Management Research Paper

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because they do all the stuff he can’t do or doesn’t like. He gets people to really throw themselves into these assignments through his ability to find their hot buttons. Whatever it takes to get you to sign on, he gives. It is only the third kind of executive who is a learner. The one I am thinking of pur- posely takes on assignments which are scary, really discomforting. Each time that person finishes one of these, he or she will say, ‘I really learned some- thing this time.’”

The Impact of U.S. Culture on U.S. Management

To what extent are the difficulties of adapting to new leadership styles the result of cultural values, not personal learning or personality? Managers are obviously products of their own cultures. In many ways, U.S. culture shaped and fostered the management style that was a very visible part of the enormous success of U.S. business during most of the twentieth century.

Perhaps the culture that was so consistent with the needs of an earlier style of production—particularly mechanistic, rigid mass production—is now an impediment to learning some of the new leadership styles required by fast- changing technologies and a more service-oriented economy.6

I have selected a few elements that I think are basic to U.S. culture: individualism and competitiveness; linearity, compartmentalization, and rational thinking; quantification and clarity; universalism; impatience; and pragmatic, not conceptual. I will discuss how each of these may relate to the leadership challenges discussed above.

Individualism and Competitiveness The U.S. culture emphasizes individualism. People in the United States

are used to viewing peers as competitors and tend to believe that they are in a winner-take-all race for individual success—whether in winning a high salary or profits or gaining recognition with a prestigious title. These values are responsible for our strong-willed entrepreneurs who succeed against great odds, as well as the spirited, even acrimonious, but often productive debates that take place at management meetings.

But such values can also inhibit useful cooperation and encourage destructive competition among peers in which a personal win becomes more important than success for the larger organization. Highly individualistic managers may struggle for as much autonomy and personal turf as possible and, in the process, detract from valuable interdependencies.

The Impact of U.S. Culture on U.S. Management

36 Leadership for Turbulent Times

Yet U.S. individualism, in a world of fast-changing technologies and markets, can be functional, even critical. As organizations become more interdependent and work systems more complex, the so-called tight coupling among the components of work systems creates difficult integration prob- lems. A good deal of individual initiative and personal responsibility is necessary to get the divergent, and sometimes incompatible, parts of the system to fit together. Perhaps only strong individuals will be willing to tell superiors bad news and disagree with high-level decisions that contradict the realities that are apparent at lower levels.

Organizations like Minnesota Mining have demonstrated also that entrepreneurial middle managers can create new businesses and new strate- gies even within large organizations. Why, then, do so few large companies appear to have senior managers who encourage the expression of counterintuitive, even countercultural, ideas and reward individuals who come up with ingenious answers to intractable problems and take personal risks to prove out their ideas?

Linearity, Compartmentalization, and Rational Thinking U.S. executives have learned their organizational logic from a larger

political philosophy and pragmatism that is based on an optimistic, reason- ably predictable future. Throughout U.S. life, there is an emphasis on planfulness and the formalization of plans in precise, written form. There is the expectation that there will be a neat, linear, one-way progression from plans to implementation to results. And, in the past, careful planning could assume that the external technological and competitive system would remain reasonably stable.

The U.S. culture encouraged a segmented view of management and functions. Plans clearly came before execution, and execution was expected to move sequentially—for example, from planning, to development, to operations, to marketing. Clear separation of functions was good, just as was the clear separation of powers in our government. Yet realistically we know that most plans require continuous change; replanning or real-time planning is becoming important with the rapid changes occurring in markets and technology.

A world filled with chaotic change may make some of these cultural- managerial values less functional. Keynes is quoted as saying, “The inevi- table never happens. It is the unexpected always.” As the cliché has it, change is everywhere and the future is almost never predictable from the past. Most plans are dated before the ink is dry. Projects are devised on the run or even

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rationalized after execution. Unanticipated and unanticipatable events require improvisation and spontaneity. Perhaps the best strategy is the emergent one.

The boundaries between functions blur, and it can be a serious error to precisely demarcate jurisdictions. Most arguments over whether a critical decision is solely a marketing one or solely one for customer services are wastefully academic, because fast-paced internal coordination is needed to develop a new product or meet a competitor’s price or specification, and usually there is continuous overlapping among functions.

The elaboration of staff, with increasing numbers and varieties of experts, not only works against the concept of a lean organization but, as we have seen, also complicates the everyday challenge for managers to achieve operating excellence, and it inhibits their learning of new and diverse techni- cal ideas and concepts. The belief and often the senior-management practice of creating a separate new staff specialty for every new problem enormously complicates organizational processes.

