The Ideal University:
In the Image and Likeness of Logos.
By
James Maroosis
Summary and Overview
The
Romans needed to put together two words to translate
the Greek word Logos: Ratio et Oratio or Ratio
adque Oratio.
Image
and Likeness as understood by the Greek Fathers
is the relationship between the Image of God
we are created in and the Likeness we co-create
with God of that Image. Our Likeness is the
way we manifest God’s Image through our
thoughts, words and deeds, i.e. through the
way we manage ourselves in the world.
Today,
I am going to suggest that we build our College
in the Image and Likeness of Logos, which is
to say, as an institution that teaches Ratio
et Oratio.
Isocrates
This
type of College would belong to the Oratorical
Tradition that is best expressed in antiquity
by Isocrates, Cicero and Quintillion. This tradition
has been renewed and brought to the fore in
our own times by Marshall McLuhan, Mary Parker
Follett and Peter Drucker.
Marshall McLuhan
Such
a College would include, of course, the wisdom
of Thomas Aquinas along with the wisdom of very
many others in and outside of the Christian
Tradition. The reason for this is that the role
of the Orator is to know and put to use, when
appropriate, all types of knowledge and every
type of wisdom.
In
our day, this is the role and responsibility
of the Manager, so that, I am proposing our
College be in effect a Leadership and Management
Institute in the Ancient Tradition of the Liberal
Arts.
The Roman’s might call this an Institutio
Ratio et Oratio.
I
base this proposal on the following observations:
1)
Management as a discipline or practice is the
Liberal Arts applied to practical goals.
-
Management Studies is the Trivium put into
practice.
-
Grammar is understanding organizational structure
-
Rhetoric is persuasion and empowerment through
dialogue.
-
Logic is drawing conclusions from models and
assumptions
·
These three liberal arts have always been at
the core of a good education because they integrate
a need to know with a need to do—to be
both insightful and capable, to be able to integrate
words and deeds, faith and works.
·
The re-cognition that The Trivium is being put
to use in the worlds of business, management
and leadership requires a rethinking and reintegration
of Liberal Arts education to include management
as part of its constitutive core curriculum.
·
This is the retrieval of the old humanist ideal
that originates with Isocrates in ancient Greece
and popularized by Cicero in ancient Rome. This
ideal reverberates through the Patristic Fathers
of the Church and arrives to us in the West
through St. Augustine Francis Bacon, Petrarch,
Erasmus and in our day through, Follett, Drucker
and McLuhan—“to put knowledge to
use for the betterment of humanity.”
·
A similar ideal arrives to us from the East.
It comes from the I Ching through Confucius,
Lao Tzu, Mencius and Pound and is the Ideal
of the Poet/Scholar as Civil Servant/Leader.
·
Both these traditions put the wisdom of the
arts into action in the world.
2)
At the heart of this approach to management
as a liberal art discipline are two components:
one poetic and intellectual, the other intellectual
and moral.
A)
First, there is a poetic and intellectual component.
·
At its core management and leadership, like
poetry and art, are about training in perception.
·
In fact, if art and technology is about innovation
and reconfiguring our sensibilities and making
them new, then management and leadership is
about learning to read these new configurations
and using them purposefully.
·
This means that Management and Leadership are
always a response to innovation …they
function by following the new forms or modes
of intelligibility at work in these new technologies.
·
Paradoxically this openness to form locates
today’s management and leadership right
at the heart of a MEDIEVAL MINDSET.
·
Today’s Leader must learn how to recognize
and respond to the new organizational patterns
that are being imposed on them by the new technologies
through a process of contemplation, analysis
and orientation to these new realities.
·
This is accomplished by putting the trivium
into action.
It
requires as McLuhan points out:
-
Detached speculation
-
Making of inventories to discover hidden patterns
-
Developing plans of action to survive and
utilize these new patterns
-
Seeing these plans through to produce results.
This
entire process parallels the intellectual nature
of practical wisdom (Phronesis, Prudentia):
-
Memoria: True to being memory…i.e. a
truthful understanding of ones past.
-
Docilitas: Openness to the way things are,
-
Solertia: Nimbleness in the presence of the
unexpected.
-
Providentia: Foresight—A vision of the
future
It
also parallels the way Mary Parker Follett describes
the “Essentials of Leadership.”
