Читать книгу Reframing Organizations - Lee G. Bolman - Страница 15

Year after year, the best and brightest managers maneuver or meander their way to the apex of enterprises great and small. Then they do really dumb things. How do bright people turn out so dim? One theory is that they're too smart for their own good. Feinberg and Tarrant (1995) label it the “self‐destructive intelligence syndrome.” They argue that smart people often act stupid because of personality flaws—things like pride, arrogance, and an unconscious desire to fail. It's true that psychological flaws have been apparent in brilliant, self‐destructive individuals like Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. But on the whole, the best and brightest have no more psychological problems than everyone else. The primary source of cluelessness is not personality or IQ but a failure to make sense of complex circumstances. If we misread a situation, we'll do the wrong thing. But if we don't discern that we're seeing the wrong picture, we won't understand why we're not getting the results we want. So, we insist we're right even when we're off track. America endured a two‐month version of this drama when Donald Trump erroneously insisted that he had won an election he had lost by seven million votes.

Vaughan (1995), in trying to unravel the causes of the 1986 disaster that destroyed the Challenger Space Shuttle and its crew, underscored how hard it is for people to surrender their entrenched conceptions of reality:

They puzzle over contradictory evidence, but usually succeed in pushing it aside—until they come across a piece of evidence too fascinating to ignore, too clear to misperceive, too painful to deny, which makes vivid still other signals they do not want to see, forcing them to alter and surrender the world‐view they have so meticulously constructed. (p. 235)

We create our own psychic prisons and then lock ourselves in and toss away the key. This helps explain a number of unsettling reports from the managerial front lines:

 Hogan, Curphy, and Hogan (1994) estimate that the skills of one‐half to three‐quarters of American managers are inadequate for the demands of their jobs. Gallup (2015) puts the number even higher, estimating that more than 80 percent of American managers lack the capabilities they need. But most probably don't realize it: Kruger and Dunning (1999) found that the less competent people are, the more they overestimate their performance, partly because they don't know good performance when they see it.

 About half of the high‐profile senior executives that companies hire fail within two years, according to a 2006 study (Burns and Kiley, 2007).

 Year after year, management miscues cause once highly successful companies to skid into bankruptcy. In 2019, a year of economic expansion and a rising stock market, more than 50 major companies went bankrupt. Among the best known were Pacific Gas and Electric (the California utility giant, which has filed for bankruptcy twice in this century) and Purdue Pharma (brought down by lawsuits over its pushing hundreds of thousands of users into opioid addiction). (The pandemic of 2020 brought a new wave of bankruptcies, but not all of them were necessarily the fault of management.)

Small wonder that so many organizational veterans nod in assent to Scott Adams's admittedly unscientific “Dilbert principle”: “the most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage—management” (1996, p. 14).