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Created: September 1, 2003
Latest Update: September 1, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Lecture on Bolman and Deal, Chapters 1 and 2

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, September 2003.
"Fair use" encouraged.

Reframing Organizations : Artistry, Choice, and Leadership by Lee G. Bolman, Terrence E. Deal. Wiley, 2003.

Preface

Bolman and Deal carefully distinguish between leadership and management. Nevertheless, they make it sound like individuals do both. That's kind of like charismatic leadership. There are some charismatic leaders, but most people do not exhibit both the personal charm and the intellectual and/or phsyiological skills needed for such leadership. More generally, we are divided into stewards and entrepreneurs. Stewardship infers the caretaking, the seeing that things do get done at least approximately when they should get done. Like the mother hens they keep the enterepreurial types on track. The balance leads to good management.

That doesn't mean that good stewards have no entrepreneurial qualities, or that entrepreneurs would screw up without their stewards. It's just a scale of qualities we all have along the whole range. Entrepreneurs don't like repetitive details and tasks; they know they need quite time to think, and are willing to take it right in the middle of everybody else's work space. That can require a steward to separate them out and unruffle lots of feathers. It was once so bad at Bell Labs in New Jersey that the managers concluded they needed a brick wall separating the entrepreneurs from the stewards. I think that's a tad exaggerated, but I do tend to piss of stewards, for what it's worth.

In the same way that stewards and entrepreneurs eventually come together as a whole, public and private sector are merging. Used to be that government was wholly separate. But the recent trend towards outsourcing (contracting jobs out piece meal to private contractors), and the overlapping concerns of entrepreneurs for non-governmental intervention have begun to make the differences smudge a little. We live in interesting times. "The public and private sectors increasingly interpenetrate one another." Ibid., at p. xvii. Notice, here comes interpenetration again, one of the themes of postmodern theory.

Not only is there interpenetration between public and private, but also between domestic and multinational organizations. Culture has entered upon the scene, and more and more we're not sure of the "way we do things here," especially as it gets harder and harder to define "here". Bolman and Deal's solution is to suggest that we use multiple perspectives, and that we give up the security of believing that we "know" what we're doing, especially when they tell us that "Hogan, Curphy, and Hogan (1944) (whoever they are) estimate that one-half to three-quarters of all American managers are incompetent." Ibid., at p.8.

Bolman and Deal suggest that management is as much an art as a science. Technology helps, but it can do as much as harm as good when people come to think of it as solving all their problems. I agree with Bolman and Deal that "management is a moral and ethical undertaking. . . " Ibid., at p. xvi, and that art is an essential part of our growth to that point.

"Overemphasizing the rational and technical side of an organization often contributes to decline or demise. Our counterbalance emphasizes the importance of art in both management and leadership. Artistry is neither exact nor precise; the artist interprets experience, expressing it in forms that can be felt, understood, and appreciated. Art fosters emotion, subtlety, and ambiguity. An artist represents the world to give us a deeper understanding of what is and what might be. In modern organizations, quality, commitment, and creativity are highly valued but often hard to find. They can be developed and encouraged by leaders or managers who embrace the expressive side of their work." Ibid., at pp. xvii-xviii.

Chapter 1

By reframing, Bolman and Deal mean changing to alternative perspectives. One of the most serious problems with "knowingness" is that we tend to "know" the truth from our own special perspective, and to remain unaware, or as Boman and Deal put it "clueless" (at p. 4) to the perspectives from which others are coming. They speak of the drawbacks of such local perspectivitis as having followed "the organizational big bang," or the effects of technology.