Book Review for The Empty Raincoat by
Charles Handy (Hutchinson, 1994); The Seven Habits of Highly
Effective People: powerful lessons in personal change by
Stephen R. Covey (Simon and Schuster, 1992) and On Becoming a
Leader by Warren Bennis (Century Pub, 1990).
In issue 12 of Philosophy Now (in the article BIG
Philosophy) I quoted a message sent to me over the Internet
by Sheldon Richmond in which he said: "I think that
academic philosophy, for the most part, is the last place to look
for philosophy" and suggested other writers outside of
philosophy who seek wisdom. The three he mentioned were so-called
‘management gurus’: Charles Handy, Stephen R. Covey and
Warren Bennis. I took up his challenge to move outside of
academic philosophy, reading a book by each author. Here is my
report on my findings.
What is a management guru? What do they write
about? Motivating staff? Making the bottom line? Time management?
Business restructuring? Not really - not these books anyway -
such issues would be seen as ‘tactics’ and gurus are
interested in Strategy. All the books followed three themes:
understanding the world, understanding yourself and understanding
how to make yourself effective in the world. They are all written
in a very clear, readable style with examples, anecdotes, lists
of bullet points and sometimes also diagrams and tables. These
writers have a message and they don’t just deliver it in
books, but through conferences, management training seminars and
consultancy. Thus we are certainly not dealing here with academic
ideas, but with people who have a real influence on the way
industry and business are run (for example at the beginning of
Stephen Covey’s book are pages of quotes from senior
businesspeople praising Covey’s ideas).
So what are the ideas? An apologetics for
capitalism? A pseudo-psychology of feeling good about yourself?
An ideology of competitiveness and dog-eat-dog? Not particularly.
One interesting input into these writers is the study of
leadership and success. Stephen Covey has studied
‘success’ literature for the past 100 years (that is,
advice on how to be successful), Warren Bennis writes "for
the last decade I’ve devoted the bulk of my time to the
study of leadership" (p.1) (his previous book, Leaders
was just interviews; On Becoming a Leader lists 29
‘leaders’ interviewed as background to the book). Thus
these writers are interested in practicalities - what works -
rather than pushing a particular ideology. Indeed, Bennis is not
only interested in business leadership, his ‘leaders’
include Betty Friedman, a leading feminist, Roger Gould, a
leading psychoanalyst, and Herb Alpert a leading musician as well
as being head of A&M Records.
What’s happening to the world? All the
writers are concerned with understanding the world, where have we
come from, where are we going to? Covey and Bennis, being
American, write from a US perspective, Charles Handy, being
English, is less parochial. Handy is the writer who goes into the
most detail over global change. He identifies a number of themes.
One is the change in the way people work. People aren’t
working for a single company all their lives - they are changing
jobs more and more frequently. A person will have a skill which
they will use in one company, then go on and use it in another.
Indeed, they may work for more than one company at once. Perhaps
even more significant is his claim that increasingly people
won’t go to work at all - using a PC they will plug into a
computer network and be able to work from home. The company
building itself will be much smaller - just contain a few meeting
rooms when people need to get together. Handy identifies four
‘ages’ of a person’s life: in the first age they
are educated, in the second age they work flat out in a
successful career, in the third age they work part-time, in the
fourth age they are physically incapable of work. Handy claims
there will be too many pensioners to continue living completely
off a pension. Instead ‘pensioners’ will supplement
their income by working and only when they are physically unable
to work (the fourth age) will they finish work completely. He
claims the first three ages may not necessarily follow each other
- people should be able to go into education, work full time and
work part time at their discretion. Handy is generally very
positive about these changes, believing it will give people more
freedom and variety in their lives.
Covey and Bennis cover the change in the type
of person society has produced. In early success literature, what
was important was what type of person you were - a well-educated
person with values, character and opinions. Since the 1920s,
claims Covey, a ‘bureaucratic’, pragmatic style has
become dominant in which people are goal oriented - the
literature changes into how to make people agree with you, how to
develop a power stare, how to appear confident, how to close
deals etc. This distinction is similar to Bennis’ contrast
between managers and leaders. For Bennis, the US has gone wrong
since Kennedy (some good things such as civil rights and feminism
notwithstanding). The country is producing managers, not leaders
of the stature of Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower and JFK.
"There are 240 million Americans, and we’ve tried for a
couple of decades to get along without leaders. It hasn’t
worked very well" (p.15). For Bennis, leaders are
individuals, they work with "ideas, questions, processes,
alternatives, risk, imagination", whereas managers lack
individuality, and are characterised by "facts, answers,
content, tactics, goals, rules and common sense" (p.46).
Bennis asks where are the "Thomas Edison, Eli Whitney,
Alexander Graham Bell, Whitman and Twain" of today?
