SEVENTEEN
Practitioner Perspectives
Comments from a Panel Discussion*
THE FOLLOWING COMMENTS come from a discussion at the December 2009 book workshop. David Nadler and Ian Ziskin, both of whom are long-term supporters of and participants in the research of the Center for Effective Organizations, were asked to provide a practitioner’s perspective.
David Nadler has been an academic, a consultant, and a senior executive. He served on the faculty at the Graduate School of Business, Columbia University. In 1980, he founded the Delta Consulting Group and was CEO of the firm for 20 years. In 2000, he managed the acquisition of Delta by Mercer, a Marsh & McLennan Company, and continued to run Mercer Delta through 2005. In 2007, he was appointed vice chairman of the Marsh and McLennan Companies, a global professional services firm.
Ian Ziskin is president of EXec EXcel Group LLC, a consulting firm he founded after a highly successful 28-year career as a business executive. He is the former corporate vice president, chief human resources and administrative officer for Northrop Grumman Corporation.
Prior to this panel discussion, both Nadler and Ziskin listened to the chapter overview presentations and participated in the discussions on the first day of the workshop. We begin with some summary comments from Nadler and Ziskin about their perspectives on relevance and the gap between academic research and practice.
DAVID NADLER
I believe strongly that trying to understand organizations and the patterns of behavior within them requires real intimacy and engagement with the phenomena. I don’t know how you study it from a distance with real understanding because it has tremendous complexity.
I also think it requires relationships over time because the phenomena play out over time. It is difficult to go into an organization and look at something for a short period of time, even a couple months, and understand what’s going on. One of the great experiences I had was my relationship with the Xerox Corporation, which went on for more than 21 years. When you’re in a place 21 years, you understand the context, and it gives you a perspective on what’s really happening. It also leads you from problem to problem.
Most of my thinking and writing has not been because I thought “what do I want to do next,” but because I was in a situation that posed new questions to me. During my consulting career I usually had at least three major clients at any one time, and each of them at some time or another posed the next big problem to me. The best cases were where we learned together. In most of these cases, I wasn’t trying to prove something, but it was more that I saw things that I didn’t understand and the client also didn’t understand. We said, “Why don’t we try to learn about this together, and we’ll see what insights we produce?” These were the paths of inquiry that were the most productive. I found, both as a producer and consumer of knowledge, that model building versus prescription was more helpful. If I could understand a situation, rather than just telling the client what he or she should do, I ended up giving them tools to solve similar problems in the future. In addition, frequently the prescription didn’t apply because there were so many “what if’s” or “if then’s.” What I wanted to have, and still want to have, are conceptual tools that will be useful to me and my client.
The thing that I’ve been struggling with all day is the question of pathways, access, and distribution. I think there is a huge translation issue between academia and the world of leading and managing organizations. Frankly, although I subscribe to journals and I look online at the publications, occasionally just for sadistic value, I read to a business colleague the title of an article and the abstract. Usually, they just scratch their heads and tell me that they can’t figure out what the author is talking about. And I can almost pick the article at random because they all have that quality to them. It is simply a different language system. That language system may be fine for academics to communicate to academics; I’m not denigrating it. But as a practitioner, that very same language system makes it very difficult to access knowledge.
Do I read? Yes, I read. But I have so many things to read as part of my business life that I frequently will just scan the table of contents of a journal online and see if there’s something interesting. Usually it’s not. I have information overload. So what is useful to me? I want information on demand. When I have a problem I’d like to be able to get to the useful knowledge about that problem. What I don’t have today is an easy way to get to that, other than asking someone who works for me to go do a scan of the literature.
IAN ZISKIN
I’ve been fascinated by the discussion, which for me has largely centered on what appears to be reconciling competing priorities between these notions of theory and practice. And so as an adopted member of the club, now that I’ve been here for the day, I’d like to offer a theory even though I’m a practitioner. One of the things that dawned on me was that theory might be viewed as problem solving without a customer. And practice might be viewed as problem solving without a theory. And honestly, I think you need both.
As I’ve been listening to the debate and the discussions and the very good presentations, one thing that’s come through to me is a sense of frustration on your parts, wondering whether or not the things that you’re doing are relevant and useful. It’s a good question to ask. It’s always a great question to ask. But I would encourage you to be much more positive about your contribution, in the past as well as the present and the future. Why do I say that? In our organization, we have about 125,000 people. About 43,000 of those people are engineers and computer scientists. So it’s highly intellectual work. We also have a couple of thousand PhDs in our company. And one of the things that we like to talk about is highly valuing the free electrons. These are the people who have the outside-the-box ideas that nobody at first blush might think are very practical or pragmatic. But many of the things that they talk about, the arguments that they make, and the issues that they push for end up to be game changers, either in terms of the technology, which in turn becomes product and service that we deliver, or in terms of how the organization simply runs better and more effectively.
I think many of the things that you’ve been talking about today, they’ve been game changers to a lot of industries and a lot of organizations. I would encourage you not to lose that. That’s my first point.
