The
Nietzsche Super-MBA
David
M. Boje
September
1, 1999
See
Reply 2001
My story starts July 10, 1999,
after this new book was drafted, taking some time off, sitting on one
of the nude beaches on one of the Canary Islands, imagining what it
was like when Columbus picked up his combat dogs on his second voyage
to the West Indies. I brought a copy of Nietzsche's Beyond Good
and Evil and ignoring the clothing-optional bathing beauties
and the World Cup windsurfing champions doing 360 degree, end for end
flips, began to read. His book is about the festival of Dionysis, the
celebration of dance, laughter, feasting, and clothing-optional. Here
is the Canary Islands, the endless post-work festival, the end of work
ethic, the celebration of play. What a daring book, to go beyond the
duality of good and evil, to argue that species advance by both will
to life and will to power. Life is frightfully unjust; not equitable
an equity of rich and poor. Exploitation is the essence of the will to
life, the hunt for power. Nietzsche thought Plato too much the
appreciative inquirer, too focused on happiness, equality, and
democracy. Rather than pick good over evil, Nietzsche saw the value of
a tragic philosophy. The good romantic story of the American Dream
combines with the tragic story of poverty wages. Many willing submit
to wage slavery and seek a gentle master; they can not abide freedom.
I found the quote Steve Best made
to my OT class last semester, the one that prompted three months of
email, "One should not go into churches if one wants to breath
pure air" and gave it yet another highlight (Beyond Good and Evil
written in 1886, hereafter BGE, p. 62). I found another I also like,
"Why could the world which is of any concern to us - not be a
fiction?" (p. 66). I thought of the movie Matrix. But this is not
for me the point of BGE in the MBA program. It is more in this quote:
The
question is to what extent it is life-advancing, life-preserving,
species-preserving, perhaps even species-breeding" (BGE, p. 35).
Why do I keep silent about these
points? Did Nietzsche foresee the BioTech Century we have just begun?
The Will to Simplify
- I will confess that reading Beyond Good and Evil for the
seventh time, I did finally get it. There on page 160, Nietzsche told
it clear, the MBA wants to assimilate the complex and to make complex
simple and therefore must repel and reject what is contradictory.
"Out of multiplicity [the MBA student] has the will to
simplicity" (BGE, p. 160). Here was my answer on how to teach
MBAs; simplify the complex. It dawned on me, I am always making the
simple complex, running up stream to the MBA interest. To Nietzsche,
and me "every surface is a cloak" (BGE, p. 161). The MBA
will to power is a will to simplify, to substitute surface for the
complex, simple for complex.
7 S Maps of OT - I
wondered what Frederick would think of the 7 Ss of OT, the ones from
the In Search of Excellence and Boston Consulting Group
heyday?. Would he think them simple and comfortable
fictions? You already know the 7 Ss of OT:
1.
Structure - At
the center draw a circle with Structure (mechanistic or organic).
Around this draw 6 more circles with lines connected to this center
circle and to neighboring circles.
2.
Strategy -
Usually situated to the right of your drawing, the general or
specialist vision of where the organization is going on its adventure.
3.
Style of Leadership
- Often placed at left to give a sense of whom is steering the
structure to enact its strategy. There are so many styles to choose,
autocratic and democratic are two.
4.
Situation
- Always on top of the map. The organization is situated in an
environment, be it turbulent or placid, chaotic of simple, so they
say.
5.
Systems -
At bottom is the system of systems, all the sequences of processes,
the technologies, communication, and other systems that inter-twine.
The open systems recognize the situation of the organization, the
closed ones, are not open to feedback beyond the factory walls.
Systems became quite popular after WWII, but did not make it big in OT
until March and Simon (1958), then Thompson (1967) and Weick's (1976)
social psychology of organizing, that restoried
"organization" into "organizing." I apologize for
leaving these great works out of Table One. I will mend the map next
time.
6.
Size -
Small or large, but most of the courses of the MBA favor large, but
small business and entrepreneurship is increasingly popular.
7.
Synergy -
Habit 6 in the Steve Covey (1989) book, and the mainstay of the Disney
University, pretender to the throne of MBA training.
