“They believe in business know-how gained on the job, not in the classrooms,” said T.W. Kang, a Tokyo-based businessman who holds an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. “They’d say you can’t learn it there. You have to learn it with your feet.”
Hitotsubashi’s dean, Christina Ahmadjian, said that students at her school are required to take a course in “knowledge creation.” “Students read about the philosophy of Zen Buddhism, among many other things, and learn about how leading Japanese companies have innovated through sharing of ‘tacit knowledge’ — knowledge that is best communicated through long-term, close, personal relationships,” she said. “This is the polar opposite of the Wall Street view of things.”
Mr. Kang, who has served on the boards of both Japanese and American companies, said the majority of Japanese managers at large corporations viewed business knowledge learned at school with suspicion and skepticism, bordering on disdain.So, I got one of these MBA degrees a few decades ago, and in fact went back to my alma mater, the Johnson Graudate School of Management (JGSM) at Cornell University, as a staff member for a few years and also was a lecturer for two courses for MBA students. I've pondered the worth of what I learned there ever since, not in terms of what it did for my salary, but for what use the lessons were in actual life.
In fact, Reiji Shibata, chief executive of Indigo Blue, a human resources consulting firm in Tokyo and formerly the chief executive of a number of Japanese firms, said Japanese M.B.A. holders generally do fine in the management consulting field, but not necessarily in the general business context. “They have a tendency to overemphasize logic,” he said. “Their approach at times leads to clashes and dead ends and deals don’t go through as a result. This is especially so when you are working with different types of customers and partners.”
At the time, we did a survey of whether our European alumni thought we should open a branch in Europe. A common response was something like "Frankly, we don't think Americans have much to teach of value to Europeans." I think the faculty at JGSM were superb, but the Europeans were underwhelmed with the content.
Of course, the content emphasized a highly rational, analytic, quantitative, "logical" approach to problem definition and solving -- the logic mentioned above in that wonderful quote “They have a tendency to overemphasize logic,”
I think that quote hits the nail on the head and exactly captures one problem with all of Western Science and the "scientific method", a methodology I was raised within and learned very well, but every year find increasingly inadequate and inappropriate for dealing with the real world problems our planet faces.
I no longer believe that the real world can be hammered down into a flat world that can be reduced to mathematical equations and numbers that still mean anything. I find the assertion that quantitative knowledge is the only way of knowing to be smug and contrary to evidence. In fact, I no longer think that quantitative analysis is even a good way of gaining insight or making decisions. In that regard, I am loudly opposed to the trending in the US to put more and more emphasis on "math and science" at the expense of other subjects.
There's a lot of loose talk about what we need today being "critical thinking" and "innovation", followed by a worshiping glance at "math and science" as being the obvious way to increase both of those. From what I've seen, math and Western science, as taught today, interferes with critical thinking and pretty well destroys innovation. Many PhD's, the greatest product of such training, seem to be idiot-savants, specialists in such a small area that they are incapable of meaningful social discourse.
As to teaching "logic", even, the supposed end goal of all of that, I had an entire undergraduate program in Physics, with emphasis on math, which never once got into the nature of "logic". In fact, the only training in logic I got was by going to the library and checking out a book on my own on logic. There was zero training in recognizing, say, the 20 most common logical fallacies in reasoning and their names, let alone a culture that would recognize a type of flaw by name if you tried to discuss it. There was zero training in reading, say, a news account, and dissecting the logic and locating the structure of reasoning, the assumptions, the weak spots, and the blatant errors.
It's not clear to me how people think learning algebra, say, will improve our thinking, or that if improving thinking is the goal, that there's not much faster and more direct and explicit ways of doing it than teaching algebra and calculus and sort of hoping somehow that those equations, in one part of the brain, will cross over to illuminate thinking, in the other parts of the brain.
Here's one example of clearly flawed logic: "All terrorists drink water. Therefore, to get rid of terrorism, we should ban people who drink water from entering our country."
Take any group of people who are not trained in math and science and give them that statement, and ask them to come up with a consensus statement about whether it's true, and if not, what is wrong with it. What is striking is how inarticulate the conversation will be. People flail about verbally, trying to put into words what is wrong, and why we should not believe that conclusion. What is even more striking is that a group of scientists will be no less clumsy at trying to reach a concensus statement of exactly what is wrong.