My second point is that, like everything in life, there’s a balance to be struck. And I know that as academicians, the notion of frameworks is important to you and the work that you do. I’d offer a pragmatic framework to think about that has five pieces to it. So let me just quickly run through them.
One is just making sure that you understand the question, What is the problem? You’ve talked a lot about that today. It’s very simple, but it’s probably the most important question. The second question I think is equally important, which is, Who cares? Is there a customer for the problem that you have identified? The third question is, What is the attention span that people have to address it? This question may be the hardest one, and I’ll come back to it. The fourth question is, Will anybody pay for it? And the fifth question is, When we’re all done, can we be brief about what we found?
Most of the frustration that I hear in the room today is not about the importance of the issues that are being researched, analyzed, and addressed. It is about the question, Does anybody have a willingness or an attention span or the resources to do something with findings once in fact they’re delivered? And to me, that’s really all about attention span. I’ve been working in companies for almost 28 years now. Certainly I’ve seen a pattern that many of you are experiencing as well, which is that the attention span of people has been significantly reduced due to resource constraints and time pressures. Projects and studies that might have been endorsed and invested in years ago, which would have been longitudinal in nature and taken multiple years to complete, are not being undertaken because no one has the patience to wait for those findings anymore.
Many of you are concerned about the issue of relevance. To me, relevance in some ways translates into rapid prototyping, cycle time reduction, and quick turnaround from identification of the problem to the solution. I think organizations today are actually more thirsty for great problem solving. Maybe the term “research” does not relate well to everybody, but “problem solving” certainly does. It’s the speed with which those problems get addressed that I think fundamentally is the issue.
The last point I’ll make is that I take note with many academicians with whom I interact. They go to great pains to think through the problem that they’re going to address, as well as the research methodology that they’re going to employ to address it. I would suggest to you that most practitioners tend to see problems in high-level themes and broad patterns. They don’t necessarily differentiate in the same way you do at the micro level and the things that you’re studying and analyzing, compared to many other people out there. So I think you need to allow for the possibility that many practitioners often see multiple research studies, multiple requests for resources to address that research, as not necessarily unique.
People are coming to us with things that sound very much the same, even though in your minds they may not be. So I would strongly encourage you to think about either how to band together with other people who have like interests (to minimize the number of external requests that are coming in for companies), or how to differentiate your concept, theory, and problem that you believe you can solve from that of others. I don’t mean to be negative or condescending in any way. It’s just not the way that many of the practitioners who are being approached are thinking about the problem.
ED LAWLER
David, let me follow up on one thing you mentioned; it has always seemed to me that one of the things you do exceptionally well is produce action-oriented tools, concepts, and materials. How do you think about producing not just knowledge, but knowledge that translates into or gets translated into tools and useful guides for people in the world of practice?
DAVID NADLER
My core process for creating concepts or tools is reflection. I’m doing some work and I’m involved in some phenomena, and I push myself to step back and reflect on what’s happening. Often it’s reflecting on what’s working and what’s not working and then figuring out what I can learn from that and what might be generalizable beyond the specific case situation. I’m fundamentally searching for insight. Over the years, I often sought to bring outsiders in to reflect on the same issues from a different perspective than I would have. There’s value to looking at the same problem through different lenses with different perspectives. I also used my client situations to test out ideas as part of the development process. When I had insights, I first tried to teach or present to a client before I ever wrote anything. I could come in to a client and say, “I have some ideas. Can I talk to you about them? Will you tell me what do you think about them?” And so it was back and forth between a potential consumer. Similarly, I’d say to my colleagues, “Let’s take this idea. Talk to your clients about it.”
ED LAWLER
An article is one kind of product, but you have developed other kinds of products as well—surveys and diagnostic guides.
DAVID NADLER
I developed tools because I wanted to operationalize my insights and enable others to apply them—whether they be diagnostic or prescriptive insight. Part of my approach to working with clients was to give them things they could use to understand and solve problems, as opposed to doing it for them or doing it to them. It was a collaborative consulting model, as opposed to a “study and recommend” model where the consultant says, “We’re going to come study you, and then tell you what your problem is and what you should do about it.” Instead, my consulting approach from the beginning conveys the following: “We’re going to help introduce you to some tools that we could use together to help you understand the problems and then help you figure out solutions because then you’ll be more committed to the solution and to making it happen. You’ll have deeper understanding and a greater commitment than in a traditional study and recommend model.”
ED LAWLER
I always saw you as having an actionable orientation, but a codeveloped actionable orientation.
DAVID NADLER
Absolutely. That’s a good description.
IAN ZISKIN
I relate very much to the model and approach that Dave was talking about. He’s obviously been a well-known successful practitioner of this for a very long time. And I think one of the reasons why it has been successful is—certainly in my organization and I think in other companies as well—the notion of codevelopment and iterative process, some experimentation and testing out of certain ideas before springing it on the entire organization, so you have a chance to see if it works and improve it. And because of the iterative nature of it, I think there’s this sense of progress and responsiveness in short time frames, where again those cycle times are significantly reduced. I’m sure there are many things that you’re all conducting as research that require multiple years to get right. And I’m not pooh-poohing that in any way. But to the extent that you’re feeling resistance from corporations and dealing with that in today’s environment, I think that’s in part why.
