Facing grand challenges with… more management?
Why the management and tech elite are so far incapable of producing real ‘disruption’.
Where did the grandeur go? Asks Martin Parker, professor of organization studies at University of Bristol. In his recent article for Aeon he asks why we no longer pursue grand projects like The Apollo Space Program or the building of the Concorde. Why don’t we inspire and bring together thousands of people to work on big, superlative visions any more?
These projects required coordination at a scale and complexity the likes of which had never been seen. The Elon Musks of the world still do this kind of work. But the difference is their work is not a collective conversation or vision, it’s an exclusive one, executed at their will. No longer do we find projects of grand collective vision. Why?
Business schools and modern ‘management’ take a good portion of the blame. Parker traces the history of the word management. Its etymology being derived from the Italian mano, meaning hand. And the act of training horses which happens in a riding school, a mennagio. Today it is a generic term for the training and control of others , Parker tells us,
From this form of manual control, the word has expanded into a general activity of training and handling people. It is a word that originates with ideas of control, of a docile or wilful creature that must be subordinated to the instructions of the master.
But management also refers to the art of organising to cope with hard challenges. Unfortunately today, even as our challenges grow, the manager is personified by entrepreneurs and business people. A class that emerged and grew throughout the 20th century.
And this means that a manager is synonymous with looking out for the interests of business “…questions about what sort of future human beings might create tend to be limited by the horizon of the management strategies of market capitalism.” According to Parker, this means we are always looking towards how to intensify and continue the same business practices that have made Jeff Bezos and others so very wealthy.
What Parker wants to get at is that visions now come and/or are limited by the view of managers. And the way managers are trained in business schools, they end up being interested in business alone. This is hardly surprising. There is nothing revolutionary or disruptive likely to happen here, despite all the talk of disruption — unless if fits the trained, organizationally limited frame of a manager.
This is similar to a point the science fiction author Bruce Sterling made at the annual NEXT conference in Berlin a few years ago, for Germany’s tech elite. Basically the European Silicon Valley crowd (forward the video to 6:07).
Even these apparent innovators — often seen as far more disruptive than ‘managers’ — face this same problem of horizons limited by the imperatives of market capitalism. You all talk about disruption, Sterling said, but the people with the money are still your masters. You’ll sell your successful app to the big financiers, and even if you keep a lot of the money you’ll go buy toys and build rockets.
“In the startup world, you move fast and you work hard in order to make other people rich. Other people. Not you. You are a small elite of very smart young people who are working very hard for an even smaller elite of mostly baby boomer financiers […] As long as you are making rich guys richer, you are not disrupting the austerity. You are one of it’s top facilitators.”
Housing and social justice for all are not sexy futures, and cannot be sold to those who can pay you, and so they are not being developed. All of which, he says, is a dangerous symbiotic system the tech world has never disrupted. “Have you ever tackled that particular dragon? No you haven’t” Sterling admonished them. “They are still sitting on your neck”.
Back to Parker in his Aeon article,
“Capitalism has captured the future, and is now commodifying it and selling it back to us as gizmos and widgets, or else distracting us with fantasy — defined by its refusal to engage in realism or real problems.”
Parker lists the work of Marianna Mazzucato, a professor in the economics of innovation and public value at University College London as a response to big problems that matches the scale of the NASA project to get to the moon, or the building of the Concorde. Mazzucato has proposed, and made progress on, massive mission-oriented research and innovation schemes across countries. With immense visions for fixing everything from climate, dementia, plastic in the oceans. He also lists The Green New Deal, and it’s big-vision projects.
the richest company on Earth.
But in the end, it is hard to see what Parker proposes business schools do to teach graduates differently given the world they enter on exit from their education.
Parker offers a few visions of his own. Solar panels across the landscape as far as the eye can see. Food made from algae grown in space. Underground distributions systems for food and goods, leaving us to turn roads into parks. But these are not exactly outside what is imagined currently by the likes of Elon Musk.
Parker’s real suggestion, or puzzle, seems to be about how the State — harnessing perhaps what historian Yuval Noah Harari suggests are the good parts Nationalism — can get involved again as an ambitious and visionary force. One that shoots well past the limited horizon of ‘the manager’.