We are clearly NOT training our people in how to have a conversation about logical anaysis. We are clearly NOT only not good, we are just miserable at working with each other to dissect even simple logical thinking, let alone more complex arguments. Ten years of math and science do not seem to have accomplished much at all in that regard.
So, even working in the plane of logic, we are not very good, and don't know how to take a task and have more people accomplish it more easily than one person could. We have no shared language for sharing insights in a quick fashion and knowing exactly what we mean by it.
But life does not please us by remaining in the flat plane where logic prevails, or should. Life is quite comfortable extending out into curved space, or disconnected space, where logical rules are unable to go.
The largest single category of that I see everywhere around us is the misuse of statistical reasoning in situations where there is a feedback loop. Almost the entire array of statistical techniques in use today are based on work by R. A. Fisher, who was working on treatment of plants to get them to grow better. The whole array are based on something called the GLT - General Linear Theory, all of which is based in turn on the key and core requirment that the situation being modeled has something over here which is a "cause" and something over there which is an "effect" and that interactions only go in exactly one direction, from cause to effect. None of the common statistical tests are even valid, regardless how rigourously the math is done, if the "effect" can turn around and alter the "cause" in a loop, mushing out the idea of a "cause" and an "effect".
All of our basic statistical training and logical reasoning comes to a crashing halt when we find that both are true -- chickens lead to eggs, and eggs lead to chickens. When asked "Which came first, we shake our heads and try to change the subject."
Or even back to plants and fertilizer "treatments". Yes, treatment with the right fertilizer may cause, say, these soybeans to grow better yields. So that's good, right? Well, what if everyone does it, and better yields lead to collapsing farm prices, which lead to farmers going bankrupt, as well as to fertilizer manufacturers then going bankrupt, so that there is no more fertilzer? So now, is more fertilizer good?
The problem illustrated is that, yes, IF you remove everything that doesn't fit easy logic, THEN easy logic works on the problem. It's just that real life doesn't give us this luxury. The key assumptions and requirements of almost every analytical technique of science or MBA's are generally NOT MET in the real world. It is only by carefully not looking very hard and not paying attention that we can even persuade ourselves these techniques are applicable. Instead, we just run the numbers and take action based on them and then are surprised when what we expected to occur does not.
Instead of hedge funds getting wildly rich, the economy collapses around them. The mathematical model used by the "quants" was correct .... as far as it went. It just didn't go far enough to consider the case of what if EVERYONE did the same thing at the same time. The problem is, NONE of the analytical techniques go "far enough" to encompass all relevant factors.
They are, then, not truly methods of knowing what will occur -- they are only methods of reaching a concensus decision and silencing dissent so that action can be taken. IF everyone agrees with this very logical model, THEN we can conclude (well, some of us), IF we run our sums correctly, what the right course of action should be. And, please, anyone who disagrees with the model itself should be ejected from the room or fired, for getting in the way of our analysis.
The tyranny of "analytical rigour" is everywhere around us, distorting reality by causing a massive game of not seeing, denial, and pretending that things which are clearly true are not true, because we cannot put them into numbers.
You think this is a minor effect? It is not. Case in point - the recent conference I went to on "Self determination of health behaviors." Accepted fact: most of the costs of health care the the US today are controllable by "life-style changes" -- ie, exercise, nutrition, etc. Fact: these costs are more or less killing the economy and business, all by themselves. So this is important. Fact - all the researchers at the conference, bar none, mentioned during their presentations the curious thing they had observed, which was that the most successful strategy for altering behavior involved other people, not the person they were trying to change. For example, if you paid $10 to a woman's CHILDREN for each pound she lost, its was far more effective than if you paid HER.
So, I asked, if everyone agreed that group interactions were the most effective strategy, why were NONE of them mentioned in the published papers by these presenters? Oh, I was assured, these were "hard to measure" because they involved interactions (feedback) and since they didn't know how to measure them, they LEFT THEM OUT, so they wouldn't look bad.
These are trained research scientists, uniformly holding PhD's in at least one area, and finding nothing at all wrong with presenting an incorrect model of the world (but one they could MEASURE) instead of presenting what they had found, including parts they could NOT measure.
This phenomenon has dominated our culture for the last 50 years, focusing huge attention on the simple problems that COULD be measured easily and WERE amenable to analysis -- which we named "HARD sciences", and diverting attention and money from the hard social problems all around us, which had parts we could not measure, which were then defined as "SOFT sciences" or NOT science at all, in a dismissive voice, as if, not only not "science" but not even something you should have in the house if you were having company over. These "soft areas" were Western equivalents of "unmentionables". Rather than blaming the analytic tools, and indirectly the godhood of the users of the toosl, for being obviously incapable of tackling these problems -- the problems were "explained away" as being non-scientific or wooly-headed or soft and in any case irrelevant.