·
“A Thorough knowledge of your job”
·
“The ability to grasp a total situation”
·
“Being able to handle the unexpected”
·
The Leader “must see the evolving situation…his
or her wisdom is not on a situation that is
stationary but one that is evolving all the
time”
Comparable
parallels are manifest in all those who thinkers
who belong to this tradition of the Liberal
Arts.
But
Management and Leadership are not simply detached
speculative activities nor are they merely acts
of pure creativity and accomplishment.
B)
There is an intellectual and moral component.
The
other aspect of this is that management and
leadership—as a doing—a mode of
effectiveness, is wholly and totally an ethical
activity that must if it is to be of real value
adhere to the four cardinal virtues of human
action.
The
Effective Executive should (straight out of
Aristotle and Aquinas):
·
Prudently: Execute the right things (effectiveness)
for the right reason.
·
By acting Justly: Proactively, giving others
their due…no more but no less.
·
With Fortitude: Firmness and willingness to
sacrifice oneself for the Right things
·
And Temperance: Self-mastery through learned
acts of selfless self preservation
So
that the manager / leader must have the perceptual
tools of an artist and the integrity, disposition,
ethical response-ability and competence to live
well, i.e. with honor and benefit for themselves
and others.
This
is not a life of rules and regulations but a
life of continual re-orientation and co-creativity
in the face of new, challenging and often dangerous
opportunities.
3)
This leads to the distinction between Power
(Virtue) and Force (acting out).
Power
(Virtue) is the ability to act for ones benefit
and the benefit of society. This is parallel
to the ancient relationship between Ethics and
Politics. This relationship needs to be re-explored
and brought up to date to include Business and
Management. It is a necessary condition for
a flourishing economy and a humane way of living.
Force
is always a function of compulsion. It is always
a form of acting out. Simply learning how to
follow force fields to succeed is as immoral
as it is inhuman.
We
need to learn how to transform Force into Power.
This always requires having the Power (Prudence)
to protect oneself (Temperance) from those forces
which otherwise would captivate us and lead
us away from doing the “right things”
i.e. keeping us from being truly effective.
This
is the ultimate ground of humility—to
serve and be a part of that which is a benefit
to all—what the Orthodox call syn-ergia
and the Roman Catholics call being co-provident
with God.
The
Ideal Manager and The Ideal Orator
Peter
Drucker in The New Realities describes management
as fundamentally a moral activity. He says,
Management,
…
deals with people, their values, their growth
and development---and this makes it a humanity.
So does it concern with, and impact on, social
structure and the community. Indeed, as everyone
has learned who, like this author, has been
working with managers of all kinds of institutions
for long years, management is deeply involved
in spiritual concerns---the nature of man, good
and evil. (Pg. 229)
He
goes on to describe Management as what “used
to be called” a liberal arts discipline
that uses all the liberal arts and sciences
to get things done.
Management
is thus what the tradition used to call a liberal
art---“liberal” because it deals
with fundamentals of knowledge, self-knowledge,
wisdom, and leadership; “art” because
it is practice and application. Managers draw
on all the knowledges and insight of the humanities
and social sciences---on psychology and philosophy,
on economics and history, on the physical sciences
and ethics. But they have to focus this knowledge
on effectiveness and results---on healing the
sick patient, teaching a student, building a
bridge, designing and selling a “user-friendly”
software package. (Pg. 229)
Drucker’s
“ideal manager” possesses an encyclopedic
knowledge of the liberal arts and sciences and
the ability to apply that knowledge to get results.
His description of the manager parallel’s
Cicero’s understanding of an educated
person “as one versed in the encyclopedia
of the sciences.” It also retrieves the
ancient notion that one received a liberal arts
education to put it to service for the common
good of the corporate body.
To
see how “traditional” Drucker’s
position is, one need simply replace the word
orator with the word manager in the following
quote from Cicero’s De Oratore.
Training
in the liberal arts is as necessary to the orator
[manager] as knowledge of color is a prerequisite
for a painter (I, 65).
Or
compare it to what Fr. Walter Ong has to say
Rhetoric, Romance and Technology,
Cicero
used to make the point that the orator needed
to know everything that could be known. Hence
rhetoric, the art of oratory…ultimately
took all knowledge as its province. Cicero was
not voicing merely a private hope of theory.
