Leadership, the consultant’s perspective

Last one! This is the fourth of four posts on The Leadership Challenge, by James Kouzes and Barry Posner, and looks at it from a consultant’s viewpoint. Prior posts took different perspectives: literary, psychoanalytic, and economic. Looking back over them, I haven’t been too supportive. The book has the literary value of a romance novel, the self-help value of a fad diet, and the economic value of a penny tech stock.

For a consultant, though, it’s very useful.

First, it tells you something about the mindset of the kinds of people who consume these books. Secondly, it’s a good explanation of how to provide guidance to a client. Let me explain both points.

Mindset first. As a consultant, you are working with all kinds of people. You have to be able to listen to them, understand the text and subtext of their messages, and frame your communications so they make sense. These sorts of management books are popular, especially with executive and aspiring executive types. They give you a chance to see what the concerns are and what the language is. Then, as a consultant, you can position your work to reflect them.

Using these books explicitly can also mark you as one of the tribe. The Art of War was very popular a few years back. It still pops up, but not like before. One of the stories emphasises decisiveness:

[A]rrangements were made to bring 180 ladies out of the Palace.  Sun Tzu divided them into two companies, and placed one of the King’s favorite concubines at the head of each….

So he started drilling them again, and this time gave  the order “Left turn,” whereupon the girls once more burst  into fits of laughter.  Sun Tzu:  “If words of command are  not clear and distinct, if orders are not thoroughly  understood, the general is to blame.  But if his orders ARE  clear, and the soldiers nevertheless disobey, then it is the  fault of their officers.”

So saying, he ordered the leaders of the two companies  to be beheaded.

The Leadership Challenge suggests that this sort of management by punishment is exactly wrong. Instead, team members have to know that it is safe to make mistakes. This increases the willingness to try new ideas, and increases the willingness to identify things that aren’t working and stop them.

When talking with your client, should you communicate execution or consultation? results or process? The management book-of-the-month club will help you decide.

The second way I found the book useful was in thinking about the consultant’s role. The Leadership Challenge describes leading without position or hierarchy. Often, that’s exactly what consultants have to do.

Consultants are external to the client’s organisation, and bring skills and knowledge that the client doesn’t have. They are trying to show the client a new way or demonstrate new thinking. As outsiders, though, they have no official clout, no institutional leverage. It isn’t enough to show up and say, ‘We’re the experts, here’s the answer.’ To be effective (and to be desired), consultants have to lead clients gently. They have to understand the values, align the project with the values, engage the client with the new direction through those values, and the encourage the client to make the new knowledge their own.

I have tended to think of consulting as providing advice. Since reading this book, I also see that there’s an element of leadership. That’s something I’ll want to integrate into my communication. At least until it goes out of style.

Leadership, the economic critique

One of the keys to economic thinking is models. We are always simplifying the world into models of cause, effect, and interaction. Economists try to do this explicitly, to write down the inputs (causes), outputs (effects), and equations (interactions) in a way that clearly explains our mental models. Then, they ex-sist in a way that allows us to play with them openly and consistently.

When we are analysing a particular phenomenon, the choice of model is very important. In this, the third of four reviews of The Leadership Challenge, by James Kouzes and Barry Posner, I’m suggesting a few different economic models and trying to figure out what they mean for leadership.

One model is the $20 bill on the footpath. It’s an old economics joke. An economics professor and a graduate student are walking down the street. The graduate student says, ‘Hey, there’s a $20 bill on the footpath.’ The professor replies, ‘No, there’s not. If there were, someone would already have picked it up!’

Another model is a standard production model, in which factors of production are combined to produce outputs. In addition to land, labour, and capital, we can add other factors like entrepreneurship, managerial capability, and leadership. We can imagine two scenarios: both have the same physical inputs, but one has high leadership and the other low leadership.

The second model suggests that, yes, we can produce more. We can be more productive and more efficient. This is essentially what The Leadership Challenge is offering. With low leadership, employees are not engaged and are not contributing to the full extent that they could. With high leadership, they can be encouraged to work harder and smarter, to present new and better ideas, to do more.

This is where the first model comes in: if there are these $20 bills lying around that can be ‘found’ by reading this book, we would expect that they would have already been found.