Years ago a European executive told me how amused he was that the U.S. corporation he was dealing with had two separate departments to handle greeting foreign visitors. One was for those using air transportation and the other handled visitors who came by ship. I see no evidence that the tempta- tion to specialize has abated.

Quantification and Clarity In a culture that places great stress on written documents and precise,

quantitative standards, it is not surprising that managers have grown used to unambiguous guidelines for action, expecting that there will be, or at least should be, clear wins and losses. Too many managers repeat the mantra: “It’s only the bottom line that counts.” Consistently, hard numbers drive out other criteria.

U.S. managers tend to grow edgy with ambiguity, with true contradic- tions and inconsistencies, and with situations where there aren’t clear sign- posts and a clear scorecard. (That is why they find intolerable the absence of performance appraisals in many Asian organizations.) They assume that if something can’t be given a quantitative measurement, it doesn’t exist. Thus, subjective, intuitive, and qualitative factors often get short shrift.

Yet many critical issues in modern business can’t be precisely quanti- fied. Ambiguities and inconsistencies predominate, and cultures like those of the Far East—which for centuries have emphasized living with ambiguity— gain a competitive edge from their comfort with an absence of clarity and emphasis on fluidity and flexibility.

The Impact of U.S. Culture on U.S. Management

38 Leadership for Turbulent Times

Universalism People in the U.S. have been taught to seek out the one best way of

doing things, the big answer, whether from consultants, management gurus or professors, or from surveys of best practice. Managers often assume that these “best ways” can just be implanted in all parts of a business with top-down fiat.

This faith in universal answers results in impatience with the need to build from the bottom up, to identify and work with what is unique about each situation. It is hardly surprising that there is widespread cynicism at lower levels about the current management fad. For example, many corpora- tions go through predictable cycles of “We have to centralize” and then “We have to decentralize”—failing to recognize that perhaps both alternatives are simultaneously necessary and that there may not be one best solution.

Impatience The U.S. propensity for recognizing that time is money and feeling

driven by time has been functional, because coordination depends upon interlocking through time. But when working overseas, courting potential new-venture partners or customers, or even dealing with most human re- sources problems, the counting of every minute by typical U.S. managers can be quite destructive. Brought up to believe they must account for each minute, they experience great pressure when there aren’t countable results equivalent to the time expended.

Pragmatic, Not Conceptual Managers in the U.S. pride themselves on being pragmatic, having no

theory, wanting just the facts, and using a one-page executive summary. At the extreme, this leads to an unwillingness to understand why and how things really work. Some of the endless reinventing of the wheel that occurs in the purchase of a new fad, and layering it on as the newest management program to solve our problems, results from this failure to look beneath the surface.

Comments from Executives “From the first day we enter the educational system in the U.S. we are

taught that it is important to succeed as an individual; team endeavors are not encouraged. We’ve grown up to think that learning is an individual endeavor and one is penalized for trying to learn together.”

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“I don’t think most executives realize how ill-prepared we are as a nation to deal with multinational business issues. We are eccentric and arrogant, more than any other people I have encountered. We don’t under- stand how frail our models are for doing business elsewhere in the world. Too many executives believe that one solution fits all, and something that has brought them great success will work anywhere.”

“We don’t realize how homogeneous we are compared to the rest of the world. We don’t realize what an incredible thing it is to be able to travel 3,000 miles and find people who speak the same language, eat pretty much the same kinds of foods, and dress the same way.”

Some Concluding Observations

What was unique about the conference was its foreswearing of magic bullets. Both the basic design and the quality of participants discouraged the search for simple solutions or models.

Rather than jumping to answers, the participants were willing to focus on problems. There was an unchallenged consensus that companies both contain and must react to a very turbulent world and that the old rules may not apply. The managerial world, all agreed, has become a very difficult place to do well and do it consistently.

Although no one opted for a version of the great man theory, there was very real agreement on the increasing importance of leadership. Leadership skills become ever more critical in a world of very great centrifugal forces and the market’s (for goods and company shares) small tolerance for error.

Most scholars of leadership look askance at what has been called the great man theory—for reasons aside from its inherent sexism. There is general agreement that leadership is a process involving relationships among leaders and followers—and we could add involving “internal” peers and “external” peers (customers, vendors, partners, contractors).

Moving to a process view also requires us to consider the context in which leadership is exercised. The context has shifted dramatically in U.S. business from what we labeled, a bit disparagingly, the comfort years, to the extraordinarily pressureful world of global competition and an ever- accelerating pace of technological change.

Not too many years ago, leadership researchers “discovered” that R&D- type organizations, filled with unpredictability, required a very different style

Some Concluding Observations