Pensieve Thoughts
I wanted to relate two thoughts I had during a recent conversation with a Peruvian friend almost a month ago.
We were talking about negotiations and business deals and he described how he thought friendliness and that vague concept of “interpersonal skills” would be the most important in any interaction. While sounding almost like a truism, I thought for a bit and respectfully disagreed on an intercultural standpoint. Drawing from my experiences with him and other North/South Americans I have met thus far who were like him, I pointed out that in some cultures there is no fundamental presumption of trust between strangers. In fact, if I were approached by a salesman being over-friendly, I might think he has something to hide – the friendliness, then, instead of breaking the ice, sets off instinctive suspicion, no matter how unwarranted. I think I managed to impress that fact upon him, which is rare because I am not used to winning arguments like that.
The other thought was on company culture. My friend was very much for a hierarchical structure with clearly defined responsibilities and accountabilities, with managers having complete oversight, understanding, and responsibility for their subordinates. It followed from this mindset that he saw no point in my interest in facilitating communications worldwide at all levels of a company. Managers should manage their respective regions, meet regularly, and control company growth through a well-designed and responsive hierarchical structure. I informed him that he was still living in the last millenium. It is the hallmark of the modern technocracy that managers will almost certainly never truly know what their people know – to be anything less is to insist on redundancy and risk loss of competitiveness. Moreover I believe it is the entire point of professional managers in the first place, the very reason why the business school was created over a century ago. The simple truth? Even 127 years ago people had realised that business complexity had become so advanced that it was actually better to train a professional manager corps who were not specialists in anything but bringing people with different skills together and running a team. Today, the team takes on a different meaning – people’s decisions may affect someone else in not just another department, but a totally different country. Furthermore, the knowledge-intensiveness of modern products coupled with the realities of global production cost (and, increasingly, human and intellectual capital) distributions means an increased need to work across borders, cultures, languages, and yes, across departments and across formal lines of management control when the need arises. Therefore I argued for a less hierarchical structure where low level employees would be encouraged to work freely with counterparts and managers in other departments without letting his manager “take care of it”.
I compared our differences in opinion to the modus operandi of centrally planned and free market economies. I concluded that a centrally planned company would be ideal but would fail in practice because of rigidity imposed by bureaucratic structure as well as an insufficiency of information, while a free market system would create a culture of nimbleness as well as ultimately leading to a better leadership pipeline, even as it increases downside risks from failures commensurate with the decrease in level of supervision.
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