MIKE BEER
Ian, in your presentation you talked about problem solving and research. I think if the academics in the room are ever going to bridge the boundary you have been talking about all day, it is actually going to be by helping Ian Ziskin solve problems. And that to me is a world of exploiting; in terms of Jim March’s ideas, that’s exploiting what the field knows. And we know an awful lot. We can also actually push the boundaries, so that there are some pieces of the work we’re doing that we actually feel are exploring things that will inform the field and inform our doctoral students. But one can only get there after one has a relationship. And then one can get to a place where these relationships help in exploring stuff we don’t know, the boundaries of the field, both idea wise and then getting data. So this relationship is what you both have been talking about, and relationship building is really important to us in the academy.
DAVID NADLER
I think you’re absolutely right. You have to build confidence in your client so that you can actually help them, that you can add some insight, that you can do it in a language system and a time frame that makes sense for them. Then that gives you permission to ask broader questions and to explore other things. I like to find the places where the client has some energy about a problem that concerns him or her that lines up with where I can help them or where I have intellectual interest.
IAN ZISKIN
If I could build on that, one of the things that I’ve seen among the most effective academicians who are doing work inside companies, not unlike effective consultants who are doing work inside companies, is that it’s not enough to be able to articulate and point out that a problem exists. You have to be able to create a love for the problem. And it’s a strange word to use when you think about the problem. But academics are great because they get a great idea and, by the time you show up at the companies that you’re wanting to work with, you love the problem. That’s a good start. But the people that you’re selling to have a lot of problems. They may not have the same love for the one that you’ve identified, even though they may recognize that it, in fact, exists. If it’s C on a long list, that’s really the one that’s the biggest itch for me that I need to have scratched. And having you be able to help us think through how to frame that problem, how to address it in a practical way but in a way that also produces some concrete research that you can use to replicate and expand that notion to others—that’s the real sweet spot. But not everybody’s good at that.
SUSAN ALBERS MOHRMAN
Underlying some of our discussion and some of the papers is an assumption, on the one hand, that somehow all the wonderful things we’ve learned in management research aren’t getting to people in corporations. On the other hand, I feel that when I deal with managers, they know a heck of a lot because they’re managing and they’re learning a lot of stuff by experience. I would like your perspective on what is needed, if anything, to get the research that’s been done to the people that work and manage your organizations or the organizations you come in contact with?
IAN ZISKIN
First of all, I don’t know if management is a profession, but it’s certainly practiced. And people are heavily invested, in terms of development, to be more effective managers and leaders in companies like ours and many others all over the world. So organizations like ours have a very high interest in making managers better. First and foremost, the entire workplace experience is driven by the person’s relationship with their immediate boss. And if that’s a mess, everything else you do in the organization that might be spectacular gets lost in the sauce.
The place where I think we may be missing the boat a little bit, in terms of your question, Susan, is that there are a lot of messages out there. I think most people who work in companies today crave simplification. And honestly, there have been a number of references made during the discussion today to some of the more popular books and popular consultant tools. And almost invariably, when people talk about those, there’s this tendency to kind of wrinkle your nose up and pooh-pooh what’s been done.
I honestly don’t know the quality of the academic rigor and research that’s behind many of these tools. But to be brutally honest with you, most people like me don’t care. What they care about is solving problems in organizations. This problem happens to be how to improve the quality of your managers and your leaders. So there is nothing wrong with having great research, and you do. I think the challenge is, how do you package it, and how do you communicate it in a way that is simple sound bites that people can pay attention to, run away from it, and go do something else because they’re multitasking, and come back to it? I find that much of the academic literature does not do that. It’s hard to digest.
DAVID NADLER
I’m more on the optimistic side. Over the years (now decades), I’ve interacted with companies, and I’ve seen that, by and large, managers are more informed and more enlightened than they were. I remember going to the Ford Motor Company with Ed Lawler when we were doing the projects around quality of work life. And we were talking about the idea of what happens on the assembly line and how it’s so boring and how workers drop bolts into the line to stop it because that adds variety, knowledge, and challenge to their otherwise unmotivating and unfulfilling jobs. And the managers looked at us and said, “We don’t care.” Today, if you go into those companies, at least the ones that I deal with, the thinking is very different. Many of the concepts that we have written about, spoken about, and taught to our students are now part of the accepted general wisdom. People believe that teams are a useful way of organizing work, that we do indeed want to empower our people, or that we ought to think about reward systems in terms of what behavior you want to have. A lot of progress has been made in introducing the insights of organizational behavior into companies. In part, we may be victims of our own success. The basic ideas that we advocated for decades are now accepted as common wisdom by many, so the question is, conceptually, “What have you done for me lately?”