For most of classical antiquity rhetoric was
the focus of learning and intelligence, the
foundation and culmination of the humanities
and of liberal education. (Pg. vii)
If
Pattern recognition is a key to discovery, then
these patterns seem to be remarkably similar.
Drucker’s
own description of a liberal art is somewhat
confusing. He defines the liberal arts as Liberal=Knowing
and Arts=Doing, but that is not what these words
mean. The word liberal comes from the Latin
Libertas which is the root of words like to
liberate or liberty. The liberal “part”
of the liberal arts is about freedom. The art
“part” means “to make.”
So the term liberal arts means, quite literally,
“the arts that make us free.”
What
Drucker describes as “The Liberal Art
of Management” the ancients simply called
Prudence, Decorum (Wisdom and Eloquence working
together) or Practical Wisdom: “the ability
to put knowledge into practice,” to put
Truth into action.
If
we ask Peter Drucker the question that he made
famous, “What Business is management in?”
and should he answer “the ‘Liberal/Arts’
business” we would have to say to him,
as he is famous for saying to others, “You
are wrong! Management is in the ‘practical
wisdom business.’ It is carrying on a
tradition that is thousands of years old. The
roots of this tradition are found in Homer.
They come through Isocrates, Cicero, the Patristic
Fathers and the Renaissance Humanists until
they reach us from the West. The same roots
(but maybe not the same wisdom) can be found
in the I Ching and comes through the sayings
of Confucius and the writings of Lao Tzu reaching
us from the East.”
In
my opinion there is no doubt that Drucker’s
idea of today’s manager, as one whose
knowledge and skill set must be encyclopedic,
highly creative and response-able is pure Cicero.
Which is not to say that Drucker’s manager
is an orator, but that Cicero’s Orator
would be a manager in today’s world.
Today
Cicero’s ideal must be expanded to manage,
words, people, processes and technological innovations
to produce results. In this sense, management
is the nexus where the liberal arts and sciences
converge in practice.
This
approach requires recognizing the importance
of a Liberal Arts education.
Drucker
is quick to point this out. Management is not
only a form of Humanism, it also is our way
back to an authentic appreciation of the liberal
arts. A liberal arts education is no longer
a luxury, it is a necessity and, …management
will increasingly be the discipline and the
practice through which the “humanities”
will again acquire recognition, impact and relevance.”
(Pg. 231)
This
point is as radical as it is important. One
way back to a purposeful understanding of the
liberal arts is through the practice of management
as Humanitas.
This
requires rethinking management studies to include
the arts and reconstituting the arts as a type
of managing.
As
with the retrieval and application of the trivium,
here too we must recognize the emergence and
re-convergence of ancient and medieval paradigms
as effective adaptations to our most pressing
contemporary needs.
Hence
the “Ideal” College is not to produce
gentlemen and gentlewoman with no visible means
of support, but managers, orators, Kalakagathons
who know how to put their learning to work for
their own benefit and the benefit of others.
For
the practice of management in today’s
world requires the retrieval of three ancient
themes:
·
The Trivium applied to learning the language
of the new organizational structures being constituted
by the onslaught of the new technologies.
·
The Renewal of the meaning of Practical Wisdom
as the subject of Management
·
The Retrieval of Humanitas “knowledge
being put to practical use” as the mission
of higher education in the 21st century.
The
post-capitalist society---the knowledge society---thus
needs exactly the opposite of what deconstructionists,
radical feminists or anti-westerners propose.
It is the very thing they totally reject: a
universally educated person.
Peter Drucker
The
Ciceronian ideal of the doctus orator is current
again.
Marshall McLuhan
I
The
Trivium @Work:
Where
are the Liberal Arts Now That We Really Need
Them?
If
we ask the question “Where are the Liberal
Arts now that we really need them on today’s
college campuses?” and base our answer
on direct observation of fact, we may be surprised
to discover that:
·
Looking for the liberal arts, we will find that
them at work in the world of management studies
and
·
Looking at the study of management, we will
find that it belongs in the world of the liberal
arts though it is generally assumed to belong
somewhere outside of that world.
