Sunday 11 November 2007

Thursday 8 November 2007

Personal Worldview (A Managerial Insight)

The purpose of this paper is to present my personal worldview. In doing so, this paper will lay emphasis on the types of people, types of organizations and their relation to management theory. This paper will commence by questioning organizational habits and draw upon its relation to the leader's role. Two key human and organizational assumptions will be discussed, namely success and intelligence. These assumptions are framed in the context of human and organizational development and put to question as we go on.

“The minute I'm disappointed, I feel encouraged. When I'm ruined, I'm healed. When I'm quiet and solid as the ground, then I talk the low tones of thunder for everyone.” - Maulana Jalal al-Din Rumi.

As we live, everyday we come across critical sessions of discussions that often makes us ponder on global issues. We ask each other and ourselves about problems that usually escape unsolved. What is the role of the foreign policies in regional conflicts? Who should provide relief to victims of poverty, violence, chaos and supernatural events? Where does all that industrial pollution get disposed? Is the “Big Mac” still cool? Could we live forever? Where are the aliens? What is the next plague?

Many of us investigate into such issues where we are caught up and linger between opposite positions that are taken by the different authorities, leaving us confused to decide who is right. A few of us however tackle the authorities and also manage to keep the score. We all want something out of life; generally it is success. The definition of success varies from one individual to another. Possibly what we are looking for is something that we already have, but are oblivious about its achievement because our lives are conditioned into a lifestyle that is tainted by consumerism by negative forces of corporate culture. We are conditioned into a pre-patterned way of living undoubtedly, which is evident yet ignored by most. Consuming more than required, whether it be a surplus of any material that a person consumes or the overproduction of that material by manufacturers. In the movie 'manufacturing landscape' Burtynsky's photographs lays an emphasis on these sort of notions. (Gravestock, 2006)

The challenge is to break free of this extreme system. By breaking free from the system I do not imply to abandon it from our lives. But we need to begin by questioning and finding out where do each of us stand amidst this myriad of over consumption of materials. What can each of us contribute as parts of the big solution from our standpoint? Life is not about luxury tenements, golden anniversaries, academy awards. It is not about a house and a job, career goals, pay rolls or the insatiable lust for worldly satisfaction. In my view the struggle to understand the purpose of our existence is the ultimate goal of life. As we live, we learn lessons and this search continues till the last day of our lives.

If we are concerned about what is happening around us and if the passion to find solutions for unsolved mysteries does remain within us then we must take interest in a wider range of reasoning. Nothing is completely black and white; we must be able to find the real meaning behind it by exercising our intellectual and tireless selves into action. Most of us are poorly equipped to handle the load of such torrent with our bare hands and a few of us have the effect of bringing it all together. These are the types of people we come across today as we engage ourselves with societies, communities, institutions and organizations of all missions and purposes.

Organizations are not just one of a kind, they too differ in their own ways like human beings. In fact there is not much of a difference between the idea of an organization and that of a human body or soul. Orgenon1 is the root word from Greek philosophy, which means an instrument of thought or knowledge. Today we can say that organizations are the tools of human development, similarly the human body and the souls are also tools for the individual to access knowledge and develop self-awareness. I personally classify organisations under two groups. There are some organizations that we did not choose to be a part of but we are born into them, such as day cares, kindergarten, high schools, cultural communities, religious organisations and so on. Other organisations that we choose to be in are like universities, business and non-profit.

Our views about these organisations are shaped by the experiences that we acquire everyday. Our experiences can lead us to like or dislike any of these organizations' ideas or styles as we interact within each of them. Organizational objects and ideas are pervasive in our life's entirety. Whether we are at work, at home or even on a vacation we interact with objects as much as we do with people. From the cradle to the grave numerous materials and logos that represent their organizational ideas surround us. This shows that we are flooded with vast amount of knowledge not only through the Internet network but also through the non-virtual world.

