In de Harvard Business review van deze maand staat een interview met een van de grote management denkers van onze tijd: James March. Hij is co-auteur van twee klassieke managementboeken: A behavioral Theory of the Firm (samen met Richard M. Cyert) en Organizations (samen met Herbert Simon).
Zoals te verwachten bevat het interview enkele aardige uitspraken:
“If a manager asks an academic consultant what to do and that consultant answers, then the consultant should be fired. No academic has the experience to know the context of a managerial problem well enough to give specific advice about a specific situation.”
“I doubt that ‘leadership’ is a useful concept for serious scholarship.” … “broad assertions about leadership are more characteristic of amateurs than of professionals.”
“….while it may be true that great geniuses are usually heretics, heretics are rarely great geniuses. If we could identify whicht heretics would turn out to be great geniuses, life would be easier than it is. There is plenty of evidence that we cannot.”
“For trust to be anything truly meaningful, you have to trust somebody who isn’t trustworthy.”
“Scholarship and notions of intellectual property are poor bedmates.” “…once you publish something, you lose special access to it. The interpretations of others have as much legitimy, if they can be defended, as your do.” “The evocative ambiguities of language are sources of creativity.”
“…life might be much less interesting if you actually took sex and sexuality out of management. It would be easier, and it might, in some ways, be less prone to atrocity – but it surely wouldn’t be as much fun.”
“Modern organized life poses problems that are not trivial; and anyone who is prepared to try to function meaningfully in a modern organization has my respect. Dealing with the simultaneous demands for self-respect, autonomy, control, coordination, order, freedom, imagination, discipline, and effectivenessthat are essential parts of modern organizations seems to me worthy of respect, even when it is done in a less than perfect way.”
“Aspirations for importance or significance are the illusions of the ignorant.” “What makes a difference to us, I think, is whether in our tiny roles, in our brief time, we inhabit life gently and add more beauty than ugliness.”
