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The Sunday New York Times business section recently (January 26, 2013) ran a piece by Harvard Business School historian Nancy Koehn entitled “Lincoln’s School of Management. “. Prof. Koehn has developed a teaching case on President Lincoln that she uses with mid-career students. In the Times article, in addition to her own discussion of Lincoln’s decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, she reports on the response of her students to the Lincoln case.

Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks wrote to Prof. Koehn in an email that “Lincoln’s presidency is a big, well-lit classroom for business leaders seeking to build successful, enduring organizations … Listening, always being present, and authenticity are essential leadership qualities whether one is leading a country in wartime or a company during a period of transformation.”

Ari Bloom, “a strategic adviser to consumer-related companies and a former student of [Prof. Koehn] wrote to Prof. Koehn in an email that “Lincoln is striking because he did all this under extremely difficult circumstances … This is important in building a business because you have to listen to customers, employees, suppliers and investors, including those who are critical of what you are doing.”

And Kelly Close “founder and president of Close Concerns, a health care information firm” wrote to Prof. Koehn in an email that “being responsible for even a small company and all the people and issues involved in such management forces you to come to terms with yourself and whether you can rise to the challenge … [Lincoln] was able to do this in a way that amazes and inspires me.”

It appears that what Prof. Koehn does in her pedagogy is depict Lincoln’s leadership traits (“resilience, emotional intelligence”) and practices (“thoughtful listening and the consideration of all sides of an argument”) and draw specific leadership lessons from them. She then applies those lessons to her students’ context, for example “the ability to experience negative emotions without falling through the floorboards is vital to entrepreneurs and business leaders.” Finally, judging from the emails she quoted, she encourages her students to identify with Lincoln, thinking of their own challenges and struggles as comparable to his.

I think the identification of leadership traits and practices in an historical individual is an acceptable practice in management education. Drawing lessons from those traits and practices is also acceptable, with the caveat that traits and practices depend on context, so that traits and practices useful in one context might be problematic in another. What I find objectionable is the promotion of identification with Lincoln.

Lincoln was a political leader who faced an existential challenge to his nation. Even among political leaders, only a small proportion ever faced an existential challenge to their nation’s survival. The leap from government to business and from existential threats to business opportunities and problems is a metaphor too far. The emails Prof. Koehn quotes strike me as expressions of delusions of grandeur or managerial hubris, sanctioned by Prof. Koehn’s pedagogy. Business schools in general, and the Harvard Business School in particular, promote this sort of managerial grandiosity.

It seems to me that Harvard Business School’s emphasis on a reductionistic pragmatism, as taught by the case method, provides a particular ineffective template for public sector decision making. One need only think of George W. Bush’s failures as “decider” and Mitt Romney’s disastrous presidential campaign to recognize the shortcomings of that approach when applied to the public sector arena.

I would advise Prof. Koehn to continue studying Lincoln and mining his experience for valuable nuggets of advice for managers. But the strongest piece of advice I would give Prof. Koehn and her students is to respect both Lincoln’s genius and the uniqueness of his context and stop deluding themselves by over-reaching in their identification.

Writer-director Joseph Cedar’s Academy Award-nominated film Footnote brought to mind the Swiss director Eric Rohmer’s “moral tales”: movies in which intelligent and articulate characters confront ethical dilemmas. In Footnote, Eliezer and Uriel Shkolnick are both Talmudic scholars at The Hebrew University. The son (Uriel), a far more distinguished academic than the father (Eliezer), is selected for the Israel Prize for Talmudic Studies – the highest recognition in their field. Due to an administrative error, the father is informed that he has won the prize. The adjudication committee, recognizing its mistake, consults with the son about what to do. On the basis of the son’s advice, the committee decides not to correct or admit its error, least of all to Eliezer. To avoid spoiling the movie for my readers, all I will say is that the movie presents the consequences of this decision to perpetuate a lie.

I enjoyed Footnote because it deftly mixes the comic with the tragic consequences of this lie, and I strongly recommend it, especially to academics. Two aspects of the story particularly appealed to me.

The difference between the two Professor Shkolnicks was more than generational. Eliezer Shkolnick was a rigorously scientific philologist, carefully scrutinizing minute textual inconsistencies to determine the origins and intertextual relationships of different versions of the Talmud. Uriel Shkolnick was a popularizer who interpreted Talmudic themes in a modern cultural context, a man who was quick with an opinion or a soundbite. Eliezer was a humanist-scientist; like an archeologist, he was using scientific methods to enhance our understanding of the past. Uriel was what we in North America call a “public intellectual” (a term not used in the movie, however).