How would Nietzsche respond to
the 7 Ss? "The cult of
surfaces!" (BGE, p 85). To the MBA the 7 Ss is a great idea. Look
at how such a map simplifies the complex, makes history unnecessary as
Steve Robbins tells us in his most recent management texts, something
worthy of an appendix, irrelevant to the serious management student.
With 7, you can select some S-signs and ignore so many more. In the
MBA student, there is a "well to simplify," part of the
"will to power." Seven Ss is solution oriented, taking the
complex and rendering it simple, without contradiction, a work of
synergetic surfaces.
Dear MBA,
Each era posits an OT with its own
7Ss. Each one an apologetic for the way BGE is to be done, to lower
resistance to the newest socio-techno-scheme.
OT exists in perpetual renewal,
each era saying it has found the "real" 7 Ss. History shows this to be a mask, an act of spectacle
showmanship, a cover story.
I really got into the Ss. I keep
doing that, take a simple theory, start moving historically and
globally and before you know it the simple is so very complex. Yet,
would you agree that the 7s of the 1960s, the 1970s, 1980s and 1990
are quite different Ss? And if they are, why are they different?
Keep OT Simple.
I think MBAs (in contrast to Ph.D.s) prefer a course in OT taught with
an eye to "Making Things Simple" (recipes like the 7 S's of
OT or the 7 Habits of Leadership) and a course that makes them
comfortable, rich with positive visions of their financial future, and
an appreciative inquiry. To "Make Things Simple" is to seek
highly practical case examples in OT. For Nietzsche the MBA, I think,
would be the Super-MBA," someone who recognizing that you
can not do away with the suffering of the world, exploit it because,
in suffering there is creative destruction (BGE, p. 155). Where Hobbes
was into mechanistic OT in a big way, for Nietzsche, it was all
organic OT, a will to power that was an organic will to life. The
mechanistic he argues is the master morality, the organic the slave's
morality, the two together make up the mixed culture of organized life
(BGE, p. 144-5). The ruination of a Super-MBA is to become
softhearted, to be either democratic or egalitarian, to back away from
exploitation, the organic function of life. The Super-MBA, Nietzsche
might argue, should be strong of spirit, recognize that to exploit is
to speed up creative suffering and bring the adventurer and conqueror
success (Nietzsche's 7s). The discipline of suffering:
"That
tension of the sould in misfortune which cultivates its strength, its
terror at the site of great destruction, its inventiveness and bravery
in undergoing, interpreting, exploiting misfortune, and whatever of
depth, mystery, mask, spirit, cunning and greatness have bestowed upon
it - has it not been bestowed through suffering, through the
discipline of great suffering?" (BGE p. 155).
Keep OT Complex.
As you can see by the density of citations in Table One, I tend to
gravitate to the "Makes Things Complicated" and the part of
the world of OT that "Makes People Uncomfortable." Still I
would think that every MBA would put Beyond Good and Evil on their
executive desk. "Oh festival" says Nietzsche, "the
wedding day has come for light and darkness" (BGE, p. 222-223).
The MBA does create values, invent values, and discover values in the
contest of nature. Learning the art of command is learning not to be
part of the herd or the herd instincts.
I see a complex spectacle - Mine
is the will to multiplicity, to deconstruct simple surfaces.
Clumsy spectators will insist, just give me one chart of
7Ss and Boje do the work of the Business College, KISS. Only with one
chart, the best one, can the MBA feel themselves master, in a will to
simplify.
Philosophy, be it (skeptical or
affirmative) critical theory or postmodern theory "Makes Things
Complicated," With a more critical pedagogy for MBAs, the focus
shifts from managers are the world, to a look at the three billion
peasantariat some writers (Burrell 1997; Kotke, 1993 and Korten, 1995)
argue the managers are taught in Business College to ignore. The focus
is on the .001% super rich (e.g. I read Bill Gates has as much wealth
as one billion people do). Since Hobbes, the managerial class has been
trained to be an elite that governs the 3 billion peasants and the
wage slaves who make up most of the other 3 billion. People feel
obliged to be wage slaves as long as the spectacle of production and
consumption promises happiness.
MBA’s
Rely by Mike Kelley