There’s a misbegotten conceptual blunder in all this. We think we can reduce the complexity of business acumen and leadership to something that is actually at a much deeper level of both personal and organizational understanding. It’s not that we shouldn’t try to articulate how to improve, but to confuse that with a promise, particularly a scientifically verifiable promise, is simply naive. This is not, to my mind, terribly different than the employee, not doing his/her job, who complains: “just tell me what to do!” And if you can’t tell me, then you are a hoax. So we do the best we can to offer the expertise, and voila, we are found out. We took the bait of hubris.
We skimmed over the section that said there are no absolute answers. We skimmed over the section that said we don’t know. The answer to this MAYBE is a community. One where we talk about the real stuff that’s going on in our firms and in ourselves. Seems like, from time to time, that might create a breakthrough.
Posted by: Dan | January 15, 2009 at 06:31 PM
Inserted from <http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/12/good-to-great-more-evidence-that-most-claims-of-magic-are-testimony-to-hubris.html>