From
these observations, we will explore three conclusions:
·
The liberal arts are alive but not well living
in the world of Management;
·
Management is not merely a technical or vocational
course of study but a type of wisdom and must
be recognized as such; and
·
That to restore the Liberal Arts to their preeminence,
allowing them to achieve their primary purpose
as Humanities, requires recognizing that the
study of management is an integral part of what
it means to be a liberally educated person.
This
will requires recognizing the following distinctions.
Distinguishing in order to unite
1.
Distinguishing Management from Business Management
In
order to follow this exposition, I must ask
you to “suspend your disbelief”
and try to dissociate the word ‘management’
from the word “business” and the
term ‘liberal arts’ from what is
being currently being taught as “The Liberal
Arts.”
Peter
Drucker points out in Management Challenges
for the Twenty First Century that the word “management”
does not mean “business-management.”
It
is important to assert---and to do so loudly---that
management is not business management, anymore
than say, medicine is obstetrics. (Pg. 8.
Which
means that business is the subject of one type
of management, but business is not what management
is. Management is an activity. It is a doing
specified by its object. There are many different
types of management as there are things to manage.
There
are, of course, differences in management between
organizations---MISSION DEFINES STRATEGY, AFTER
ALL, AND STRATEGY DEFINES STRUCTURE---But the
difference between managing a chain of retail
stores and managing the Roman Catholic Church
are amazingly fewer than either retail stores
or Bishops realize.
So
whether you are managing a software company,
a hospital, or the Boy Scouts the differences
apply to only 10% of your work. This 10% is
determined by the organizations specific mission.
Its specific culture, its specific history and
its specific vocabulary. The rest is pretty
much interchangeable. (Pg. 80)
Mission
defines strategy and strategy defines structure.
This is true if you are managing a business,
a college or a tradition. Management as a discipline
not only orients toward an end it also acts
and produces results in accord with those ends
it hopes to achieve. It puts ideas into action
to produce results.
In
this sense, by defining our mission and what
we mean by results, it is Management that offers
the structure needed to bring an ideal of education
into existence as a working college full of
imperfections and continual room for improvement
and change
Not
only is management not business management,
but it sounds very much like a discipline belonging
to the great humanist traditions of Isocrates,
Cicero and Castiglione. In a talk delivered
at Harvard’s JFK School of Government
Drucker both not only distinguishes management
from business process, he defines it as liberal
art and social function.
Management,
in most business schools, is still taught as
a bundle of techniques, e.g. budgeting or organizational
development. To be sure, management, like any
other work, has its own tools, and its own techniques.
But just as the essence of medicine is not urine
analysis, the essence of management is not technique
or procedure. The essence of management is make
knowledge productive. Management… is a
social function. And, in its practice, management
is truly a liberal art.
“To
make knowledge productive,” is the role
of practical wisdom. If this is the essence
of management, then could we ask “Is Management
the place where the humanist ideal is put to
the test, the place where corporate responsibility,
honor and benefit converge to create value in
the world?
But
is Management a form of practical wisdom? What
evidence do we have that the practice of management
is in essence a liberal art discipline that
serves a social function? If so, where does
it belong in the liberal arts? What is its subject
matter?
The
answer will come to us if we are willing to
look at the evidence.
If
we look at the way it works, we will see that
management as a discipline is nothing but the
original Liberal Arts of Rhetoric, Grammar and
Logic applied to the language of organizational
practices.
2.
Distinguishing The Liberal Arts from what is
being taught as “Liberal Arts”
Just
as it is a mistake to equate Management with
Business, it is an error to assume that the
Liberal Arts are that which are currently being
taught under that name in most colleges and
universities. In fact, most Liberal Arts courses
are really courses in applied social sciences,
applied psychology, or applied political theory.
They rarely are courses in applied Liberal Arts.
Today,
the Liberal Arts are normally understood to
be a group of subjects or books and not as a
way or method of approaching or reading these
subjects or books. Paradoxically, the Liberal
Arts as a method of inquiry seem to have lost
their applicability in the “Liberal Arts”
as a form of education.
The
original meaning of the liberal arts as a threefold
path rarely is mentioned much less taught with
any seriousness in today’s “Liberal
Arts” faculties. Yet, it is precisely
this older understanding of the liberal arts
that is being taught in business schools as
the practice of management.