The likely explanation is that leadership is hard. Learning about and practising good leadership takes time and effort. Adding more leadership to your production function isn’t costless and its success is uncertain. If a business wants to produce more, it may be better off adding more machines or workers, rather than worrying about the uncertain pay-off from leadership training. It is safer to depend on mediocre leadership.

There is an interesting wrinkle, though. From the firm’s perspective, it may be safer to assume mediocre leadership. However, the individual’s perspective is different. An individual can become richer by increasing human capital, in this case, leadership abilities. Furthermore, self-help books are efficient from the firm’s perspective. The firm doesn’t have to select people, spend resources training them, and then discover that it has only a 20% success rate (or whatever). Instead, individuals self-select as those who are willing to spend time improving their leadership, bear the costs, bear the uncertainty of success, and then potentially reap the benefits of improving their own human capital. The firm provides the environment in which individuals could improve their fitness by improving their leadership, but allows variation and selection to do the work of identifying those superior organisms.

You will have noticed that I have slipped into a third model, that of evolution.

A further observation: the low price and wide distribution of pop-management books is further evidence of the difficulties with leadership. Here, I take up a fourth model: expected value. Let us assume that the gains to good leadership are as great as suggested. That is the potential payoff. Expected value is the potential payoff multiplied by the probability that it will happen:

EV = probability * payoff.

If I as an individual invest in buying and reading a book, I am investing according to the EV of the self-improvement project. A $40 to $50 book and a few hours of my time reading is a relatively low investment. If the payoff is huge — tens of thousands of dollars to me, personally, and thousands or potentially millions to the firm — the the probability of success must be quite small. Just to throw in some numbers:

$500 per year = probability * $10,000 per year

probability = 5%.

There you have it, four economic models for thinking about leadership: $20 bills, production function, evolution, and expected value. They all suggest that leadership is hard and uncertain. I don’t think Kouzes and Posner would disagree. The difference is that their book cheers, ‘You can do it!’ My models mumble, ‘Well, no, you probably can’t.’

Leadership, the psychoanalytic critique

This is the second of four reviews of The Leadership Challenge, by James Kouzes and Barry Posner, each through a different lens. In the last post, it was a literary critique. This post is the psychoanalytic critique.

The reason for the multiple critiques is this: I read these popular management books from time to time, to understand the work world and learn some management skills. But they don’t really make sense to me. If they were true — if all we needed were seven habits to be highly successful or five practices to be good leaders or 60 seconds to accomplish management tasks — then we wouldn’t need the hundreds (thousands?) of books published each year. They are, it seems, a bit like weight-loss books. Their success as a product depends on their failure to deliver results.

Kouzes and Posner advocate a specific style of leadership. This isn’t ‘fake it ’till you make it’. Real leaders get in touch with their core values, align those values with the organisation, engage their employees through their values, and inspire them to be better. This isn’t so much about getting people to do things. It’s about getting them to want to do things.

Organization Studies devoted the September 2012 issue to ‘What can psychoanalysis offer organization studies today?‘. Costas and Taheri provided their perspective on the return of the primal father through the modern theme of authentic leadership. They argued that ‘authentic’ leadership, as opposed to leadership via position and hierarchy, has the potential to be either liberating or repressive. They used the Lacanian discourses to argue that the modern version of leadership — which stresses connecting leaders’ values with the organisation and the employees or team members, and which suggests giving power and discretion to employees to get the best out of them — could be a movement from the master’s discourse to the analyst’s discourse. In that case, workers can potentially achieve the sort of liberation that psychoanalysis can provide. But, it could also be a movement away from the post-Oedipal structure to the primal father, who sees and wants and consumes. In that case, employees are left without the protection of the symbolic structure and are at the mercy of the boss/primal father.

I see it differently, relying more on Seminar XX and less on the four discourses. In Seminar XX, Lacan discusses two positions with respective to the phallic signifier, the masculine and feminine positions. Zizek has a nice, short essay on this. The Leadership Challenge and authentic leadership generally claim to be moving away from a dictatorial approach, which on the surface seems to be a movement away from hierarchy and therefore phallocentrism. However, the explanation for how this new paradigm actually works re-asserts the primacy of a specific phallic signifier. The explanation is that employees will learn how their behaviours contribute to business success. Their behaviours will then be regulated not by the boss but by the market.

