I don’t make predictions, and I never will.

Paul Gascoigne

In a nutshell

Business pundits think management academics overcomplicate the world. Academics think pundits oversimplify it. This leaves you, the practitioner, stuck in the middle, needing to get on with your job but also aware that there are limits to your abilities and knowledge. How do you make sense of it all?

In The Every Day MBA my aim has been to present an informed and selective overview of the content and thinking you would find at a business school and to suggest that applying those concepts also involves an evolution in your own thinking. You have been given practical prompts to apply in your management practice along the way. A lot of these have suggested you talk to and share with others, and this is very important. You’ve also been challenged to think about your work in a more reflective way and I hope you have attempted to apply this curiosity to your daily job. As you seek your competitive advantage in your career, an enquiring mind could be the most important qualification on your CV. This final chapter contains several ideas that look beyond the book.

In this final chapter you will:

• take business back to its minimum elements
• find six ideas to boost your management thinking for the future
• be invited to explore action learning

Management: the empty space

In 1968 British theatre director Peter Brook wrote a short book about acting, called The Empty Space. Here is an extract:

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged. Yet when we talk about theatre this is not quite what we mean. Red curtains, spotlights, blank verse, laughter, darkness, these are all confusedly superimposed in a messy image covered by one all-purpose word.¹

Brook’s intention was to strip away all the thinking about our concept of ‘theatre’ in order to find its essential, minimum components – an empty space, an actor and an audience. That’s it. According to Brook nothing should be added unless it adds to the situation. Be wary, he says, of the temptation to add ornament without getting the basics right.

Is thinking this way useful to your management practice? Yes, it’s vital. Management is a noisy topic and if you want to understand it you need to strip it of its ornaments and pretensions. When you get down to those basics, I think you’ll find three things:

Over the years, we have added many layers to these basics (the MBA is guilty of ornament, too) but at heart management is the deliberate and purposeful orchestration of these inter-relationships. There are many skills you will develop in your career. In the jobs you hold, choosing among conflicting options for ideas, resources and actions takes knowledge and experience. You’ll need honesty, a strong work ethic, flexibility and mental agility and a lot of other things, that’s true, but without a doubt the skill that will bring you mastery is self-awareness.

The Every Day MBA is a start. If you have read this book in anticipation of future study, or a move further into management, then notice which chapters or ideas caught your attention – and dig deeper yourself. If you have read this to refresh your thinking after graduating with your own MBA, then hook back into the excitement (not the stress) from your course – and continue your journey.

Self-awareness requires curiosity, but I would like to add a thought to this. In your curiosity, acknowledge, without judgement, things as they are. Why is this important? First, this stance is a core component of mindfulness, an interesting and ever more popular subject in adult learning. Second, we all have a tendency to filter what we see through thinking biases. Here are just three:

• Confabulation: the tendency to fill in the gaps when recalling the past. We like to make a coherent story so when we can’t remember the details of what happened, we make them up.
• Hindsight bias: the way we convince ourselves, after the event, that we knew things were going to happen that way all along. To do this, we carefully select information that now supports our ‘clairvoyance’.
• Confirmation bias: the big one. Managers suffer from this all the time. Even you. Confirmation bias is when we settle on a position, solution, opinion or answer and then start to look for data that support our view. The cure for confirmation bias is to start your enquiry from the position of ‘I don’t know ... let’s find out’.

You need a way of standing back from what you are observing in order to be fully aware of it. So, as you read the next section, why not practise the art of noticing your thought and reactions, without judging.

Six key lessons for your management future

I offer the ideas below to support your further development. Each is a statement and also an activity for reflective practice. The first three relate to managerial activity and the last three are intended for your wider personal development.

1 You won’t learn how to manage an organisation in a classroom

In management, the right way to grow is by applying practice to theory. But first you need the practice. There is no substitute for being in the workplace if you want to learn the ropes in management. There are many managers who have done an MBA in their mid to late 20s who suspect that if they had waited another 5 or 10 years, they would have got a lot more out of it. They’re right. Organisations are the collective efforts of human beings – a frustrating, complicated, complex and wonderful resource – and learning how to manage them is a contact sport. Master the basics, get the experience and earn your stripes first.

The classroom can, however, be a great place to learn something about yourself. If you can combine the self-reflection of learning with others to the application of method and theory to your management experience (especially your management mistakes) you may see some dramatic results in your career. Of course, even without access to the business school classroom, you can still find many ways to learn (see the final section in this chapter for an example of a method for this).

2 Know how value is defined in your organisation

Value has been a recurring theme in The Every Day MBA. The importance of value creation is one of the few things that all management experts agree on. The trouble is that there are so many ways to define and measure it. In a publically traded company such as Apple, for instance, value is undoubtedly measured by the economic return on investment for stockholders. In health service provision, by contrast, value may be the achievement of target improvements in public health. In a family firm, it could be ensuring the next generation has a livelihood.

We tend to monetise it, but value looks different wherever you go. If you don’t know how it is defined where you work, find out. If no one in your organisation knows, then either you’re working in the wrong company or there is a fantastic opportunity for you to lead a transformation.

3 Know what your business is worth

Not everything should be summed up in financial terms but valuation is important. It does not require that you know finance inside out; you just need to know enough at least to start to answer the question of the worth of your business. Why? There are lots of reasons. You may be part of an acquisition process, or it may become critical in litigation, but most commonly it gives you more power for business planning and negotiating external sources of funding. If you don’t know what the business you are in is worth, find out.