One of the perpetual tensions in academe is between those who see themselves as scientists and those who see themselves as public intellectuals. Scientists are deliberate and even sometimes hesitant because they want to gather and evaluate all the data before presenting their conclusions. And the conclusions are always open to the possibility of revision on the basis of new data. Public intellectuals are good at quick pattern-recognition, and can always express themselves articulately about the latest trends in their area of expertise and its relevance to the wider society. Scientists see public intellectuals as shallow and self-aggrandizing. When I was studying economics at Harvard, one of the best-known public intellectuals in Cambridge was Lester Thurow, then dean of the Sloan School at MIT. I remember that among the scientists he was referred to as “less-than-thorough.” Public intellectuals, on the other hand, see scientists as timid, blinkered, and boring.

Footnote had two visual images that struck me as emblematic of the scientist. Eliezer Shkolnick always wore headphones when he wrote or studied, so as to shut out the outside world. His academic colleague and head of the selection committee for the Israel Prize, Yehuda Grossman, had a massive brow that was always deeply furrowed, perplexed by the puzzles he was trying to resolve.

The selection committee was where the ethical dilemma marking this moral tale began. When the committee discovered that Eliezer, rather than Uriel, had been notified, they could not decide what to do, so for some reason they consulted Uriel. As a former administrator, I think consulting Uriel was madness. Decision makers should never be in a position of conflict of interest and should recuse themselves in such situations. Consulting Uriel put him into a double conflict of interest – with respect to himself and with respect to his father. But bad administrative practice created the ethical dilemma, and hence was essential to plot development.

Uriel’s arguing that his father should nonetheless receive the prize, and the selection committee’s agreement, set in train a series of painful consequences. Without spoiling the plot, I can say that it brought conflict and sadness, rather than joy and naches, to the entire Shkolnick family and, despite the selection committee’s cover-up, the truth came out.

Mark Twain wrote that “if you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.” Footnote argues that this adage applies even to what we call white lies or diplomatic lies. If these lies concern a matter of ongoing importance, they will have consequences. Lies beget cover-ups and cover-ups beget investigations and investigations beget exposes. So, for me, Joseph Cedar’s moral tale provides additional support for the hypothesis that, in academic administration as well as in research, honesty is the best policy.

Now that the semester is almost over, I will assess the two books I assigned in my capstone strategic management seminar for fourth year UTSC undergraduate management majors. The textbook was Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand, and Joseph Lampel’s Strategy Safari, 2nd edition (Financial Times Prentice Hall UK, 2009) and it was accompanied by Walter Kiechel’s The Lords of Strategy (Harvard Business Press, 2010). This review represents my opinion. Though I was influenced by students’ reactions to the books, I take full responsibility.

The authors of Strategy Safari, whom for brevity I will refer to by the first letter of their surnames as MAL, had a terrific idea. Strategic management is a field that tolerates a great deal of diversity in substantive focus and methodological approach. They divided the field up into 10 “schools,” or conceptual approaches, and provided a portrait of each, outlining the major authors and their works, summarizing its major assumptions, critiquing it, and then offering an assessment of its contribution. The ten schools are indeed very diverse, the set of authors surveyed for each school extensive, the critiques pointed, and the assessment of contributions usually fair-minded.

Unfortunately, there are a number of features that detract from Strategy Safari’s value as a textbook, particularly for undergraduates. MAL did not state clearly at the outset Strategy Safari’s objective or its intended readership. Because the publisher makes available an instructor’s manual and set of powerpoints, we can infer it was intended as a textbook. If undergraduates are the target audience, then MAL tried to pack too much into the treatment of every school, for example beginning the chapter on the positioning school with a nice-to-know nine page (pp. 89-97) discussion of military maxims. As a consequence the book often reads like a literature review aimed at doctoral students. MAL could have satisfied both audiences by discussing each school in terms of one or two foremost scholars (Porter representing the positioning school) in the core of each chapter and relegating the literature review to an appendix to the chapter.

