The passion of words in management

In a recent Harvard Business Review article that we read for Management class, Gary Hamel (2009) urges us to humanize the language and practice of business. "To create organizations that are almost human in their capacity to adapt, innovate, and engage, management pioneers must find ways to infuse mundane business activities with deeper, soul-stirring ideals...These timeless virtues have long inspired human beings to extraordinary accomplishment and can no longer be relegated to the fringes of management."

Hamel claims that the discipline of management relies too much on words like "focus," "advantage," "superiority," "differentiation," and "value." He claims that these words are far less likely to invoke an emotional response than words like "love," "beauty," "truth," "honor," and "justice."

I decided to perform an empirical test of this claim. With the help of our 49 CIMBA students in Intro to Management, I asked them to assign a value of 1 to 5 (completely disagree - completely agree) to indicate the extent to which each of these words inspired feelings of passion. The results? Hamel is correct, at least in this sample population. Nearly all of the corporate word - emotional word pairings proved to be different in statistically significant ways. The only exceptions were some pairings with the word "value," which indicates that this word has far more depth and complexity in interpretation than differentiation, superiority, focus or advantage.

You can view the results yourself by clicking here. Send me your comments!

Hamel, G. 2009. Moon shots for management. Harvard Business Review, 87(2): 91-98.

European Contagion?

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/bcvideo/1.0/iframe/bcArtIframe.html?z=0&videoId=1247466963617&pageSection=world
The accumulation of budget deficits in some European Union countries has created a classic moral hazard problem for the EU, and especially Germany, which championed the common currency over a decade ago. The current debt and currency crisis in Europe poses threats to Spain and Italy as well. The video to which this link leads explains the complexities and hazards of sharing a currency across national borders. Here is the full article from the New York Times.

CEO vs worker pay

In our Intro to Management "Drucker Day," we discussed articles about Peter Drucker heralding him as the "Father of Modern Management" (Byrne, 2009), imagining what Peter Drucker would say today (Kantor, 2009), and why we should still pay attention to his management lessons (Kantrow, 2009, 1980). One of the trends that particularly troubled Drucker was the increasing misalignment of CEO pay with the pay of regular workers, which he thought was morally wrong. We did an experiment in class today. I asked management students to (1) name a company they would like to work for, (2) how much they would want to be paid for being the CEO, and (3) how much they would want to be paid for simply working there. The results?
In a class of 44 management students, the average ratio of CEO pay to worker pay was 73, and the median ratio was 20. A typical student expects to make $1 million for being the CEO, but is perfectly happy to accept a salary of $55,000. When Drucker raised his concerns about pay disparities 20 years ago, the ratio was 40. Just prior to the meltdown of 2008, the ratio was 400, which also happens to be the maximum ratio reported by any student in our class. Do novice management students lack a sense of the magnitude of CEO salaries today, or are their estimates a more accurate reflection of what CEO salaries should be? The mode salary of $500,000 suggests the former is explanation.
Post Script: See Flowingmotion's comments below. They offer some compelling questions about how HR recruiters fail to justify this gap. We need empirical tests.

Managers in popular media

In CIMBA's spring semester session of Introduction to Management, we debated the need to "professionalize" the practice of management in ways similar to that of the practices of law and medicine. Anyone can be a manager, but you can't be a medical doctor or lawyer without a specific degree and credentials (with the exception of "My Cousin Vinny"). The focal article of our discussion was Khurana and Nohria's 2008 HBR article "It's time to make management a true profession." After our classroom discussion, I asked CIMBA students to send me images of managers from the popular media and got some interesting (and scary) results. Click here for CIMBAn submittals. Are doctors and lawyers similarly depicted in popular media? Is the "dark side" of management just as dark in law and medicine? What does a "professional manager" look like?