Take that same reasoning into business, and you have analytical MBA's, confidently striding out to conquer the world with their new found analytical tools, and discovering, to their shock apparently, that the tools didn't actually work on REAL problems, only on pretend class-room exercises.
Multiply that by a hundred, and you have the entire class of people called "economists" -- who have been snidely referred to as people who see something happen in practice, and wonder if it could happen in theory. These people are the ones we look for guidance from in running the country, the economy, the Federal Reserve board etc. They definitely fit the bill of "Often wrong, but never in doubt." They have zero learning curve, and zero humilty, because their first rule of action is to dismiss anything that challenges their entire core assumption that their techniques have any validity at all in the real world.
When things "work" they claim credit, and when things don't work, they blame the result on some sort of enemy action, so, yeah, by their measurements, they have a perfect track record. To the rest of us, not hampered by this restriction of what we are allowed to look at, their track record looks closer to 100% wrong. They can't grasp our attitude, which must be based on "soft" things, not "real" numbers, like, say, the Gross Domestic Product.
So, no, I don't think we need "More of the same" kind of education of math and science and economics and analytical thinking that comes with a self-congratulatory smug culture that is perfectly willing to leave out of the discussion all those messy real-life factors that don't fit the model.
I DO think we need more critical thinking skills. However, I also think that one of the first thing peole who think critically will realize, is that math and science worship has become a sort of religion, and one that keeps trying to turn our attention away from REAL social problems, on which it has weak or no muscles, and turn it to tiny special case problems, in which it has some demonstrable power -- in the short run.
Again, I say short run. Consider the problems of "We need better energy sources" and "We need better ways to get clean water" -- both unquestioned assumptions of the engineering world today, and problems our universities are busy trying to train people to tackle.
It turns out, both of these problems are bogus problems, and the LAST thing our society and planet needs is to have either of them "solved." In the real world, a shortage of unlimited energy is the only thing stopping massive corporate rape and pillage of the planet that would stop only when the biosphere completely collapsed and life on earth terminated. It is NOT a good thing to be working on FIRST. It is not a "value free" problem that it's ok to work on regardless how the results will be used, any more than coming up with a bomb 1000 times more powerful than a Hydrogen Bomb that could fit in a suitcase. I have a problem with the way "problem" is defined and the implications of same.
Or water. WHY do we want more water? Water is used primarily, by humans and industry and other living things, to flush away toxins. Cool. Sounds good. Let's get more water!
Uh... wait. Flush away the toxins to where, exactly? To the local aquifer, or to the ocean. To local aquifer is bad for living things, so say it flushes to the ocean. Then what? Then to get "clean water" we separate the toxins from the clean water, and send the clean water upstream. Fine. And what do we do with the toxins?
Oh, those. ... um. Dump them back in the ocean and kill of all life in the ocean, which then removes the source of food and oxygen for the rest of us which then kills us off? Stack the toxins in huge reservoirs of toxic material on the very edges of the oceans, where, inevitably, there will be an event that will release them back into the ocean? Stack the toxins on land, where they will ultimately leech into the drinking supply?
The only reason these so called "scientific problems" are even acceptable to be worked on is that the full picture, the full implications of working on them, like working on biological warfare, is held off in a world of denial and delusion that, somehow, that is not our concern, that is not our problem, and besides, that is not "numeric" or "quantitative" so it shouldn't be included.
When "Science" was something done in small labs in universities, and didn't itself alter the planet we live on, that fiction of it being "separate" was fine. Now that Science is backed by corporate MONEY, and is done on a global scale sufficient to eliminate entire ecosystems, those factors that didn't fit in the picture DO come back to haunt us.
Or, SHOULD come back to haunt us. WE don't need more energy. We don't need more clean water. We don't need more economists or MBAs. We don't need more scientists, or more eduction in math and science in our school system, as currently taught. Science as taught is the art of ignoring everything outside your mental model, so you can get it down to something small enough that you can work on it comfortably and make "progress" -- regardless how damaging that "progress" turns out to be if you put back into the equation all those things you left out in order to get a "solution".
We need more education on what's WRONG with math and science and economics and MBAs, as used today in the real world.
No comments:
Post a Comment