Management Rewired Reviewed: A Summary

Nine is the final and wrap-up chapter of Jacobs’ book.  It does not present new information and I will use this post to summarize my ideas about this book.

First, what is the contribution of Neuro-science?  I believe that neuroscience and fMRI studies are very important, especially going forward, but at this point they seem to be insufficient in themselves.  We still need to understand and interpret the data and that depends on psychology more generally.  Jacobs’ suggestions are very interesting, and management could certainly benefit from a stronger connection to the insights of other social sciences, it is just that his positions could be better supported by the findings outside neuroscience.  In a future post I will look at the social nature of learning, working, and the artifacts that we use to make sense of organizations.  I think this can not only support Jacobs position, but may be able to extend them further.

What are the primary insights that I have gained from this book?

  1. The mind works holistically.  Don’t be ruled by emotion, but logical mind sets that discount emotion can cloud important insights.  When logical thinking discounts emotions and the holistic nature of the mind, it is constraining decisions not making them better.
  2. Higher mental functions like stories, paradigms, metaphors or theories can focus and enable thinking skills in a way that honors the minds holistic nature.
  3. Relationships are complex and understanding that people are active thinkers with minds of their own is a much more functional method of management.  Treating people and organizations as mindless machines is counterproductive.  Jacobs makes the mind (behaviorism’s epi-phonemena) central  in management.
  4. Instead of relying solely on managers abilities, avail yourself of employees mental capabilities.  Be like Socrates: ask don’t tell, ask for objectives, for reviews of their work, for their ideas about support needs.

Management Rewired Reviewed: Chapters 5, 6, 7 & 8

Chapter 5 discusses the benefits of organizing through small cross-functional teams over hierarchal forms and chapter 6 talks about examples of strategy and how emotion and other previously mentioned themes can have an impact for good or ill.  There is nothing particularly new in either of these chapters.

The topic of chapter 7 is change and change management.  Jacobs addresses this subject through previously introduced topics.  He suggests leading change by changing the paradigm and avoiding negative relationship dynamics.  Because we often think of organizations like machines (he calls this Aristotelian logic) rather than mindful thinking people, the best path to change can often seem counter-intuitive rather than direct.

In chapter 8 Jacobs talks about transformational leadership (as opposed to transactional leadership).  The idea of a transformational approach is consistent with the main themes of this book, but I think it can be better viewed by looking at the distinction between leading and managing (See the subsection Leadership versus management in the Wikipedia leadership article).  Jacobs’ ideas of Socratic management de-emphasizes power relationships while emphasizing vision and empowerment.  This makes the distinction between leading and managing to almost nil.  His 5 key actions of leadership reads like a summary of the book in actionable terms (paraphrased):

  1. Transform the way people think; shift the paradigm
  2. Make it Participative;
  3. Convey an aspirational vision
  4. Tell the Story: Use the power of narrative
  5. Create focus and urgency

Management Rewired Reviewed: Chapters 3&4

In Chapter 3 Jacobs begins to address relationships.  First the idea Jacobs develops, that each person experiences their own version of reality.  It is close to the theory of mind.  We can’t understand how a person behaves until we have some conception of what their thinking.  In general, trying to manage relationship can become very complex.  It does not lend itself to a proscriptive approach and Jacobs acknowledges this.  The emotional IQ people have a good handle on the complex process of reading and responding to others.

Where Jacobs analysis picks up is when he begins to look at how a theory of mind changes our base behavioral expectations regarding reward, punishment, how they are often used to manipulate behavior, and how the results of manipulation are often counter intuitive.  Behavioral science made one fatal error.  They considered the mind an epi-phenomena, when the mind proved to be the central point when trying to understanding human behavior.

In chapter 4 Jacobs offers a proscriptive approach that seems appropriate in a broad sense: switch from an Aristotelian approach to a Socratic one.

Rather than tell an employee what to do and create all the negative relationship dynamics, the manager needs to ask . . . ask the employee to set (objectives). . .ask them how they think they are doing . . . it turns the relationship upside down.  As the prime mover of the organization, the employee now calls the shots and the manger is in a supportive role.

I believe there is an important role for Jacobs here.  This Socratic role is consistent with suggestions by other management thinkers, but what Jacobs does is associate these approaches with current social science.  Management is a branch of the social sciences, but there were not good linkages between management theory and current directions in the social sciences.  Jacobs provides a rationale for making these linkages explicit.

Review of Jacobs’ Management Rewired: Chapters 1 & 2

Working my way through Charles Jacobs’ Management Rewired.  I have some reservations about his findings, but he does a good job to frame psychology and education’s relationships with business in specific and with practice in general. The next few post are directed to a chapter by chapter listing of first impressions.

Chapter 1 focusses on emotion over logic in decision-making.  I think this chapter is potentially confusing.  First, his card game example does not prove emotion is better than logic.  What it does suggest to me is that the emotional parts of the subjects minds picked up on the underlying logic implied in the game before the reasoning portion could state it.  This is more in line with Malcolm Gladwell‘s line of though in his book BlinkThe emotional mind was able to understand the logic of the game before the logical mind could express that logic.

What does this mean?  Well, we should pay attention to our gut.  However, the very existence of science is because our gut response is so often wrong.  Jacobs does do a good job of expressing the holistic way that the mind works and to suggest that practice should reflect the function of the mind.  For example, we may have a sound logic behind a practice, but that practice will be much more effective if we are emotionally behind it.

In chapter 2, Jacobs talks about the primacy of perception.  We can’t experience the world directly, we experience it through our minds perception and the world we experience may not be remotely similar to other peoples perception. Therefore, idea, theories, paradigm, metaphors and the like play a big role in our perception.  This idea also reflects what I believe about measurement / assessment.  You can’t understand what your measuring if you don’t base your measurements on theories.  The theoretical world and the empirical world are in a dialectical relationship.  You might think of them as 2 sides of the same coin.  I’m greatful for how Jacobs gives voice to this idea.

Jacobs also echos a theme in chapter 2 that I attribute first to Vygotsky, the relationship between lower mental functions and higher mental functions:

Lower Mental Functions (LMF): (are) inherited, unmediated, involuntary, . . . Higher Mental Functions (HMF): are socially acquired, mediated by meanings, voluntarily controlled and exists in a broad system of functions rather than as an individual unit (from the Lev Vygotsky Wiki).

LMFs (memory perception, emotion, etc. . .) can be controlled to a certain degree when they are mediated through HMFs which are Jacobs’ stories, paradigms, metaphors or theories.  The one caveat over Vygotsky is that the fMRI studies Jacobs is referencing do give us a much clearer sense of what these mental functions are, how they function, and how they are related to each other.  Vygotsky thought of LMFs as being isolated from each other, something that current knowledge and (I believe) Jacobs would refute.

Side-bar I am becoming somewhat uncomfortable with the way that Jacobs uses neuroscience.  These fMRI studies are important and enlightening, but as an educational psychologist, I see a much broader field of knowledge (like the above reference to Vygotsky).  Neuroscience seems to be used as a rhetorical device like science often is.  In example, newspaper articles will often read “studies say” when they want to indicate that the authority of science behind their conclusion, even when their conclusion is not scientific.  Neuroscience is a relatively new field that most people know little about and referencing it can give one a certain authority that psychology would not supply.  Yet, there is little in neuroscience that is really useful without taking it back to a general understanding of psychology and (in some cases) education.  I don’t begrudge Jacobs, you have to find a way to sell your ideas, but I do step back and look closely at the way he uses neuroscience in framing his (rhetorical) arguments.