This interpretation doesn’t necessarily take you to the primal father; there is still system of signifiers, just a different phallus. It also doesn’t take you directly to the analyst’s discourse, which depends on keeping a structure but recognising its inherent emptiness. Instead, it suggests a reinvigorated phallic function. But, as Zizek points out, the paradox is that ‘the phallic function coincides with its own self-limitation’. Reinvigorating it also reinvigorates its limitation. If we are forced to admit, finally, that we are ‘bound by the prison rules’, then authentic leadership may actually ‘[open] up a space for true hope’.

Leadership, the literary critique

I’ve been reading The Leadership Challenge, by James Kouzes and Barry Posner. It’s another one of these management/leadership books, the ones that crowd shelves in airports and chain bookshops.

Its writing style is quite formulaic.* I assume that someone has studied this sort of thing and told writers of these types of books the correct formula to connect with readers. That got me thinking about one of my favourite classes at university. In the middle of my literature degree, we had a paper on what they call ‘paraliterature‘. This is all those romance novels and police novels that also crowd bookshop shelves. At the time, they accounted for something like 80% of fiction book sales while all that literature we were studying accounted for only 20%.

I was fascinated by the romance novel formula. About every 40 pages, there’s a love scene. Check it out — open up a Harlequin novel, turn to page 40 or 80 or 120, and you’ll be within a page or two of strong hands and teasing lips.

But another thing about the novels is the character development. The novels are about true love, about a woman finding the one person who completes her, who fits. You know how the novel will end — the gal and the guy figure out that they were meant for each other. A consequence of this pre-determined trajectory is that every setback is temporary, every obstacle will be overcome. They exist in the book only to prove the true-ness of the love.

It is the same with The Leadership Challenge. The book is filled with anecdotes about this sales manager or that CEO who applied the lessons of the book and turned things around. The team might have been dysfunctional, the process might have been desperately behind schedule, the leader might have been completely unprepared. But, you know already that the person is going to overcome the obstacles, which only exist in the anecdote to prove the validity of the leadership techniques.

The lessons, therefore, are hollow. They are no more substantial than a romance novel. The ‘characters’ are cardboard cut-outs who don’t have to deal with the real issues of actual workplaces. The situations are contrived and don’t represent real challenges that could actually sink a project or a career. It’s a world without Dilbert, the Peter Principle, or any of Parkinson’s Laws. In the book, success is pre-ordained. This may be the way to increase sales, but it’s hard to see how it reflects the challenges of leadership.

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* I would be remiss if I didn’t refer to Orwell’s novel-writing machine in 1984. I do wonder if they aren’t in more widespread use than we care to recognise.

Book report: The Spirit Level

The Spirit Level puts forth the thesis that more-equal societies are better places for everyone; rich and poor both suffer from inequality. It marshalls many graphs and references to support the thesis. There seem to be two problems with the book. One, the authors are in love with their big idea, and make all the details fall in behind. Two, the data don’t necessarily support the thesis.

The book has been discussed, debated, debunked, and defended extensively, so I do wonder what I can constructively and accurately add. Let me start with some key links:

• The Equality Trust was founded to support the work of the authors to reduce inequality.
• The TaxPayers’ Alliance has taken on the book, its arguments, and its referencing. They found major problems with the research, including misrepresenting the findings of academic papers, cherry-picking of data, and non-replicability of findings.
• The Spirit Level Delusion is a book and blog that takes on the book’s ‘theory of everything’. It has new graphs and good discussions of the datasets, and reveals inconsistencies in the analysis.

Consider yourself fully warned.

Here is one tiny example, a synecdoche for the book’s general sloppiness. In the chapter ‘Building the Future’, the authors say:

The need to provide unrestricted free access in order to maximize the public benefit was offered as an economic explanation of why roads and bridges were in public ownership — until government began to try to recoup the costs of road building by charging tolls.

This says that we used to finance roads publicly, and then government invented toll roads. As it happens, I grew up not far from Little River Turnpike, which was a toll road over 200 years ago. Oh, and Columbia Pike was chartered in 1810. Toll roads aren’t a new idea, and it isn’t the fault of some neoliberal, pro-inequality conspiracy that we suddenly have them. By an accident of geography, I happen to know a bit of toll-road history. So I wonder, what else is wrong with the book? This is where the websites linked above are useful. They have three general charges:

• mis-representing other research
• cherry-picking data
• ignoring contrary findings.