Whatever these writers’ differences in
analysing the world, the implications are remarkably similar: the
new world requires people who know and understand themselves. So
we come to the next area covered by these writers. Handy’s
world requires people who are independent, able to take
responsibility for their own lives and decisions, able to act on
their own initiative and who therefore are people who know what
they want and who know how to get it. Bennis’ leaders are
those who "listen to the inner voice" (p. 34), who take
risks, work on instinct, who have vision, passion, integrity,
trust, curiosity and daring (p. 40). One characteristic of these
books is that they are packed with quotes from writers, thinkers,
and frequently philosophers. Bennis includes a quote from the
child psychologist Jean Piaget, "every time we teach a child
something, we keep him from inventing it himself" (p.69). A
frequent theme is that it is the task of the individual to invent
themselves, life is a work of art. This means not simply that
people must be technically proficient, but they must be real
people with knowledge of the arts, literature, philosophy, other
cultures and other times. The individual must be happy with
complexity, ambiguity, uncertainty and chaos. There is a lot of
advice about how to know yourself, how to find out who you are,
how to listen to the inner voice etc. Indeed, Covey’s book
classification subject is self-realisation, the same
classification as the more overtly spiritual M. Scott Peck’s
The Road Less Travelled (Rider, 1993), with which there
are many similarities. Bennis quotes psychoanalysis Roger Gould
as saying "feelings are memories of past behaviour... you
can literally begin to use your thinking process to change your
behaviour" (p. 67).
This leads us to the last thread covered by
these writers, how to change the world. This is the culmination
of the writer’s thought - the purpose of the book, seminar,
consultancy or conference. Many of the anecdotes given by these
writers cover incidents they were directly involved with in how
people made a difference, how they managed change, how they
succeeded. Bennis emphasises that a central quality of a leader
is not simply that they have a vision, but that they can
effectively communicate it to others and enthuse them, then
beyond that that they can organise the change effectively. Covey
describes how effective people are in terms of a diagram
containing four quadrants. The first row covers urgent tasks
which must be performed immediately, the second row tasks that
are less urgent. The first column contains important tasks, the
second column less important tasks. Thus a first quadrant person
is someone who is frequently having to perform important tasks
immediately, a second quadrant person is governed my things which
are urgent but less important (for example the phone rings - it
may not be important, but it is urgent). A third quadrant person
does important things when they are not urgent, while a fourth
quadrant person does unimportant tasks with no urgency (e.g.
watch TV!) Covey then argues that too many people jump between
the first and fourth quadrants. When there is time to spare, they
relax and perform unimportant tasks, allowing important tasks to
creep up on them and be tackled at the last minute. In contrast
to this Covey praises ‘third quadrant’ people who think
long term and perform important tasks in good time before they
become urgent. Just common sense? Maybe, but these are frameworks
within which people can analyse what type of person they are and
do something about it.
But is this philosophy? Bennis quotes the
philosopher Alfred North Whitehead: "in the modern world,
the celibacy of the medieval learned class has been replaced by
the celibacy of the intellect which is divorced from the concrete
contemplation of the complete facts" (p.22). Here we have
people with ideas, who try out their ideas by verifying and
validating them in the ‘real world’ beyond the
university. (In Terry Pratchett’s book Small Gods he
describes a group of philosophers who try to make a living giving
people advice. They are always poor, for when their advice
doesn’t work people ask for their money back.) Much of what
they say echoes philosophy - the analysis of the perpetually
revolutionising capitalist economy might be based on
Fukuyama’s contention that capitalism is the end of history,
their views on individual responsibility on Sartre’s
existential responsibility, their views on inventing the self on
Foucault’s ideas on self-creation, the argument that we must
thrive on chaos, ambiguity and uncertainty on post-structuralism
and deconstruction’s suspicion of objective truth. In all
these cases the argument is pitched at a level where
non-academics can understand it - and perhaps therefore turned
into a absurd parody of the original idea. So what? I’d like
to see deconstructionist management consultants who turn theory
into practise the way Umberto Eco turned advanced literary theory
into The Name of the Rose. But it will never happen. Why?
Because there’s one area where philosophy it seems dare not
tread - the question of leadership.
Leadership perhaps has always been a dangerous
topic for philosophy. An obvious example is Heidegger’s
equating leadership with "the Fuhrer himself and he
alone is the German reality" (Heidegger’s rectorship
address, 1933, quoted in Ott’s Martin Heidegger: A
Political Life, p.164). Marxism-Leninism again was a
philosophy of leadership, and in all the contemporary
reinterpretations of Nietzsche there is a significant reluctance
to see his Superman as a leader. So perhaps philosophy has
despaired of understanding leadership - and perhaps it should
renew itself for this task?
Critical philosophy is happy to analyse
existing power relations, to question, and to realise there may
be alternatives. Moral philosophy may defend individual rights
and liberties. But leadership means telling other people what to
do - a Philosopher King? As the books reviewed show, telling
people what to do doesn’t mean forcing them to do it. Where
is the philosopher who has not only the vision, but the ability
to communicate that vision to others - to enthuse them - and the
organisational ability to make it happen?
Stephen R. Covey The Seven Habits of Highly Effective
People: powerful lessons in personal change (Simon and
Schuster, 1992), 358p. ISBN: 0671711172
Charles Handy The Empty Raincoat (Hutchinson, 1994),
280p. ISBN: 0091780225
Warren Bennis On Becomming a Leader (Century Pub,
1990), 226p. ISBN: 0091742889
©John Mann 1995
Back to main Philosophy Page