Fighting the Orthodoxy: Learning to be Pragmatic

Abstract

Preparing this speech was a challenge. The challenge was finding something important to say—something meaningful and something that hadn’t been said before. I considered a number of alternatives, but, in the end, I decided to talk about my personal experience as both a manager and an academic. I want to tell you something about my life, and I hope I can relate it to you and your work in a meaningful way. Let me start by sharing with you some of my experiences as an entrepreneur. When I was a twenty-three-year-old, newly minted MBA, I had the opportunity to own my own business. It was a small, six-employee machine tool company. The company had been much larger and, at one point, quite successful. But by the time it came into my hands, it had lost its management, was losing money, and had a negative net worth. The business rented space in a dirty, decrepit building that was cold in the winter and hot in the summer. The jobs involved machining steel parts to customer specification. It was monotonous, repetitive work. All the employees were more than twice my age. I had no management experience, but I had a whole lot of ideas about how to run a company. When I was an MBA student, I was enamored with what I learned about modern management, particularly with what I call “The Bright Side of Management.” I thought that when I was a manager, I would practice modern management concepts. For example, my employees would be motivated by the intrinsic worth of their jobs, or I would enrich their jobs to make them meaningful. When I was a manager, my organization would be a bright and happy place. So I took my enthusiasm, my shiny new ideas, and my textbook knowledge and went into my organization determined to introduce the modern management concepts that I had found so inspiring as a student. Can you guess what happened next? You’re exactly right. My idealism had to adapt to reality. It was a slow process for me, and not without a lot of pain. Coffee breaks were one of my first introductions to this painful reality. We had two fifteenminute breaks scheduled in each eight-hour shift. However, in practice, the breaks would stretch to thirty to forty-five minutes, simply because workers would extend the time. I would often sit with employees to take a break. After fifteen minutes I would get up and, automatically, the employees would all go back to their machines. If I didn’t get up, no one else did. I wondered how much time they took in my absence. As we grew the business and the number of employees, this lost time was becoming more expensive. So I put some of my textbook knowledge of management to work. I tried profit sharing: breaking down the time in the value of a lost minute and what it would mean in terms of lost profits. I produced elaborate graphs and posted them in the lunchroom. Since we hadn’t made any money, that strategy was challenging, but if we made our goals, the money would add up. Unfortunately, this did not inspire much in the way of changes. The problem was that the work was not particularly motivating. It was dirty. It was boring. The company had no slack resources. After a long time and a number of different bright-side ideas, my solution to the problem was a loud bell that sounded to signal the I thank my wife, Laurie, and Rebecca Winner, senior writer and editor for the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, for their wonderful thoughts, insights, and contributions to this speech. I also thank my colleagues, Jay Barney, Qing Cao, Stephen Carroll, Martin Gannon, Azi Gera, Jim Guthrie, Jeff Heebner, Lori Kiyatkin, Scott Livengood, Ed Locke, David Major, Harry Sapienza, and Greg Young, for their great feedback on early drafts of this presentation. Academy of Management Review 2008, Vol. 33, No. 2, 304–308.