Places a Strategy for Prioritization

How many products does an organization have? 10? 100? 1000? More?

It can range from the invoices that an organization makes to inform clients that payments are due all the way up to the way the organization itself is run – considering that organizations are the biggest “wholes” that people create.

If there are 100s or 1000s of products associated with an organization, how should we organize and manage these human-made things? Obviously, we cannot manage all products. I know realize that having a set of places (topics in rhetoric) provide the strategy to organize as well as discover a multitude of options.

For Buchanan, it’s his 4 orders of design. An organization has types (more encompassing that “families”) of products: communication products, artifacts, interactions & services, and environments in which the previous three reside. (he also describes his master topoi as: things, thoughts, words, deeds).

Others use different places. Kenneth Burke has the pentad. Plato uses “being” and “becoming.” Aristotle distinguishes between “common” (commonplaces) and “proper” (which are specific for particular disciplines, for example, the natural science disciplines). Cicero has the Quaestio. Ravi Zacharias uses origin, meaning, morality, and destiny. These are the places these scholars go to discover a problem, whether it’s a text (Burke), a product (Buchanan), oration (Cicero) or worldview/religious system (Zacharias).

I wonder what my places are. Is this strategy? Is this a part of management?

Two examples and implications:

  • Personal experience: for example, in product design, requirements gathering is a huge challenge and a significant portion of planning (conceptual, for budgeting, and also allocation of resources & people).
  • Concerning economic growth theories: John Williamson and others came up with the “Washington Consensus,” a set of ten policy prescriptions that could inform economic growth in countries in Latin America (as well as others). He has revised this list to focus on economic growth (the original ten were more about financial stability) – now, having 4 key factors. Dani Rodrick of Harvard has added even more to this list. Not satisfied with this hypertrophy of prescriptions, economists W. Baumol, R. Litan, and C. Schramm propose another way forward for a theory of economic growth: 4 places/types/faces of capitalism. Their argument unfolds in Ch. 3 of their book, Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity.

 

History of Technology, Religion, Services, Travel

Started reading a fascinating book titled, The Unbound Prometheus, by David S. Landes. It’s a history of technology and the Industrial Revolution (with a capital “I” and “R”) that began to happen around 1750 in Europe. He is curious as to why it happened in Europe at the time it did and why some countries in Europe underwent this revolution earlier than others.

To address the first inquiry, he has two hypotheses (shares on p. 15): (1) private enterprise was largely responsible for Europe taking the lead; (2) and Europe placed a high value on rational manipulation of the human and material environment. Rationality – defined as the adaptation of means to ends and the opposite of superstition and magic (p. 21) – was claimed to be a product of Protestant ethics, as attested by Max Weber (see pp. 21-24), and the Protestant Reformation, as argued by Robert Merton (p. 31). Must check out Merton’s seminal monograph on Science, Technology, and Society in Seventeenth Century England.

Interesting quote on travel, hotels, restaurants and the rise of the service sector in Western civilization:

… the increase in the standard of living due to higher productivity created new wants and made possible new satisfactions, which led to a spectacular flowering of those businesses that cater to human pleasure and leisure: entertainment, travel, hotels, restaurants, and so on. Thus the growth of a factory labour force was matched by a proliferation of service and professional people, white-collar workers, functionaries, engineers, and similar servants of the industrial system and society. Indeed, as productivity rose and the standard of living with it, this administrative and service sector of the economy – what some economists have called the tertiary sector – grew more rapidly than industry itself (p. 9).

What’s the use of worrying about your beard when your head’s about to be taken? (Grandad from Seven Samurai)

There are systems design implications for this. Too many times we are concerned with the “touchpoint” problem before us and neglect to probe a level deeper at the heart of the issue. This is one way to distinguish between design practices that focus on one-off projects but do not get to the heart of an organization.

People Business

Bill Marriott describes one of the vital aspects of Marriott’s business – standard operating procedures (SOPs). These rules and guidelines are devilish in the details and they have helped sustain the standardized and consistent product and service offerings at Marriott. An example of an SOP is a guide setting out sixty-six separate steps for cleaning a hotel room in less than half an hour. It is an example of operations on steroids.

However, he understands the limitations of this engineering approach and makes the point that it has its place.

What solid systems and SOPs do is nip common problems in the bud so that staff can focus instead on solving uncommon problems that come their way … by nailing the basics into place, systems allow employees to provide more customized customer service. They can just get on with the job of delivering the kind of quality attention that distinguishes extraordinary from ordinary” (Marriott and Brown, The Spirit to Serve, p. 25-26).