The challenge here is to make sense of this extreme flow of information within and around us. McElroy (1999) draws on the knowledge structures of the corporate world within which he says that we express knowledge in two different ways. He notes that Organizational knowledge is expressed in the form of procedural and declarative rules that are recorded in various organizational knowledge structures.Some knowledge is expressed in literal structures such as business plans and policies-and-procedure manuals while other knowledge is acted out in the process or chain-of-command structures that we follow. (McElroy,1999)

Management theories are very important because they are guides to our personal and collective behaviour in organizations. Making ideas into concrete subjects should be the purpose of any management theory. For the leader the incorporation of the subjective and the objective is the ultimate challenge.

Theories are incomplete without action. According to Polanyi, the separation of reason and experience, which since Pythagoras was pressed further and increased over time, disfigured the true idea of the scientific method and of the nature of science. In the two seemingly contradictory words, ‘personal’, that is, subjective and ‘knowledge’, that is, public or objective, Polanyi symbolizes the balanced combination of the objective and the subjective (Kodish, 2006)

The contributions of Aristotelian approach towards actionable theory impresses me the most. Contemporary theorists like Chris Argyris emphasizes on the relations between thought and action. He contrasts between Single-loop learning and Double-loop learning. Single-loop learning is present when goals, values, frameworks and strategies are taken for granted where as Double-loop learning involves questioning the role of the framing and learning systems, which underlie actual goals and strategies (K.Smith, 2001)

In relation to the views above (about people and organisations) the questioning of the motive behind the assumptions of success like extreme over consumption and over production is the collaboration of action and thought towards such problems. Theories that have logical reasoning like double-loop learning provides a ground for Leadership to flourish in ideas of realizing human situations, questioning them and correcting them.




Conclusion


The purpose of this paper was to lay emphasis on questioning organizational habits and its relation to leadership. In the third paragraph this paper highlighted the questions that are clichés of our daily life, yet escape unsolved. The problem lies in the lack of participation of leaders in questioning the motives behind human and organizational extremities like over production and over consumption of material. These extremities are assumptions of modern day success. There is a tacit hunger for solving mysteries of life, which is the purpose of life. The extreme flood of knowledge is the assumption of human and organizational advancement in intelligence. Most of us are poorly equipped (in knowledge and understanding), but few of us make sense of (organize) the enormous amount of knowledge that we are flooded with in this world of information age. That is one of the reasons why we have more students than teachers in universities and less leaders than workers in corporations. Classifying organizations and the nature of human involvement within them is another emphasis of this paper. Finally this paper ends by laying stress on the relation between thought and action. This paper connected the dots between my personal view of human, organisations and management theory by bringing in the leaders' role on questioning (people's and organisation's assumptions) values, goals and strategies rather than just taking them for granted.


References

Jalal al-Din Rumi, Maulana Open Secret: Versions of Rumi Trans. John Moyne & Coleman Barks Putney, Vt. : Threshold Books, 1984

Gravestock, Steve (2006) Manufactured Landscapes. Retrieved November 6, 2007 from http://archives.torontointernationalfilmfestival.ca/films_schedules/films_description.asp?id=195

McElroy, M.W. (1999). Double Loop Knowledge. The Systems Thinker pg 2.

Kodish, Salvica (2006) The paradoxes of Leadership: The contribution of Aristotle. Leadership, vol. 2, no. 4, pg 459-461

K.Smith, Mark (2001) chris argyris: theories of action, double-loop learning and organizational learning
Retreived November 7, 2006 from http://www.infed.org/thinkers/argyris.htm#_Single-loop_and_double-loop

Other Readings

Argyris, Chris (2004). Reflection and Beyond in Research on Organizational Learning. Management Learning. Thousand Oaks: CA. Vol. 35, Iss. 4; pg. 507 – 510

E Cunha, Miguel Pina et al. (2006) Organizational Spiritualities: An Ideology-Based Typology Business & Society, vol. 45, no. 2, pp. 211-234

McDonald, Ross. A (1996) The Spiritual Poverty of Material Economy Journal Of Human Values, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 179-188

Zohar, A & Morgan, G (1996) How Seriously Should We Take Mobots Organization, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 408-410

stonefree13 publications© Yaseen Z.