Remember, when it comes to what things are worth, time is the measure of all things. American investor Warren Buffett, whose company Berkshire Hathaway is ranked by Fortune as the 18th largest in the world and consistently outperforms the market (and who famously suggested that while price is what you pay, value is what you get), is a firm believer in the unexciting but critical skill of business valuation. Equally, you may also want to bear in mind that worth and value are not necessarily the same thing. Einstein put it this way:

Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.

4 There is no limit to learning

You can never be ‘full’ of knowledge and it is impossible to run out of things to learn. This is because the nature of knowledge is not cumulative. For many, the truth of ‘the more I know, the more there is to know’ first comes as a bit of a shock, but it is then quite liberating. Think about what this means to you in your management practice and career and then consider the following.

Learning thrives on sharing

Sharing is always a better business strategy than not sharing. For example:

• Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, has never wavered from the ideal, famously tweeted by him live at the opening ceremony of the London Olympics in 2012, that ‘this is for everybody’.
• Elon Musk, an extremely successful investor in IT and new technologies, is also head of Tesla motors, a company making electric vehicles. Tesla is acknowledged as having patented a superior new battery design, but in June 2014 the company announced that it would share all its technology patents.² This may be the move that kick-starts real change among the world’s automotive companies, which have lagged behind in developing a switch to non-hydrocarbon means of transport.
• The decision by the founders of TED to place hundreds of videos online started a revolution in open-access sharing of knowledge.

You can learn a lot about your managerial identity in a classroom

This is the biggest opportunity for personal development open to you as you get older and as you become more experienced. All you need is to be curious, awake and rigorous in your thinking. This may require a real change in you. If you do an MBA, make sure you find the right course, with the right cohort. In that case, a business school education can really make all the difference. If you only have the workplace, make sure you are speaking and learning from those around you who have more experience.

5 Your future career is not written in your past

I think this is huge. Most of us don’t realise it, though. We like to hold on to a sense of where we have come from – it’s an important part of maintaining an identity – but a lot of us sleepwalk our way through life never realising that we only actually ever live it in the present.

Carl Jung said that the purpose of the second half of our lives is to understand the first. I don’t start the MBA Personal Development module at Henley with career goals. Rather, we begin with a guided exploration of students’ life stories. This is not because they should use the past to determine the future. Quite the contrary – I do it so that they can eventually be free from the control that their past has over them. From there we can really start to explore liberating goals.

6 In the end, what matters is working things out for yourself

My final lesson is the hope that you will eventually be able to see and work things out as they actually are for yourself. If you want total freedom to act, this can only come from within you, not from a doctrine. When you start work, the structure and purpose of business and management are given to you. Freedom in management comes when you no longer need validation of your conclusion by others. When you accept without question the tools, methods and even theories of others in your work, you are taking for granted whatever they took for granted.

You are unlikely to find this out during an MBA, or just from reading a book. The final part of an MBA usually includes a piece of management research or a larger strategy project. It is often where a few things fall into place, including a much stronger sense of self-confidence and critical thinking skills. Even without that, if you can find more flow and happiness at work, if you can build resilience and develop a passion for what you do, and if you can understand something of the wider social context of being a manager, then you will have succeeded in starting a very worthwhile journey.

Putting it together: management is learned from others but defined by you

Every manager should know how to start an investigation of an organisational problem and how to generate evidence on which to propose solutions and make decisions. This is profoundly important because it moves from applying management tools in order to fix problems to self-awareness about your view of the world and how to define what a problem is. The Every Day MBA finishes with an introduction to another method you can use to combine knowledge with experience: action learning (AL). The central idea in AL is, as British academic Reg Revans says:

There is no learning without action and no (sober and deliberate) action without learning.³

AL is an educational approach to solving complex problems. It was developed by Revans in the decades after the Second World War and has since been used in many leadership and productivity initiatives. The formula for AL is:

L = P + Q

where L is learning, P is programmed knowledge and Q is insightful questioning.

AL involves regular group discussions but the key is to put individual follow-through into action. AL requires a small set of people from diverse backgrounds who contract to cooperate over a period of about 18 months. It is also a good method to trigger reflection.

An action learning set is the small group tackling important organisational problems. Membership must be voluntary and each person needs to have an apparently intractable problem that requires action. The requirements for action learning are:

• an issue or problem
• turn-taking, good questions, fresh ideas
• time to reflect on experience
• no hierarchy, no power games
• confidentiality
• action.

You may already be part of such a group at work but it is called something else (especially if you are part of a quality improvement initiative). One of the best ways, if you can, of engaging in the strength of AL is to be part of a set where none of the members works for the same organisation or in the same industry. Action learning groups can be facilitated or they can run themselves. This doesn’t matter. What does matter is that an attitude of curiosity, respect and learning becomes part of the development of skills and behaviours that solve real management issues.

I wish you every success in your career and in your journey of self-awareness as a manager.

Further reading

Notes

1 Brook, P. (2008) The Empty Space, Penguin Modern Classics.

2 Foy, H., ‘Tesla lifts bonnet on its electric car tech secrets’, The Financial Times, 13 June 2014.

3 Revans, R. (1982) The Origins and Growth of Action Learning, Chartwell-Bratt.