not matter whether the plan worked; what did count was the ability to produce a document which looked like a plan’ (Wildavsky, 1973: 140, 151).
In a narrow sense, of course, some of this ‘planning’ seems to be justified. After all, supermarkets need their capital, the developing nations need their aid, universities need their support. In the poorer nations, national planning ‘may be justified on a strictly cash basis: planners may bring in more money from abroad than it costs to support them at home’ (Wildavsky, 1973:151).
But in a broader sense, is this kind of planning justified at all? Leaving aside the obvious waste of resources – money that could be saved if everyone stopped playing the game – public relations planning probably distorts priorities. In poor nations, for example, it misallocates skills that are in short supply, and that could be devoted to solving real problems (or doing useful planning). Even in more developed countries, think of how much time and talent has been wasted over the years. Worse, what is intended as public relations can be taken seriously when it should not be.
Add all this together, and public relations planning becomes a means by which almost everyone, no matter how intent on using planning to gain control, ends up losing it. Outsiders get useless pronouncements, and junior managers waste time filling out forms while senior managers get distracted from the more important issues. Only the planners come out on top. And that makes such planning for them fundamentally political.
In the final analysis, in the experiences of western corporations no less than of communist states, planning used for image instead of substance ties everyone in knots and so ends up controlling everybody.
References
Cohen, M. D. and March, J. G., ‘Decisions, presidents, and status’, in J. G. March and J. P. Olsen (eds), Ambiguity and Choice in Organizations, Bergen, Universitetsforlaget, 1976.
Lorrange, P. and Vancil, R. F., Strategic Planning Systems, Prentice Hall, 1977.
Nutt, P. C., ‘A strategic planning network for non-profit organizations’, Strategic Management Journal, 1984, 5, 57–75.
Wildavsky, A., ‘If planning is everything, maybe it’s nothing’, Policy Sciences, 1973, 4, 127–153.
Source: dapted with the permission of The Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., from The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning by Henry Mintzberg. Copyright © 1994 by Henry Mintzberg. All rights reserved.
The Opposite of a Profound Truth Is Also True
by Richard Farson
Our great achievements in science, law, government, and in every intellectual pursuit are dependent upon our development as rational, logical thinkers.
But this kind of thinking has also limited us. Without quite knowing it, we have become creatures of linear, categorical logic. Things are good or bad, true or false, but not both. We have been taught that a thing cannot be what it is and also it’s opposite. Yet it sounds wise when confronted with a conflict to say, ‘Well, yes and no.’ Or, ‘It’s both.’ We’ve all heard statements that concede the coexistence of opposites: Less is more. Living is dying. Hating is loving. Although it seems illogical, no two things are as closely related as opposites.
Going in both directions
What practical value can we get out of that notion? At a mundane level, take, for example, the development of frozen food processing. It led to a rash of predictions about the growth of a fast-food market – predictions that certainly turned out to be correct. What was not predicted, however, was the popularity of gourmet cookbooks, with their emphasis on fresh ingredients, organically grown products, wholesome preparation, and a new respect for chefs. Frozen food processing made possible the development of fast food, but along with that development came its opposite.
We have seen the coexistence of opposites in management with the introduction of participative approaches designed to democratize the workplace. These approaches often do increase worker participation. But it is also true that hierarchy and authority remain very much in place, perhaps stronger than ever. That is because the executives who grant the work force some amount of authority never lose any of their own authority. Granting authority is not like handing out a piece of pie, wherein you lose what you give away. It is more like what happens when you give information to someone. Although he or she may now know more, you do not know any less.
Practical deceptions
Another coexistence of opposites: To be healthy, an organization needs full and accurate communication among its members. But also, to be healthy, it needs distortion and deception. If those words sound overly harsh, think of commonly used terms like diplomacy and tact, which imply less than candid communication.