If
we examine the study of management as a discipline,
the patterns which emerge have their roots in
an ancient, medieval and early renaissance understanding
of the Liberal Arts.
All
through antiquity, through the middle ages and
into the Renaissance, the goal of a Liberal
Arts education was service to the community
be it religious or secular. The whole point
about scholarship as a cloistered pursuit was
that these studies were so important for society
that society needed to create a free space where
they could be pursued at leisure. Never the
less, a liberal arts education had rock-solid
practical value: to put knowledge into action
for the corporate well-being of the realm.
At
the core of this understanding of education
are the three liberal arts of Rhetoric, Grammar
and Logic. Together they constituted the crossroads
or tri-via that,
…prepare
the mind for philosophic truth…since by
these roads, the lively mind may enter the secret
places of wisdom. (Hugh of St. Victor)
They
are:
·
Rhetoric as the art of transformation (i.e.
persuasion, empowerment, negotiation) and was
generally understood as the arts of eloquence
and decorum. The goal here is transformation---changing
the way people think or act.
·
Grammar as the study of words and their inter-animation
with other words-- which means etymology (studying
their roots and meaning in different contexts),
exegesis (interpreting their meaning and exploring
their consequences). The goal here is to study
words, their interaction, their history, interplay
and implications and how to read signs and situations.
·
Dialectic (logic) as the art of following arguments,
evaluating the soundness of thinking. It was
about mapping things out in an orderly fashion
and learning how to think things through. The
goal here is abstract clarity and focus.
In
Teaching as Interpretation, I. A. Richards points
out that the original purpose of these three
arts were,
To
orient, to equip, to prepare, to encourage,
to provoke, a mental traveler to advance by
his own energies in whatever region may be his
to explore; to make him or her think for themselves
and make them able to do so sanely and successfully…(Pg.
63)
He
goes on to explain that this,
…has
always been the aim of a civilizing education
… [and that] … Rhetoric, Grammar
and Logic, if we set aside their repulsive terminology’s
and associations, are the headings under which
to arrange what the student we hope to help
needs most to study.
His
point being: “a training in Rhetoric,
Grammar and Logic, as Arts not sciences, which
is at present almost entirely lacking in the
curriculum, is what is most needed.” Richards’
wrote this over 60 years ago and it was as true
then as it is true today. You will still not
find the liberal arts being taught with any
seriousness as liberal arts in the “Liberal
Arts.”
This
is not to say they are not being taught or taken
seriously anywhere else. In fact, if we take
a look, we will find that they are being taught
in the Business Schools as the practice of management.
Trivium
is the core curriculum managers must learn to
do their jobs.
What
management programs teach, without realizing
it, is the old Liberal Arts core curriculum
of rhetoric, grammar and logic: that, along
with the quadrivium (the four major sciences),
made up a liberal-arts-and-sciences education.
·
Rhetoric is learning how to work with people,
how to facilitate meetings, sell ideas, empower
fellow workers, make presentations, talk on
the telephone or in front of people, write memos,
market and advertise products. It is about using
words and media to transform the way people
think.
·
Grammar is the study of organizational and informational
interfaces, the art of interpreting the processes
that make up an operation and then learning
the true meaning of an organization. It is about
a deep exegetical analysis of the meaning and
the manner of organizations. How people and
processes work together to produces results.
·
Logic is “what if” analysis, strategic
models, statistics, policies and procedures.
Management
is at its core a Liberal-Arts discipline. The
Trivium is what MBA’s Do.
3.
Distinguishing between the Ancients and the
Moderns
Discovering
the trivium at work in management is important
for two reasons. First, it makes it very clear
that management has every right to call itself
a Liberal-Arts methodology or discipline, albeit
a discipline that is quite different from the
one currently being taught in today’s
Liberal-Arts faculties. Second, it reintroduces
grammar and rhetoric as a legitimate and not
just remedial or preparatory course of study.
This
brings us to “the battle of the books,”
that is, the history of the trivium as the history
of a “battle” over the control and
definition of the meaning of the Liberal Arts.
This
battle began when Plato threw Homer, The Sophists
and The Orators with their “MBA programs”
out of his ideal Republic. In the Middle Ages
this battle raged as a civil war among the scholastics
between the Ancients (The Grammarians and Rhetoricians),
and The Moderns (the Logicians).