A book like Strategy Safari is most effective if it illustrates the ten different schools with compelling case material. Unfortunately, the case material is often far from compelling. The major case in the instructor’s manual is “Robin Hood,” a based-on-a-true-story case about a mediaeval rebel, aimed at students who have had no prior exposure to strategy. The chapter on the entrepreneurial school, for example, incorporates Mintzberg’s studies of strategy making from the 1930s to the 1970s in Steinberg’s, a Montreal-based supermarket chain, and Canadelle, a Montreal-based manufacturer of what were once called “foundation garments.” Given Mintzberg’s long career at McGill, it may well that in empirical research, as in real estate, nothing propinqs like propinquity. Nevertheless, these particular examples now appear as dated exemplars of the “Duddy Kravitz school of entrepreneurship.” (Personal disclosure: my students had no idea whom I was referring to but older readers might.)

In MAL’s version of the entrepreneurial school, strategy making is centred in the CEO. That was certainly true for the Duddy Kravitz school of entrepreneurship, in which most of the employees were unskilled laborers making minimum wage. But that is far from the situation at high-tech or Internet startups, where most of the employees are skilled professionals. Contrast the number of Microsoft millionaires with the number of Steinberg millionaires. So being out of date has consequences for the conceptual framework developed.

MAL would have stimulated much greater interest on the part of my students if they had chosen leading-edge contemporary firms (Apple and IBM are two obvious ones) and applied the different schools to the evolution of each. Indeed, this is what my students are doing in their papers.

This approach of applying different conceptual lenses to an empirical context, be it an institution or a sequence of events, has a distinguished precursor: Graham Allison’s deconstruction of the Cuban Missile Crisis to illustrate his three models of decision-making. Allison had the advantage that even though the Cuban Missile Crisis happened half a century ago, its world-in-the-balance storyline continues to stimulate interest, in a way that is not the case for Sam Steinberg (or even, had Mintzberg studied him, Sam Bronfman).

Mintzberg is well known for his advocacy of emergent strategy, discussed at length under the rubric of the learning school, as well as for his critique of strategic planning, the core of his chapter on the planning school. I find the former very convincing but the latter much less so. Mintzberg’s critique of strategic planning was published in 1994 and took aim at large scale corporate strategic planning exercises conducted in the 70s and 80s. Since then the importance of information as a factor of production has become obvious. Information is all that many leading-edge companies (Google, Facebook) now produce. Technology enables companies to capture vast amounts of information about their customers. Data base management and spreadsheet software have become vastly more powerful.

The public and non-profit sectors have also made great strides in generating and using information. Examples that come to mind are performance management systems in the public sector starting with Compstat and finding more recent expression in NYC’s Mayor’s Management Report, the US Government’s data.gov initiative to make public sector data bases available for citizen use, and the Gates Foundation’s emphasis on generating data and using it to evaluate its programs. Metrics matter more than ever before.

MAL summarize their critique of the planning school with the italicized statement “Because analysis is not synthesis, strategic planning has never been strategy making” (p. 81). For them, the analysis of data is fundamentally different from the creative synthesis expressed in the choice of an organizational strategy. I would put it differently. Synthesis follows analysis like the left foot follows the right (a claim MAL makes about the relationship between strategy and implementation). There is a constant interplay between the generation and analysis of data and strategic choice. Mintzberg’s 1994 book was titled “The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning” but its sequel could well be titled “Planning Reborn as Metrics.”

Readers familiar with Duddy Kravitz will also recall the adage “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” MAL included many instances of what they felt were spoonfuls of sugar: cartoons to start each chapter; the extended safari metaphor, which incorporated poetry and designated an animal to refer to each school; and a plethora of conceptual diagrams. For me all of these intended spoonfuls of sugar were, to use another metaphor, rococo ornaments that made it hard to see the structure of the intellectual edifice MAL were trying to build. I thought the cartoons were sometimes not relevant to the chapter, the safari metaphor was overwrought, the poetry was too cute, and the diagrams were imprecise and unclear (such as those on pages 79, 34, 162, 202, 225, 342, 344, 349, 384, 386, 391). I would add that I think one problem afflicting the entire strategic management field, and not just MAL, is the overuse of unclear conceptual diagrams.

To conclude: MAL would do much better to cut to the chase, base the exposition of each school on a small number of key writers, use up-to-date examples and carry them through the entire text, relegate the extensive literature reviews to appendices to each chapter, and be much more sparing in their use of cartoons, metaphors, and diagrams.