Just as the profession of medicine or the conduct of a romance requires mystique – that is, encouraging beliefs about oneself that may not be completely accurate but make others feel positively – so, too, do leadership and management. Some, for example, hold that one function of middle management is to massage or filter information, both upward and downward. Such ‘distortion’ or ‘deception’ is said to serve two practical purposes.
First, workers are led to believe that their leaders are confident, fair, and capable, reinforcing the necessary myths of
leadership. Second, since the top leaders surely would be troubled by knowing everything that goes on in the organization, they are protected from hearing about the petty problems and minor failures of the work force.
In human affairs, some form of deception is the rule, not the exception. In most cases it should not be considered lying, because that term fails to take into account the complexity of human communication and the many ways people must maneuver to keep relationships on an even keel. Appreciating the coexistence of opposites helps us understand that honesty and deception can function together in some paradoxical way.
Contradictory impulses
One executive I know is a classic example of a man who wants to succeed but at the same time seems to want to fail. Everything he does carries both messages. From the very moment he enthusiastically volunteers to head a project, he operates in such a way as to cripple it – refusing to delegate, undermining the work of committees, failing to meet deadlines, and stalling on crucial decisions.
His behavior is not that unusual. Contradictory impulses to both succeed and fail can be found in every project, every work team, even every individual. Every management choice, job offer, or new applicant can appear both appealing and unappealing. Every deal is both good and bad. That is why leadership is essentially the management of dilemmas, why tolerance for ambiguity – coping with contradictions – is essential for leaders, and why appreciating the coexistence of opposites is crucial to the development of a different way of thinking.
Like one
There is yet another spin to this paradox that I have always found intriguing – that opposites not only can coexist, but can even enhance one another. Take pleasure and pain, for example. Scratching an itch is both. Not pleasure, then pain, or pain then pleasure, but both at once. Granted, scratching an itch too long can become very painful and no longer pleasurable, but there is a moment when they coexist, when they are one. Like truth and falsity, good and evil.
Source: Richard Farson, Management of the Absurd, Simon and Schuster, 1997, pp. 21–24.
Systematic Buzz Word Generator
by Lew Gloin
Functional digital options
We have a wonderful place of jargon that came this way from (it is alleged), the U.S. Public Health Service. There, an official named Philip Broughton, nearing retirement put together a ‘sure-fire method for converting frustration into fulfilment (jargon wise)’. He calls the method, the Systematic Buzz Phrase Projector.
It consists of a lexicon of 30 carefully chosen buzzwords, which you, as a jargonaut, may wish to drop into memos, reports or the boss’ speeches.
The SBPP is simple to use. Just think of any three-digit number, then select the corresponding buzzword from each list.
List 1 List 2 List 3
0 integrated 0 management 0 options
1 total 1 organizational 1 flexibility
2 systematized 2 monitored 2 capability
3 parallel 3 reciprocal 3 nobility
4 functional 4 digital 4 programming
5 responsive 5 logistical 5 concept
6 optional 6 transitional 6 time-phase
7 synchronized 7 incremental 7 projection
8 compatible 8 third-generation 8 hardware
9 balanced 9 policy 9 contingency
For instance, 125 produces total monitored concept. And 440 produces the heading on this column. See how easy it is? You, too, can write authoritative-sounding memos and reports that mean absolutely nothing.
Ron Webster of Brighton writes with a problem: ‘Wondered if you could identify the word, the dictionary definition of which is, “product of a mellow world, in which everyone abides by the rules.” Read an article years ago, which used the word to describe a person and try as I might, have been unable to recollect the word.’
Okay. Words admits failure. Answer, anyone?
Source: Lew Gloin, ‘Words’, Saturday Magazine, The Toronto Star, 25 February 1989, p. M2.
If everyone is thinking alike, then no-one is thinking.
Benjamin Franklin
CHAPTER 3
* * *
MISLEADING MANAGEMENT
Management is the delusion that you can change people. Leadership is deluding other people instead of deluding yourself.