He describes this type of extra-mile customer service as “stuff that no SOP can cover.” It reminds me of Atul Gawande’s point about checklists in the surgery room. Gawande shared during a lecture that the pilot who landed the plane over the Hudson river was only able to do so because he didn’t have to worry about the basics (since they were all covered) and could focus entirely on landing the plane over the Hudson, something that he wasn’t trained to do.

An excellent passage on the humanistic aspect of Marriott’s philosophy and some thoughts on service design possibilities:

The philosophy of putting employees first is particularly important in our industry, because Marriott is in the people business, not just the service business.
What do I mean by that? When your job is to supply customers with answers to two of life’s basic needs – food and lodging – you’re touching on pretty special human territory. Even if our customers aren’t conscious of it, they have very definite expectations about not only the tangible parts of eating and sleeping – good food, a comfortable bed – but also the intangibles of those experiences: how they’re greeted, how their questions are answered, how their special problems are handled. That’s where the right human touch can make all the difference between a mediocre or poor experience and a positive, even unforgettable one” (Marriott and Brown, The Spirit to Serve, p. 35-36).

If the subject matter of design is indeterminate – potentially universal in scope, because design may be applied to new and changing situations, limited only by the inventiveness of the designer – then the subject matter of design studies is not products, as such, but the art of conceiving and planning products. In other words, the poetics of products – the study of products as they are – is different from the rhetoric of products – the study of how people come to be as vehicles of argument and persuasion about the desirable qualities of private and public life. The interplay between rhetoric and poetics of products is a significant issue in design studies, but the orientation in logical sequence is from rhetoric to poetics.

Logic is from rhetoric to poetics – from what Buchanan calls the forethought (which is captured in Western culture as an “architectonic” or “master” art, p. 31), “the particular conception of design that stands behind the product” (p. 27), to making. He captures the humanistic narrative of design’s history and demonstrates how the relationship between design as rhetoric and making (poetics) changes – and really gets separated following the Renaissance when people arbitrarily separated thinking/thought and doing. The 20th century has seen an emergence of rhetoric, or design as a new liberal art. For example, the original Bauhaus was a struggle between rhetoric and poetics … they had a vision of making but not a systematic vision of forethought … the intellectual, thinking aspect was only captured in the personality of the leadership. Therefore, it did not last. We are at that point in history where rhetoric is coming on the scene again and design, as an architectonic art, has the ability to close the gap between thinking and making (Basically, a summary of Buchanan’s Rhetoric, Humanism, and Design).

This however means, that ultimately “Management Science” may have to develop a logic which assumes that no statement is meaningful unless it is valid on several different levels of meaning. At the very least a way will have to be found to “translate” from one level to another, or to “transmit” from one model to another. There are developments in modern mathematics that seem to tend in such a direction. And the attempt has a distinguished precedent from which we might learn a good deal: Medieval “symbolical” logic with its assumption that every statement in Holy Writ has equal and full validity on four levels of meaning: as a historical account, as an allegory of Christ’s coming, as a moral precept and as spritual experience (Drucker, Management Science and the Manager, p. 125).

As much as I love simple and straightforward phenomenon, I really love it when a concept or idea has multiple layers of meanings. Interesting that Drucker points out the depth of the Scriptures in his essay on Management Science.

Hatchuel argues that Simon is overeager in his efforts to incorporate design within the general bounded-rationality problem-solving theory. Hatchuel illustrates the distinction that he thinks needs to be made between design and problem solving by an example in which two problem situations are compared. He pictures a group of friends coming together on a Saturday night. The one problem situation is that they are “looking for a good movie in town”; the other problem situation is that they set out to “have a party.” The first situation is considered to be “problem solving,” while the second situation is, in Hatchuel’s terms, a real design project (Kees Dorst, “Design Problems and Design Paradoxes,” p. 12).
The fact remains that in modern society there is no other leadership group but managers. If the managers of our major institutions, and especially of business, do not take responsibility for the common good, no one else can or will. Government is no longer capable, as political theories still have it, of being the “sovereign” and the “guardian of the common good” in a pluralist society of organizations (Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, p. 325).
It is not difficult to relate Dewey’s own works, in terms of their dominant interests, to those of Aristotle. Thus Dewey’s Logic corresponds to the Organon, Experience and Nature to the Metaphysics, Human Nature and Conduct to the Ethics, The Public and Its Problems to the Politics, and Art as Experience to the Poetics (Walter Watson, 36).

Master of My Fate

Today, especially moved by two passages of poetry by two Williams. I, as a human being, am defined as a creature of power (having been “made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned … with glory and honour” ~Psalm 8:5) and control, able to make sense of out this world and rise above the structures of determinism.

Julius Caesar, Act 1, Scene 2

William Shakespeare

Cassius:
Why, man, he [Caesar] doth bestride the narrow world
Like a colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs, and peep about
To find ourselves dishonorable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates;
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Invictus

William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.