Today it is the yet-to-be-declared turf war
between the Management Schools and the Liberal
Arts faculties over the direction and goals
of higher education. Ironically, the Management
schools represent the ancient alliance of Grammar
and Rhetoric, while the ”Liberal Arts”
faculties are the descendants of the opposition:
Logic. This war is “yet to be declared”
only because the question on most campuses is
how do we get management majors to take an interest
in the arts when in fact the real question is
when will the arts begin to take a real interest
in management!
The
problem is that “the liberal arts of management”
(the trivium) are directly opposed to the way
the Arts Faculties have in fact been managing
the Liberal Arts (abstract constructions and
deconstruction’s of ideas, political theories
and applied social science). Hence the battle
lines have already drawn and the best we can
do is anticipate this conflict and try to resolve
it before it gets out of hand.
4.
Distinguishing the Complexes at Work in this
Battle
This
age-old battle between the Ancients and the
Moderns (pre-post-or present) has to stop and
it has to stop now. There is too much at stake.
The
first step toward ending this conflict is to
break through our denial and admit that such
antagonism really does exists and that it has
a long history. The next step is to approach
this problem psychologically and in depth to
look for the intellectual and psychological
complexes, fears, and anxieties that are instigating
and perpetuating it. I am talking here about
exposing the immense, and largely unconscious,
sea of resentment and distrust that lie in the
way of any real integration of Management and
the Liberal Arts.
If
we can recognize that this is a 2500 year old
feud that carries with it all the ferociousness
of a tribal vendetta, a balkanization as it
were of the Liberal Arts and if we look at this
relationship with the consciousness of some
one who is tired of acting out these destructive
complexes, then we can work together on reintegrating
all of these shadowy elements by looking at
them in a totally new way. This requires courage
and the willingness to let go of old identities
in order to rethink who we are as artists, managers
and educators in a far more honest and effective
manner.
Doing
this will require that everyone take on new
roles and responsibilities. It requires recognizing
that one’s old expertise has now become
one’s new ignorance.
This
restructuring of our own self-identity will
produce a lot of stress, with ignorance taking
the place of certainty and dialogue taking the
place of set rules and regulations.
But
this new ignorance is systemic and must be accepted
as a prerequisite for survival. It has to be
depersonalized and seen for what it really is:
a byproduct of reintegration and a rich source
of new insights and awareness.
5. Distinguishing Ignorance for Knowledge
Ignorance is to knowledge what ignoring is to
folly. This is our axiom and guiding principle.
Ignorance
is to this new learning what ignoring is to
the folly of trying to upgrade the old system.
Ignorance will lead the way either to hope or
to disaster.
Recognizing
our collective ignorance requires a team approach.
It also requires the courage to be open, honest
and willing to learn anything from anyone. This
is the type of interdisciplinary humility is
expressed by Hugh of St. Victor in his Didascalicon,
which is a 13th century treatise on Liberal
Arts education. For him,
Humility
is the beginning of discipline, and although
there are many examples of this, these three
especially are important to the reader:
·
First, that he should hold no knowledge and
no writing cheap;
·
Second, that he should not be ashamed to learn
from anyone;
·
and third when he himself has attained knowledge,
he should not scorn others.
Describing
the age-old humility at the heart of Liberal-Arts
scholarship, this passage also describes the
humility required to be an effective educator,
manager or consultant in today’s world.
This type of “cross discipline”
convergence is one more indication that we are
way beyond the threshold of this wonderful revival
of classical and medieval modes of understanding.
The
resurfacing of the practical integrity of Rhetoric,
Grammar, and Logic is only the tip of the iceberg.
Medieval and pre-literate competencies and modes
of awareness are everywhere.
Could
it be that McLuhan was right? He observed that
our world of instantaneous global communication
is a paradigm for Medieval and Pre-literate
sensibilities. His point being to manage effectively
in today’s world one must learn and assimilate
ancient sensibilities in order to learn how
to orient oneself in today’s world.
The
reappearance of the trivium is no trivial matter,
because it is the efficacy of the trivium, and
not some nostalgia for the past, or some common
places about the importance of a classical education,
that is responsible for its reinvention by and
utilization in business and management schools.