Mis-representing other research is the most serious charge. It is one thing to ignore other research; it is something much worse to cite it to support of your argument when it doesn’t. The critics rightly say that this is exactly what Wilkinson and Pickett do. Take the work of James Heckman. I skimmed this report (pdf) from Cunha and Heckman (or see this similar NBER report). Heckman is talking about the impacts of inequality on people who are disadvantaged. The work isn’t about about how unequal societies perform worse for everyone, which is the thesis of The Spirit Level.

The complaints about cherry-picking data are sometimes important and sometimes not. I wouldn’t tend to be worried about whether Slovenia is in the dataset or not, for example. However, it is fascinating that the significance of the relationship depends on the countries chosen. That suggests that we may have an interesting thesis, but more work needs to be done. The complaints about choosing different series of data are also possibly non-issues. Working with these sorts of international datasets is hard and messy; compromise is inevitable. The two key things are: say what you’ve done (and why), and be prepared to back off your conclusions if new evidence calls them into question.

The complaints about ignoring contrary evidence work at two different levels. If we think just about the book, it isn’t an important criticism. The authors have a thesis and they put forward the evidence. They aren’t under any obligation to show you the contrary evidence. The second level, then, is how you as a reader and we as citizens decide to use this one book. The responsible thing is to look around and see what else is there. Are there alternative theories explaining the same data? Also, is there other research dis-proving the thesis?

One of the authors cited as providing contrary evidence is Angus Deaton. His book Economics and consumer behavior (with John Muellbauer) is an essential reference for microeconomic work, so I’m prepared to take his word/findings over Wilkinson and Pickett’s. I looked at one of Deaton’s papers. He says:

But it is not true that income inequality itself is a major determinant of population health. There is no robust correlation between life expectancy and income inequality among the rich countries, and the correlation across the states and cities of the United States is almost certainly the result of something that is correlated with income inequality, but that is not income inequality itself.

So, yeah, that pretty much says the opposite of The Spirit Level. Again, Wilkinson and Pickett are not required to tell you that this other research is out there. However, caveat lector means that you should inform yourself.

None of that, though, is the central problem with the book. As I said at the beginning, they are in love with their thesis. ‘Inequality’ functions for them as a fetish, in exactly the way that Zizek describes the role of ideology. Ideology can function as fetish or symptom, and in the modern world functions as both at once:

it enables you to fully participate in the frantic capitalist game while sustaining the perception that you are not really in it.

Wilkinson and Pickett propose to reorient the economy around a new fetish/symptom, ‘equality’. But, if inequality is as fundamental to some societies as the data suggest, it can’t be just a case of shifting them a bit or reorienting them. Real change would have to be more fundamental. Instead, the authors have covered over this conclusion with a bit of ideologic paste.

Book report: Economics and the Law

I ordered Economics and the Law by Mercuro and Medema because of its subtitle: From Posner to Post-Modernism. The book had a disappointing lack of discussion on postmodernism, but made up for it by being a very good summary of this important field of economics.

The book surveys the different schools in law and economics. I found this really useful because I have picked up bits and pieces here and there, but didn’t understand how they fit into law and economics scholarship. Now I have a better sense of what the different schools focus on as well as their key assumptions and insights.

Mercuro and Medema discuss five schools of thought in law and economics:

• Chicago school: Posner reduced legal justice to economic efficiency. Efficiency can both explain how law evolved and also how it should be written. Where legal rules are inefficient, there is an argument for ‘efficient breach’.
• Public choice theory: applies economic principles to non-market decision making, particular in the political and bureaucratic spheres. People and firms act through the market system but also through the legal and bureaucratic systems to maximise their welfare. Bureaucrats maximise their own welfare, which may not accord with social welfare.
• Institutional: economics and institutions are in a dialectical relationship. Efficiency doesn’t work as a criterion because the solution is not unique. Instead, law and economics are historically contingent and materially determined. Law creates and re-creates rights, which are (rightfully) contested.
• Neo-institutional: also assesses the impact of institutions, but considers people to be constrained rational utility maximisers. The goal of society is wealth maximisation.
• Critical legal studies: sees law as performative. This is a reaction against formalistic or doctrinal legal studies. This school rejects the Chicago school, and in particular rejects that it is value-neutral or apolitical. Because law is performative, it should be used to address social problems.

