James Maroosis
The Ideal University: In the Image and Likeness of Logos
By James Maroosis
Summary and Overview
The Romans needed to put together two words to translate the Greek word Logos: Ratio et Oratio or Ratio adque Oratio.
Image and Likeness as understood by the Greek Fathers is the relationship between the Image of God we are created in and the Likeness we co-create with God of that Image. Our Likeness is the way we manifest God’s Image through our thoughts, words and deeds, i.e. through the way we manage ourselves in the world.
Today, I am going to suggest that we build our College in the Image and Likeness of Logos, which is to say, as an institution that teaches Ratio et Oratio.
This type of College would belong to the Oratorical Tradition that is best expressed in antiquity by Isocrates, Cicero and Quintillion. This tradition has been renewed and brought to the fore in our own times by Marshall McLuhan, Mary Parker Follett and Peter Drucker.
Such a College would include, of course, the wisdom of Thomas Aquinas along with the wisdom of very many others in and outside of the Christian Tradition. The reason for this is that the role of the Orator is to know and put to use, when appropriate, all types of knowledge and every type of wisdom.
In our day, this is the role and responsibility of the Manager, so that, I am proposing our College be in effect a Leadership and Management Institute in the Ancient Tradition of the Liberal Arts.
The Roman’s might call this an Institutio Ratio et Oratio.
I base this proposal on the following observations:
1) Management as a discipline or practice is the Liberal Arts applied to practical goals.
Management Studies is the Trivium put into practice.
Grammar is understanding organizational structure
Rhetoric is persuasion and empowerment through dialogue.
Logic is drawing conclusions from models and assumptions
• These three liberal arts have always been at the core of a good education because they integrate a need to know with a need to do—to be both insightful and capable, to be able to integrate words and deeds, faith and works.
• The re-cognition that The Trivium is being put to use in the worlds of business, management and leadership requires a rethinking and reintegration of Liberal Arts education to include management as part of its constitutive core curriculum.
• This is the retrieval of the old humanist ideal that originates with Isocrates in ancient Greece and popularized by Cicero in ancient Rome. This ideal reverberates through the Patristic Fathers of the Church and arrives to us in the West through St. Augustine Francis Bacon, Petrarch, Erasmus and in our day through, Follett, Drucker and McLuhan—“to put knowledge to use for the betterment of humanity.”
• A similar ideal arrives to us from the East. It comes from the I Ching through Confucius, Lao Tzu, Mencius and Pound and is the Ideal of the Poet/Scholar as Civil Servant/Leader.
• Both these traditions put the wisdom of the arts into action in the world.
2) At the heart of this approach to management as a liberal art discipline are two components: one poetic and intellectual, the other intellectual and moral.
A) First, there is a poetic and intellectual component.
• At its core management and leadership, like poetry and art, are about training in perception.
• In fact, if art and technology is about innovation and reconfiguring our sensibilities and making them new, then management and leadership is about learning to read these new configurations and using them purposefully.
• This means that Management and Leadership are always a response to innovation …they function by following the new forms or modes of intelligibility at work in these new technologies.
• Paradoxically this openness to form locates today’s management and leadership right at the heart of a MEDIEVAL MINDSET.
• Today’s Leader must learn how to recognize and respond to the new organizational patterns that are being imposed on them by the new technologies through a process of contemplation, analysis and orientation to these new realities.
• This is accomplished by putting the trivium into action.
It requires as McLuhan points out:
Detached speculation
Making of inventories to discover hidden patterns
Developing plans of action to survive and utilize these new patterns
Seeing these plans through to produce results.
This entire process parallels the intellectual nature of practical wisdom (Phronesis, Prudentia):
Memoria: True to being memory…i.e. a truthful understanding of ones past.
Docilitas: Openness to the way things are,
Solertia: Nimbleness in the presence of the unexpected.
Providentia: Foresight—A vision of the future
It also parallels the way Mary Parker Follett describes the “Essentials of Leadership.”
• “A Thorough knowledge of your job”
• “The ability to grasp a total situation”
• “Being able to handle the unexpected”
• The Leader “must see the evolving situation…his or her wisdom is not on a situation that is stationary but one that is evolving all the time”
Comparable parallels are manifest in all those who thinkers who belong to this tradition of the Liberal Arts.
But Management and Leadership are not simply detached speculative activities nor are they merely acts of pure creativity and accomplishment.
B) There is an intellectual and moral component.
The other aspect of this is that management and leadership—as a doing—a mode of effectiveness, is wholly and totally an ethical activity that must if it is to be of real value adhere to the four cardinal virtues of human action.
The Effective Executive should (straight out of Aristotle and Aquinas):
• Prudently: Execute the right things (effectiveness) for the right reason.
• By acting Justly: Proactively, giving others their due…no more but no less.