This “reinvention” is a response
to a real need that the original Three Liberal
Arts seem to meet. It is the need to learn how
to navigate in today’s multi-technological
trans-cultural global marketplace.
The
fact that this adaptation takes on the form
of the trivium hints that the keys to our survival
in today’s world may well be age old and
diverse and not what is touted today as post-modern
and multi-cultural. The renewal of this integrated
understanding of the Liberal Arts could mark
the end of the hegemony of abstract western
logic (modernism in all of its pre, past and
post phases) and the pseudo unilogical-multiculturalism
it has engendered.
It
could mark the end of the fragmentation of Grammar,
Rhetoric, and Logic into discrete specialties
by pointing to the need to reintegrate the trivium
as fundamental to a vital and relevant renewal
of the Liberal Arts. The reintegration of the
arts is the renewal of something very old, very
rooted, and very well tested.
This
renewal requires the restoration of management
to its rightful place within the Liberal Arts
not only as a discipline but also as a Liberal
Arts subject. The subject matter of management
is found in the field of practical action. It
is that nexus where knowing shifts into doing,
where wisdom moves from insight into action.
It is the place where creativity and responsibility
meet. This points us to the world of practical
wisdom and the original meaning of the Humanities
as Humanitas “knowledge put to the benefit
and use of humankind.”
II
Practical Wisdom @ Work
Letting Ignorance Lead
It
is very important to understand that management
is about following patterns and not about following
rules. It is not about taking orders and doing
things right (being efficient). It is about
seeing what needs to be done and doing the right
things (being effective). But this distinction
between efficient and effective which is commonplace
in the school of management is incomplete and
really belittles the task of the manager.
Management
as a doing is fundamentally a moral activity
and therefore good management needs to learn
to do the right thing (which means being highly
effective) for the right reason (which means
having the courage and self-control to be honest,
fair, and just). As we will see, managing is
fundamentally a moral activity that lives for
better or for worse in the world of the moral
virtues: Prudence (Practical Wisdom), Justice
(Honesty), Fortitude (Courage) and Temperance
(Self Control and Soundness of Mind and Body).
To
do the right thing for the right reason at the
right time in the right way is precisely how
Aristotle and Aquinas describe Practical Wisdom.
It is also how Cicero and Quintillian describe
Eloquence and Decorum. It means knowing what
to do and doing it in a timely and appropriate
manner. Castigleone called this “Sprezzatura”
or a “wild civility.” Wild because
it is effective and not efficient. Civility
because it manifests actions oriented toward
the common good.
Peter
Drucker explains it this way. “Do first
things first and second things not at all.”
The point being that the “first thing”
to do is always the next right thing to do.
Doing first things first for the right reason
in the right way at the right time with the
right tone is what the Greeks called Phronesis,
the Latin’s called Decorum and the Chinese
call The Tao.
My
point is that management as a practice entails
all the discipline entailed in these various
trans-cultural age-old understandings of practical
wisdom. It is the study of eloquence or decorum
( a mix of effectiveness, beauty and The Good)
and belongs to the Kairon Gnothi (seize the
advantage in the moment) tradition of the liberal
arts.
Now
this notion of practical wisdom has always been
understood to consist of two distinct components.
·
First it has a intellectual component. It is
a knowing that follows the way of things and
their effects on us; and
·
Second it is a doing. It is a way of being in
action by developing plans, expediting options,
producing results, making things happen and
living in the world.
So
that practical wisdom is a knowing that is a
doing and a doing that is a way of being. It
is who we are in the world.
As
Aristotle points out in the 6th book of The
Nicomachean Ethics of the five intellectual
virtues and the four moral virtues, only phronesis,
(practical wisdom…the management of things
or oneself in the world) requires knowing about
things and doing something with that knowledge.
Practical
wisdom is knowledge in action or knowledge in
practice and everything that is taught in management
belongs to this field of study.
Please
note: What makes this knowledge practical is
not that it belongs to a different type of reason
like Kant’s distinction between practical
and pure reason. What makes it practical is
that one’s knowledge of the way things
are is transformed into effective actions generating
results.
