Morgen Witzel deals with a vast and serious subject: spotting incompetence before it hollows out a company. With certain tools in his workbox, which include a lively writing style and a grasp of business history, Witzel manages the task with evident ease.
Every time he introduces a challenging idea, he does so with a pithy story. The stories are drawn from literature, drama, history, antiquity and from everywhere else. He then drills down to the heart of the subject, illustrating almost every point with an example from the world of business.
Dealing with the topic of companies being consumed by greed, he presents Mr. Creosote, a glutton from a Monty Python sketch who explodes while having a mega meal, his belly unable to keep up with his greedy eyes. Witzel explains how companies, driven by the greed for growth, profit and market share, become short-sighted and explode from the unnecessary pressure building up inside. To illustrate his point, he then draws attention to how the supermarket major Royal Ahold went on an acquisitions spree and drove itself into a corner.
While discussing the effect unhealthy fear can have on companies, Witzel turns to Plato. Fear creates a skewed view of reality and keeps people from achieving their potential. A story by Plato enables him to make the point powerfully. In the Platonian narrative, a huddle of cave-dwellers step out and experience sunlight for the first time. Surprise gives way to fear and they recoil from the light and return to the darkness, and stay there forever. Witzel then discusses how the fear of uncertainty, of the unknown and of the ‘other’ could paralyse companies at times when they have to run the hardest.
To show how a great company can be derailed from its original objectives when a culture of arrogance sets in, he launches into a potted history of Ford Motor Company under the leadership of Henry Ford. Witzel diagnoses the malady that afflicted Henry Ford: arrogance of past success.
Witzel brings up the iconic Model T and its effect on Henry Ford. The car’s phenomenal success lulled Ford into an unbreakable — as it turned out, self-destructive — belief in his own methods. He was persisting with the Model T, even after the model had run its course and buyer expectations had changed.
Witzel believes incompetence could be missed because it is often hidden. It could be hiding behind any of what he calls the seven deadly sins of management, which include arrogance, greed and fear. The other four are ignorance, lust, linear thinking and lack of purpose.
While describing how these ‘management sins’ manifest within a company, the book also defines the roles and duties of leaders and managers, in an unobtrusive but unambiguous manner. In that sense, it serves as a leadership tool. Witzel is addressing leaders even when is discussing classic organisational problems. He explains that what is being said about companies apply to leaders and managers.
Witzel is a business historian with notable works in the area, including TATA – The Evolution of a Corporate Brand , but he is also in the profession of creating leaders for the workplace. He teaches the subject. He is a Fellow at the Centre for Leadership Studies at the University of Exeter Business School.
Viewed from another angle, Managing For Success is also a book that offers some instructions for life. After all, it deals with universal human frailties — greed, pride and arrogance — within the context of a business environment. As he has treated these topics with simplicity, humour and clarity, lay readers can translate the metaphors and business stories into lessons for their lives. To give just one example: in the section on the fear of uncertainty, the reader indirectly feels encouraged to live with uncertainty, taking calculated steps in the dark, and not wait indefinitely for a path paved with absolute certainty. For, there is no such path. Witzel has aptly titled the section, ‘The mirage of certainty’.
The author has begun well and finished well too. At the beginning, he lists the pages where the reader can find overviews of the seven management sins, presented in a reader-friendly tabular format.
The first chapter clearly lays out what is to be expected from the rest of the book. And the last one sums up the arguments and telescopes the elaborate lessons offered in the previous pages into a few quick pages. Here, in a tabular form again, are listed the desired responses to the seven sins of management.
However, the most interesting aspect of the final chapter is Witzel’s emphasis that “management is a force for good in the world”. As he closes the book, the reader is left with this thought: business touches people and the challenge before leaders is to enable business to touch people in ways that enrich their lives.
Managing for Success — Spotting Danger Signals – And Fixing Problems Before They Happen: Morgan Witzel; Bloomsbury Publishing India Pvt. Ltd., Vishrut Building, DDA Complex, Building No. 3, Pocket C-6&7, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi-110070. Rs. 399.