This brings me to Kiechel’s The Lords of Strategy. Keichel was not trying to write a textbook, but rather what he called a “secret intellectual history of the new corporate world.” By that he meant he was trying to tell the story of the academics and practitioners, particularly consultants, who developed the field of strategy management beginning in the mid-60s. Kiechel believes that many of these people, for example Bruce Henderson of the Boston Consulting Group, are not well known in business circles, but their stories would be of interest. Unlike MAL, who dealt exclusively with ideas, Kiechel organized his book around the three foci of ideas, organizations, and people. Thus, not only do we learn about the BCG growth-share matrix, but also about the early days of BCG and how the consultants developed it. Similarly, we learn about Michael Porter’s intellectual journey back and forth across the Charles River (between HBS on the right bank and the Economics Department on the left) and how it led to his theory of strategic positioning. Kiechel thus was following the practice of intellectual historians, not only writing about disembodied ideas, but also dealing with their originators and their organizational context. The overall verdict of the students, which I share, was that it served as a valuable supplement to Strategy Safari, and made the material come alive.

I offer two minor criticisms. As might well be explained by Kiechel’s Harvard degrees, career at Harvard Business Press, and HBP’s publication of the book, there was a strong emphasis on Harvard as academic institution and Boston-based consultants (Boston Consulting Group and Bain Associates) as practitioners. Perhaps it was a bit too Harvard or Boston-centric. Second, Kiechel’s writing is often ironic and subtle, for example his chapter on strategic management and the financial crisis of 2008-09. The argument goes back and forth for several pages before Kiechel concludes that strategic management was partially responsible. While there is nothing wrong with irony or subtlety per se, in a classroom context, a more direct statement of the argument would have been preferable.

No texts are ever perfect. The students and I worked hard to master both Strategy Safari and The Lords of Strategy. And we learned a lot about strategic management in the process. Based on the high caliber of the presentations I have heard, I am looking forward to receiving the students’ papers. And these books will be least partially responsible for this outcome.

I saw Davis Guggenheim’s documentary about American public education, “Waiting for Superman,” at the cinema recently because of its relevance to a chapter of my forthcoming book Governing Fables. The chapter deals with transformational teachers in inner-city public high schools and discusses stories of those who succeed (“Stand and Deliver” and “Freedom Writers”) and those who fail (“Cheaters” and “Half-Nelson”). My preference is to screen a movie on the computer at home where I can take notes, rather than in a darkened cinema, but Waiting for Superman is not yet available on DVD.

Waiting for Superman attempts to do too much, by telling too many stories. There are 5 stories of children attempting to be admitted to successful charter schools. One of the heroes of the charter school movement, Geoffrey Canada, founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone, is featured. Finally, educational reformer Michelle Rhee, the chancellor of the Washington D.C. public schools is also profiled. Since one of the issues Rhee takes on is tenure for incompetent teachers, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten is presented as what the New York Times calls “a demonic opponent of change.”

The movie ends on several rather sad notes. As any economist would predict, there is excess demand for successful charter schools, and the law requires that excess demand be dealt with by publicly-held admissions lotteries. Of the five students presented, one is successful in the lottery, a second makes it on the wait list, and three are unsuccessful. Michelle Rhee proposes a contract that pays substantial bonuses to the most effective teachers, but the proposal fails in collective bargaining. Rhee begins the movie looking young and dynamic but by the end appears to have aged two decades. Indeed, following the defeat of Mayor Adrian Fenty, she decided to resign.

The movie was produced by Jeffrey Skoll’s activist Participant Media and, consistent with Skoll’s approach, ends by interspersing with the credits text urging the viewer to take action. The actions suggested include parents writing their school boards to demand great teachers, volunteering their time, or donating money. All of this strikes me as well-meaning, but it is not clear that it would have much impact.

To go back to the movie, my criticism is that, by attempting to tell so many stories, it doesn’t tell any one of them in sufficient depth. First, there are many successful charter schools, but also many that, by any standard, aren’t doing any better than the public schools they seek to challenge. So what differentiates the successful charter schools from the unsuccessful ones?

Second, was Michelle Rhee a successful reformer or did she crash and burn? Were her tactics – in particular the closing of schools and firing of teachers – warranted, or an unproductive shock and awe campaign?

Third, was Randi Weingarten being demonized because the plot line demanded an adversary? The New York Times, at least, suggests that Weingarten is more flexible than the film suggests. Any one of these stories could have been investigated – and presented – with more depth and nuance.