[Scott Adams, in Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel]
Leadership: it’s all the rage. Amazon has something like 10 000 books on leadership, and hardly more than a handful on followership. Find an organisation with a problem and leadership is inevitably the professed solution. But what if leadership is the problem? Or, at least, what if leadership too is not what we think? Read this chapter, and you might wonder about this too.
So we selected pieces for this chapter that bring leadership down to earth. To open, we turn to Farson again. He challenges the stereotyped image of the leader, conjuring up instead a more realistic picture of leadership distributed among a group.
Next comes an example of this in an interview with John Mackey about how Whole Foods was developed. Not how you might have thought. John Kay reinforces this point with his column in the Financial Times about how ‘A star executive does not make a company’. There are grave dangers in believing that ‘supremely talented individuals can single-handedly transform business’.
Henry Mintzberg follows with some rules for being a ‘heroic’ (destructive) leader. After this, it’s back up the mountain of leadership, about the need for some good sense in literally going up the mountain. We then close this chapter with a plea for more ‘communityship’ alongside ‘just enough leadership’.
There Are No Leaders, There is only Leadership
by Richard Farson
One of the great enemies of organizational effectiveness is our stereotypical image of a leader. We imagine a commanding figure perhaps standing in front of an audience, talking not listening with an entourage of assistants standing by. Or sitting behind a large clean desk, barking out orders, taking charge – aggressive, no-nonsense, a bulldog.
Such images of leaders get us into trouble not just because they fail to conform to reality, but because they set us up for roles that are ultimately dysfunctional. The macho image of leadership, associated with men like Vince Lombardi, Ross Perot, and Lee Iacocca, makes us forget that the real strength of a leader is the ability to elicit the strength of the group.
This paradox is another way of saying that leadership is less the property of a person than the property of a group. Leadership is distributed among members of a group, and they in turn play such vital roles as taskmaster, clown mother figure, and so on. Relying on one person – the manager for example – to provide all the leadership builds expectations that cannot be met. Moreover it robs the group of its powers, leading to overdependence on the manager. In turn, the leader’s response to this dependence is sometimes to micromanage, getting into areas of control and responsibility that represent a poor use of time and may far exceed his or her capabilities, actually reducing the productivity of the group.
Defined by the group
People who are leaders in one situation usually are followers in others. For example, they may be managers at work but just interested parents at a PTA meeting, or mere spectators at social gatherings. Leadership is situational, less a personal quality than specific to a situation.
True leaders are defined by the groups they are serving, and they understand the job as being interdependent with the group. We have all seen leaders who successfully move from one organization to another even though they may not be expert in the second organization’s business. They are able to do this because they define their task as evoking the knowledge, skills, and creativity of those who are already with the organization. They are secure enough in their own identities to be able to be influenced by new information and to accept the ideas of others in the group. They are especially able to elicit the intelligence and participation of group members who otherwise might not join the discussions.
In a well-functioning group, the behavior
of the leader is not all that different from the behavior of other responsible group members. In fact, if it were not for the trappings of titles, private corner offices, desks with overhangs, a seat at the head of the table, and so on, it might be difficult to identify the leader in a group that is working well.
Making life easier
The best leaders are servants of their people. I once conducted a study aimed at trying to understand how people achieve power in a group. We found that those people who were most successful served it. They would go to the blackboard and perform what might be thought as secretarial task for the group. They would call on those who had not spoken; they listened attentively to everyone. They spoke their own views clearly and fully, but mostly they encouraged others to speak theirs. They helped the group to stay focused on the problem. In other words, they tried to serve the group.
Humility comes naturally to the best leaders: They seldom take credit themselves but instead give credit to the group with which they have worked. They characteristically make life easier for their employees. They are constantly arranging situations, engineering jobs, smoothing out the processes, removing the barriers. They think about who needs what. They define their job as finding ways of releasing the creative potential that exists within each individual employee and in each group with which they work …
Management- It's Not What You Think! Page 5