Managing
is a way of doing things, which means it is
an ethics. This is straight out of the Aristoleao-Thomistic
tradition. As Joseph Pieper explains in his
The Four Cardinal Virtues:
An
education to prudence [practical wisdom] means:
to the objective estimation of the concrete
situation of concrete activity, and to the ability
to transform this cognition of reality into
concrete decision. (Pg. 31)
Practical
wisdom implies “a transformation of the
knowledge of truth into decisions corresponding
to Reality.” This is exactly what it means
to be an effective manager.
As
the habit of effectiveness, management is a
form of Prudence. Put simply, to be virtuous
is to be effective. It is to do the right things
for the right reasons. But to be effective is
not necessarily to be virtuous. You can always
do the right things for the wrong reason’s
(acting out of fear, self-interest or an addiction
to power, greed, sex, etc.).
To
be virtuous does not mean one has to be nice
and proper (that’s merely being efficient);
it does mean being truthful and honest (situation-appropriate).
It does not mean being perfect, or always being
right: it does mean to be unceasingly committed
to “doing first things first” in
a way appropriate to the situation.
This
is why I think books like Steven Covey’s
Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, or
Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive
and Managing for Results should be required
reading and built into the core requirements
for first year Liberal Arts students.
Reading
these books is the quickest way I know to get
students to learn through their own experience
the efficacy of ethics as a preparation for
action. Moreover, the time to learn how to be
effective is at the beginning of one’s
studies. When I use these books in my freshman
philosophy classes, I have seen students study
habits change right before my eyes.
Once
they have tested Covey’s suggestions and
found them to work, I use their desire to be
effective to whet their appetite to do good.
The good decision is always better than the
merely effective one and this is a fundamental
lesson that needs to be taught and re-taught
continually.
One
can begin with Covey or Drucker and end up with
Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Aquinas or one
might end up with Confucius and Lao Tzu or The
Bahavada Gita or Grimms Fairy Tales. On this
one point world wisdom tends to be saying the
same thing. To be good is to be effective but
to be effective is not necessarily to be good.
Management
in effect is “the practice of existential
readiness.” For unlike the reflections
of a philosopher, or the creations of an artist,
the manager puts what he or she knows into action.
He or she is responsible for getting things
done and producing results
Understood
in this sense, management is a way of being
or comporting oneself in the world. It is about
being effective, being innovative, and being
entrepreneurial. It is also about embracing
life, staying in touch with things and working
things out. Management is an ethics without
it being a moralism of set rules and regulations.
A
good manager needs the courage to be fair without
acting out. He or she needs to develop those
habits (virtues) which will allow him or her
capability to do the right things for the right
reasons. The idea is to become response-able,
to learn how to flourish within contexts, to
be eloquent, decorous, situation appropriate--
without being vacuous, devious, evil or mean.
This
is what once constitutes a well-rounded Liberal
Arts education. What the Greek’s called
Enkuklios Paideia or learning the whole cycle
of arts and sciences needed to be a civil and
contributing member of society.
As
practical wisdom, the practice of management
is about being good by bringing goods into the
world. It is about learning the meaning of bestowal.
This is what makes up the effectiveness and
practicality of an ethical way of life. It is
what makes for good people, good societies,
good cultures and good organizations.
The
educated person will therefore have to be prepared
to live and work simultaneously in two cultures--that
of the “intellectual,” who focuses
on words and ideas, and that of the “manager”
who focuses on people and work.
Peter Drucker
It
might be helpful to rid ourselves of the habit
of always hearing what we already understand.
Martin Heidegger
©
2002 Jim Maroosis
Dr.
James Maroosis is a Recipient of The Innovations
Award in American Government co-sponsored by
The Ford Foundation and The JFK School of Government
at Harvard University. He has a Ph.D. in Philosophy
from the University of Toronto and currently
teaches a seminar on Leadership for the 21st
Century: Innovation, Creativity and Responsibility
and a seminar on The Giants in the History of
Management: Peter Drucker, Mary Parker Follett
and Marshall McLuhan at Fordham’s Graduate
School of Business Administration and a course
on Management as Humanism and Liberal Art for
The Deming Scholars MBA Program at Fordham.
He has had recent articles on Innovation and
Creativity published in The Harvard Management
Update and Leader to Leader the quarterly journal
of The Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit
Management. |