Much should be done to improve public education in the US. It is not clear to me that breaking teachers’ unions is the best way to do that. Reducing class size, coping with the effects of poverty, and making better use of technology are all part of the answer. All these, of course, require additional resources. The resources made available by foundations and by the Race to the Top initiative are part of the solution, but a real initiative would require support on a much greater scale. And it is not at all clear to me that the US is ready or able to make such a commitment.

I’m just back from the Social Studies event last weekend and here are my reactions. First, the confrontation. The issue of whether Harvard should accept the scholarship fund named in honor of Marty Peretz was passionately debated, but it did not dominate the day. The protesters outside the Science Building seminar and Adams House luncheon and those who walked out of the luncheon when Peretz rose to speak were loud, but not obtrusive. That seemed balanced, and consistent with the spirit of the free exchange of ideas in a university.

I feel considerable sympathy for and sadness about Peretz. The honor was for his responsible leadership of the program during a difficult time. (For example, Prof. Michael Walzer revealed that, in the aftermath of the Harvard strike of 1969, Peretz worked hard to convince the university not to expel the students who had occupied University Hall.) The honor was undermined by what Peretz, in his posted confession on Yom Kippur eve called his “sin of wild and wounding language.” A responsible and judicious leader and mentor can at the same time be an extreme partisan in print in the culture wars, a tendency aided and abetted by the ease of instant online publication. As a general precaution, I think blog publication software should have an automatic internal “diplomacy checker” that cautions against overly provocative prose and prevents a post from going up until the writer looks at it the next morning. My guess is that wouldn’t be sufficient in this case: Marty is who he is.

Aside from the sadness of l’affaire Peretz, there was much at the seminar that was thought-provoking, which I’ll discuss under the themes of inter-disciplinarity, connecting, and remembering.

In its essence, Social Studies is an interdisciplinary social sciences program. Interdisciplinarity is great for undergraduates, but is feasible for a practicing academic? Most academics are specialized, not interdisciplinary. Tenure decisions and publication decisions are usually controlled by people rooted in their intellectual niches.

One of the speakers, sociologist Rogers Brubaker, observed that sociology’s absence of a dominant paradigm and perpetually fracturing and realigning subdisciplines facilitates interdisciplinarity. University of Pennsylvania President Amy Guttman, in contrast, observed that economics is controlled by a dominant rational actor paradigm, making it difficult for economists to engage in inter-disciplinary research. That said, it seems to me that she passed over the growth of behavioral economics, which is a hybrid of psychology and economics, attempting to supplant the rational actor with more realistic psychological assumptions.

One difficulty of being interdisciplinary is the challenge of learning a new discipline in mid-career. You must go beyond undergraduate dilettantism; if your knowledge of the new discipline is superficial, reviewers for academic journals will catch you out. Perhaps a better way to do interdisciplinary research is to put together a team of scholars from different disciplines. While each will not be expected to master the other discipline(s), each will have to become conversant enough with the other disciplines that the collaboration produces synergies. Social studies encouraged us to be interdisciplinary and provided models of effective interdisciplinary scholarship, but emulating the models is always a challenge.

Second, connecting. Because there were faculty and former and current students from a 50 year period present, likely everyone knew only a handful of the several hundred in attendance, a situation that is painful for introverts and delightful for extroverts. I went with the latter tendency, and ended up talking with many of the lecturers, recent graduates, and current students. To a person, I found them engaging and engaged, with lots of ambitions and plans for future learning, whether through formal research or life experience. The caliber of its participants speaks highly of the strength of the program’s design and its appeal to the best students and young faculty members.

Third, remembering. I asked Director of Studies Anya Bernstein whether the program had been recorded and her answer was that, as is often the case now at Harvard, there wasn’t money in the budget. As someone concerned with narratives and institutions, I deeply regret that. The Social Studies program, while a relatively young institution by Harvard standards, has a wonderful story to tell. Telling an institution’s story is a great way of recruiting – not that Social Studies seems to have any problem there – and of building identification with the institution on the part of its participants. It would be great for Anya and other lecturers to say to their students that, if they wanted to know more about the history and philosophy of the Social Studies program, they could look up the proceedings of the 50th anniversary celebration on the program’s website.

Without the benefit of transcripts, I hope Anya can round up the speaker’s notes and texts which, together with the filmed interview of Prof. Stanley Hoffmann, one of the program’s founding fathers, would constitute something approaching a record of the event, and post it on the program’s website. I think the students, current and future, would learn a lot from it. I found it so thought-provoking that I’d also like to read it and think again about all that was said.