Posted by Janet Sayers
Rene Magritte - The White Race
Friday 11 November 2011Massey University Albany Campus. Conversation with Staff and Students of the School of Management (Albany). Organised by Associate Professor Wendelin Kupers.
Professor Robert Chia, Currently at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.
About Professor Chia
Robert is an elected Fellow (by invitation) of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufacturing and Commerce, (FRSA) United Kingdom as well as an invited member of the Society for the Advancement of Management Studies (SAMS), UK.
Robert has published extensively in top international management and organization journals. He is the author/editor of five books including, Strategy without Design: The Silent Efficacy of Indirect Action (with Robin Holt). His current research interests revolve around a variety of the issues including: process organization studies; strategy practice, sensemaking and emergence; scenarios, foresight and peripheral awareness; the educational role of university business schools; knowledge and practical wisdom; and the significance of contrasting East-West mentalities and their implications for business practice.
Prior to entering academia, Robert worked for 16 years in aircraft maintenance engineering, manufacturing management and human resource management for a large multinational corporation based in the Asia Pacific. Robert has consulted extensively with well-known international organizations and institutions. More about Robert can be found here.
Robert has published extensively in top international management and organization journals. He is the author/editor of five books including, Strategy without Design: The Silent Efficacy of Indirect Action (with Robin Holt). His current research interests revolve around a variety of the issues including: process organization studies; strategy practice, sensemaking and emergence; scenarios, foresight and peripheral awareness; the educational role of university business schools; knowledge and practical wisdom; and the significance of contrasting East-West mentalities and their implications for business practice.
Prior to entering academia, Robert worked for 16 years in aircraft maintenance engineering, manufacturing management and human resource management for a large multinational corporation based in the Asia Pacific. Robert has consulted extensively with well-known international organizations and institutions. More about Robert can be found here.
Some of his publications, found using Google scholar are here
Robert in Conversation
The following is a summary of my understanding of Robert’s talk. Some of what I mention below is what I have followed up since he spoke, because I was captivated by his various metaphorical allusions (to writer and drawer Rushkin, poet TS Elliot, painter Rene Magriette, Zen philosophy, and Japanese management) as well as his ability to connect these ideas to his practical experience as a manager of a tin can plant producing millions and millions of units per day, and his other work experiences, and his management education philosophies.
The following is a summary of my understanding of Robert’s talk. Some of what I mention below is what I have followed up since he spoke, because I was captivated by his various metaphorical allusions (to writer and drawer Rushkin, poet TS Elliot, painter Rene Magriette, Zen philosophy, and Japanese management) as well as his ability to connect these ideas to his practical experience as a manager of a tin can plant producing millions and millions of units per day, and his other work experiences, and his management education philosophies.
My notes below are idiosyncratic, and if you want to add your thoughts as an attendee or just out of interest, add them below in the comments section …
Robert began by stating that managers (and us all) must comprehend the large concepts and the little tiniest details. It is the tiny little things that matter, as well as the big picture. Robert impressed upon us all the need to attend to the minute-est details in all practice, and for PhD students, especially in their writing. Many academics in the audience nodded sagely and in agreement with this advice :o).
At another point Robert related this need to understand detail to the work of John Rushkin. John Rushkin illustrated his observations of the natural world with beautiful drawings and also wrote some inspiring text about how learning to draw can help people observe. If you want to start learning to draw, go to Project Gutenberg and download Ruskin’s book The elements of drawing, for free. I recently read Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel and recommend it for an engaging introduction to Rushkin.
What is the university for? Education - not skills training. Training skills is not what universities should be for, and this applied to business education also. Universities should be places where people can learn to think differently, or learn how to think counter-intuitively. Go to a consultant if you want a solution. Come to the university if you want space and time to think and learn to do this critically.
