Yes to the Mess. Frank J. Barrett
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Название: Yes to the Mess
Автор: Frank J. Barrett
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Экономика
isbn: 9781422183953
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In fact, we now know that Jobs was referring to the development of the iPad, but back then there was no guarantee the iPad would succeed—no way of knowing if it would be a “huge” commercial success or a flop as the Apple Newton had been. Jobs was doing what jazz musicians do all the time, living and acting in the unknown and loving every minute of it. As he told the interviewer, “when you feel like that, that’s a great thing. That’s what keeps you coming to work in the morning and it tells you there’s something exciting around the next corner.”6
In that same spirit, jazz historian Ted Gioia asks readers to imagine what it would be like for icons of other art forms to work under the same conditions that jazz musicians do:
Imagine T.S. Eliot giving nightly poetry readings at which, rather than reciting set pieces, he was expected to create impromptu poems—different ones each night, sometimes recited at a fast clip; imagine giving Hitchcock or Fellini a handheld motion picture camera and asking them to film something, anything—at that very moment, without the benefits of script, crew, editing, or scoring; imagine Matisse or Dali giving nightly exhibitions of their skills—exhibitions at which paying audiences would watch them fill up canvas after canvas with paint, often with only two or three minutes devoted to each “masterpiece.” 7
Or imagine, for that matter, the CEO of a global petroleum giant having to react on the fly to a fatal explosion and burgeoning environmental disaster with virtually no useful script to follow, no sure solution to the blown-out wellhead, and no idea when or where the damage might stop. Tony Hayward might well have benefited from a few nights at the improv.
Weick has a favorite anecdote to drive home this idea of improvisation as an exhilarating (and sometimes terrifying) combination of exploration, constant experimentation, and tinkering with the unknown and often unknowable. A group of Hungarian soldiers were hiking in the Alps and got lost. After wandering aimlessly for days, some had given up hope of being found, while others had resigned themselves to dying. Until, that is, one of the soldiers found a map in his pocket. He used the map to help his fellow soldiers get their bearings and feel comfortable that they were headed in a hopeful direction. Indeed, the group finally did return safely. Only then did they realize that the map that saved their lives was of the Pyrenees Mountains, not the Alps.
To Weick, the story demonstrates that you should not fall in love with strategic plans, that when you are lost and face a radically unfamiliar situation, “any old map will do”—that is, any plan will work because it will turn you into a learner by helping you take action and venture forth into the unknown mindfully. You take a few steps and then new pathways emerge as you discover what to do next. Having a map helped turn the soldiers into learners precisely because they were able to experiment; with each tentative path, they compared their progress to the map, and this comparison heightened their awareness. They became more mindful. They could see more features of the landscape that might have gone unnoticed. The Pyrenees map tracked a different range, but it served to orient the soldiers and gave them a temporary sense of confidence that there was enough structure within the chaos and a loose belief that if they started down the path, they would eventually find their way out of their dilemma. Taking action turned them into learners. In short: Act first “as if” this will work; pay attention to what shows up; venture forth; make sense later.
The English Romantic age poet John Keats was getting at much the same idea when he praised Shakespeare for his “negative capability”—the ability “of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Keats’s fellow Romantic, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, wrote about what he called the “willing suspension of disbelief” that allows readers to fully enter into a fantastical tale. Both concepts partake of the fundamental nature of improvisation: sometimes leadership means letting go of the dream of certainty, leaping in, acting first, and reflecting later on the impact of the action.
I was once asked to play at a club in Cleveland with a jazz quartet that included members I had never before met, including a singer I had never accompanied. They called a hard bebop tune, and within a few measures, it was clear that the singer didn’t really know the song very well and became disoriented. What to do? Players looked confused, and a few dropped out and looked around at each other. The drummer and the bass player kept going, but clearly they were about to stop. I was terrified and, for a few moments, frozen. So I just began to play a few notes, restating the melody in the original key. The sax player and bass player heard what I was up to and jumped in. The singer picked up the melody and started following it, making up new words. Within a few seconds, we were grooving again.
That’s Keats’s negative capability in action, but it’s a good lesson for leaders, too, especially when the wheels are starting to come off and it’s impossible to get enough information for a fully coherent plan. Do what jazz players do. Do what Shakespeare did. Act, and pay attention to what unfolds as you go.
For decades, the assumption has been that management is the art of planning, organizing, deciding, and controlling. But planning of necessity becomes unreliable when the environment grows unpredictable and unstable; organizing looks quite different viewed from the perspective of open-source innovation; deciding is not so much a rational, deductive conclusion as it is a product of ongoing relational exchanges; and controlling seems impossible in a world of networks. What we need to add to our list of managerial skills is improvisation—the art of adjusting, flexibly adapting, learning through trial-and-error initiatives, inventing ad hoc responses, and discovering as you go.
One popular story often associated with leadership holds that leaders master the skills and tools associated with strategy (such as financial and market analysis), much as people learn to play music by mastering scales, arpeggios, and other exercises. Business schools reinforce this model and sometimes treat learning as if knowledge were an object transferred between brains—what Paulo Freire called the “banking concept” of education. In this view, knowledge is a currency first deposited inside the head, then aggregated and detached in separate clusters that can be transferred, accumulated, and consumed.
In today’s dynamic world, though, quickly unlearning old habits, routines, and strategies can often be as important as learning them in the first place. GE offers a case in point. Until the financial crisis that began in 2007, GE was convinced that its financial arm, GE Capital, was the goose that laid the golden eggs. Not only was GE Capital hugely profitable in itself, it required almost no new capital investment, such as factories, to sustain itself. Then came the crash, and the golden eggs turned rotten overnight. Suddenly, GE’s credit rating was being downgraded from triple-A, and the company had to cut its dividend for the first time since the Great Depression, even with Warren Buffett riding to the rescue with a $3 billion investment.
Today, GE is stressing what it used to do so well in the past—making things, from light bulbs to jet engines, not just loans. But CEO and Chairman Jeffrey Immelt is also helping the company’s next generation of leaders unlearn old ways by having them study and spend time with organizations as diverse as Google and the United States Military Academy at West Point—Google for its “constant entrepreneurship,” as Immelt told the New York Times, and West Point for its “adaptability” and “resiliency” in highly dynamic and shifting circumstances.8
Sometimes it’s in the context of breakdowns, even crises, that learning comes most alive. When there’s a breakdown, managers СКАЧАТЬ