Helpfully, they also place ‘law and economics’ in the broader context of legal scholarship. The first chapter runs through hundreds of year of legal reasoning and explains the rise of ‘law and ___’ scholarship. When law was deprived of metaphysical foundations in God, religion, or Platonic ideals, scholars tried to understand why law was the way it was. They looked to other disciplines — economics, sociology, anthropology, etc. — to explan the legal system and to provide it legitimacy.

Two warnings:

• Because I know this area only a little, I cannot vouch for the book’s accuracy. Caveat lector.
• The quality of the writing is uneven. The book was clearly written by two different people. Some chapters flow really well, while others are informative but dense.

N.B.: I have the first edition (1997), but there is a second edition (2006).

Book report: The Death of Economics

Used book stores are odd. It is hard to get really good books, because people hold onto them. So, you get middling books, textbooks, and very common books. The economics section is usually quite grim: a volume of Galbraith, a 4th edition of Samuelson, and Atlas Shrugged.

It was in such a shop that I found The Death of Economics by Paul Ormerod. I’d heard his name in relation to Butterfly Economics, so I gave it a shot.

Here’s the quick summary: Ormerod overstates his case. A lot. The book is internally inconsistent, because he uses economic research to show that economic research is mistaken about economics. It is also inconsistent with the external world. My exhibit: yesterday’s FT blog by Martin Wolf. He describes a panel discussion on ‘The Future of Economics’, in which four very senior economists had criticisms and suggestions that were nearly identical to Ormerod’s. Maybe economics has an amazing capacity for renewal and reinvention, so that Ormerod’s criticisms of 20 years ago are now the received wisdom. Or, possibly, the situation was not so dire as he suggested in 1994. Neither explanation suggests a dying discipline.

On to the details. The first half of the book criticises mainstream economics, following a well-worn path. Classical economists were better because they were philosophers and political economists. The marginalists took a wrong turn by adopting a physics model for economics. In the 20th century, the focus on mathematical prowess turned economics inward and away from real life. In particular, the fiction of the rational individual has led us astray.

This is a selective reading of economics. As Ormerod himself explains, there have been many disagreements throughout these different eras. He counters the dangerous mainstream of economics by citing…other economists! For example, while discussing the problems with general equilibrium theory, he relies on work by von Neumann, Arrow, Lipsey, and Lancaster. Economic research doesn’t appear as blinkered as he would have us believe.

The second half of the book proposes new ideas, focusing on determinants of unemployment. There is some interesting stuff here. For example, he has graphs that suggest the rates of unemployment and inflation have a more consistent relationship than the levels. He also runs through some work on attractor points and the Lotka-Volterra system. His point is that an economy cycles around an equilibrium relationship between unemployment and inflation, but the specific equilibrium point can be shifted by external forces or social preferences.

In effect, Ormerod is saying that he has a better model. He favours a different set of variables (rates rather than levels) and a different mathematical expression (attractor points rather than linear regressions). Structurally, though, his argument is basic economics. A mathematical equation, properly specified, can describe human behaviour.

The last chapter reveals Ormerod’s real confusion. He forgets that economics comes in two flavours, micro and macro. Macro examines economy-wide indicators; its behavioural foundation can be rather thin. Micro is about rationality and its limits and what they imply. There have been attempts to bring them together, but the Grand Theory still escapes us. And this is, perhaps, his real criticism of economics:

Over the course of time, the system possesses many potential solution paths. Any actual path which is observed, from the myriad potential paths which could have been followed, will not correspond, except by the purest of coincidences, to the one which would have been chosen by the globally optimal maximising behaviour of ‘rational’ individuals. (p. 209)

Perhaps this is just a book of its time, 1994. Rational expectations theory hadn’t lived up to its promise in the 1980s. Unemployment was rising in Europe, Japan was in trouble, the US growth was low. Economists had new things to explain.

Perhaps, too, the biggest issue with the book is its title. Economics, even the mainstream general equilibrium theory Ormerod so heavily criticises, has not died. But then, Some Suggestions for Improving Economic Theory probably wouldn’t have sold as many copies.