In other words, Robert serenely suggests that business schools should not be about learning instrumental approaches to business problems, but to think counter-intuitively about practices. That is, we should not be helping students to rote learn copious amounts of management texts/information about how to do things, or manipulate financial data, but to reflect ‘differently’ and critically on how things are done. Then when we each return into our ‘normal’ roles in life we can look at what we do and who we are in relation to our fields of practice differently. In explaining this Robert used the analogy of travelling. When you are in your own country it is very hard to see your own culture. Paradoxically, it is not until you are outside your own culture that you can reflect upon it, see it clearly, and think about it critically. This does not mean emotionally distancing oneself from it either – people that live overseas are often the ones that defend their country of origin the most passionately. But it does involve critical distancing in terms of thinking. Robert quotes TS Eliot:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Robert suggests that when managers come into the classroom (and he is talking about experienced manager training here) they should be told categorically to leave their management problems behind. Tell them, Robert advises, “we are not here to give you the solutions to your problems, but to help you learn to reflect on them differently”.
One strong theme to come across to me during the talk was the old chestnut about space and place. Robert is interested in sense-making and the phenomenological experience (along with colleague Wendelin Kupers who arranged Robert’s visit). A theme that came across to me in Robert’s talk was the tensions between place and space in management thinking and this being the source of almost all management problems. What is meant by this?
Robert related the following example from his own experience. At one point when he was working manufacturing cans, a customer rang complaining that a % of the cans Robert was supplying were leaking. The customer’s order was for millions of cans. The customer insisted that Robert do a 100% quality check of all cans before they left the factory or he would take his order somewhere else. Robert was somewhat stumped by this as they did quality checks already of course, but not of all cans. Robert talked with some of the workers on the factory floor about the problem and they came up with the solution. They could already predict a fault by the sound it made if it was struck by another piece of metal. Apparently they often amused themselves by banging the metal sheets and the cans. From this bit of information, which could only be understood by people actually working with the materials and by their sound sense, a simple ‘bang test’ process was introduced as the new 100% quality check of cans.
Relating this incident helped Robert illustrate several points he has learnt. The first was the attention to detail that he stressed from the start. The second point was the central and continuing importance of the simple and effective principle of management by wandering around (MBWA), a principle first popularised by Tom Peters. See below for Tom Peters himself relating the incident when he realized this principle, and why it is still resonant for him (and others).
Tom Peters talking about MBWA
The third point relates to a sculpture by Rene Magritte, called ‘The White Race’. Magritte was a Belgian surrealist artist. You can find out more about him and his work here. One rendition of this famous work is below.
The painting represents a hierarchy of senses with the eye, or the optical or vision sense, at the epitome, with the nose at the bottom, of the pyramid but as you can see doubled and at the base. With relation to power and especially the power of visual culture this image represents what Western senses are based on. That is, the visual sense is very much related to fields of power relations.
In relation to the importance of space and place, we talked about the recent ‘occupations’ of Wall Street around the world and including in NZ, and the implications of these types of protests in the contexts of technology and opposition to aspects of globalisation that citizens find troublesome. Robert mentioned the Gutenberg Press as an invention that changed the world and caused revolutionary movements also, and drew parallels with the development of the internet and its potential also to enlighten but also radically change the world.
I was interested to ask if there is such a thing as a wise business leader? Robert’s take on this was that the title of ‘wise’ is conferred on you by others in retrospect and is not a resource that can be developed as a tool in the business sense. He referred to Zen philosophy and to a Japanese leader who argued that the best businesses are always those that arise from serving others, not from reasons like just making money. Businesses should be driven in their actions to create through something deep, personal and presumably un-selfish. I personally see something problematic in management technologies of wisdom that are currently evolving and so it was welcoming to see this key point about wisdom so clearly and simply stated.
Robert suggested that naivety is the type of paradoxical state of mind that we should aim for in business education; the emptying out of the mind that one seeks in Zen so that one innocently sees the world anew in each moment. I exited from the session with Robert feeling very serene and calm; like I had just been enlightened by someone who is intelligent, kind, sensible, open and practical. I can see why his services are much in demand with senior business leaders.