• With Fortitude: Firmness and willingness to sacrifice oneself for the Right things
• And Temperance: Self-mastery through learned acts of selfless self preservation
So that the manager / leader must have the perceptual tools of an artist and the integrity, disposition, ethical response-ability and competence to live well, i.e. with honor and benefit for themselves and others.
This is not a life of rules and regulations but a life of continual re-orientation and co-creativity in the face of new, challenging and often dangerous opportunities.
3) This leads to the distinction between Power (Virtue) and Force (acting out).
Power (Virtue) is the ability to act for ones benefit and the benefit of society. This is parallel to the ancient relationship between Ethics and Politics. This relationship needs to be re-explored and brought up to date to include Business and Management. It is a necessary condition for a flourishing economy and a humane way of living.
Force is always a function of compulsion. It is always a form of acting out. Simply learning how to follow force fields to succeed is as immoral as it is inhuman.
We need to learn how to transform Force into Power. This always requires having the Power (Prudence) to protect oneself (Temperance) from those forces which otherwise would captivate us and lead us away from doing the “right things” i.e. keeping us from being truly effective.
This is the ultimate ground of humility—to serve and be a part of that which is a benefit to all—what the Orthodox call syn-ergia and the Roman Catholics call being co-provident with God.
The Ideal Manager and The Ideal Orator
Peter Drucker in The New Realities describes management as fundamentally a moral activity. He says, Management,
… deals with people, their values, their growth and development—and this makes it a humanity. So does it concern with, and impact on, social structure and the community. Indeed, as everyone has learned who, like this author, has been working with managers of all kinds of institutions for long years, management is deeply involved in spiritual concerns—the nature of man, good and evil. (Pg. 229)
He goes on to describe Management as what “used to be called” a liberal arts discipline that uses all the liberal arts and sciences to get things done.
Management is thus what the tradition used to call a liberal art—“liberal” because it deals with fundamentals of knowledge, self-knowledge, wisdom, and leadership; “art” because it is practice and application. Managers draw on all the knowledges and insight of the humanities and social sciences—on psychology and philosophy, on economics and history, on the physical sciences and ethics. But they have to focus this knowledge on effectiveness and results—on healing the sick patient, teaching a student, building a bridge, designing and selling a “user-friendly” software package. (Pg. 229)
Drucker’s “ideal manager” possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of the liberal arts and sciences and the ability to apply that knowledge to get results. His description of the manager parallel’s Cicero’s understanding of an educated person “as one versed in the encyclopedia of the sciences.” It also retrieves the ancient notion that one received a liberal arts education to put it to service for the common good of the corporate body.
To see how “traditional” Drucker’s position is, one need simply replace the word orator with the word manager in the following quote from Cicero’s De Oratore.
Training in the liberal arts is as necessary to the orator
Or compare it to what Fr. Walter Ong has to say Rhetoric, Romance and Technology,
Cicero used to make the point that the orator needed to know everything that could be known. Hence rhetoric, the art of oratory…ultimately took all knowledge as its province. Cicero was not voicing merely a private hope of theory. For most of classical antiquity rhetoric was the focus of learning and intelligence, the foundation and culmination of the humanities and of liberal education. (Pg. vii)
If Pattern recognition is a key to discovery, then these patterns seem to be remarkably similar.
Drucker’s own description of a liberal art is somewhat confusing. He defines the liberal arts as Liberal=Knowing and Arts=Doing, but that is not what these words mean. The word liberal comes from the Latin Libertas which is the root of words like to liberate or liberty. The liberal “part” of the liberal arts is about freedom. The art “part” means “to make.” So the term liberal arts means, quite literally, “the arts that make us free.”
What Drucker describes as “The Liberal Art of Management” the ancients simply called Prudence, Decorum (Wisdom and Eloquence working together) or Practical Wisdom: “the ability to put knowledge into practice,” to put Truth into action.
If we ask Peter Drucker the question that he made famous, “What Business is management in?” and should he answer “the ‘Liberal/Arts’ business” we would have to say to him, as he is famous for saying to others, “You are wrong! Management is in the ‘practical wisdom business.’ It is carrying on a tradition that is thousands of years old. The roots of this tradition are found in Homer. They come through Isocrates, Cicero, the Patristic Fathers and the Renaissance Humanists until they reach us from the West. The same roots (but maybe not the same wisdom) can be found in the I Ching and comes through the sayings of Confucius and the writings of Lao Tzu reaching us from the East.”
In my opinion there is no doubt that Drucker’s idea of today’s manager, as one whose knowledge and skill set must be encyclopedic, highly creative and response-able is pure Cicero. Which is not to say that Drucker’s manager is an orator, but that Cicero’s Orator would be a manager in today’s world.
Today Cicero’s ideal must be expanded to manage, words, people, processes and technological innovations to produce results. In this sense, management is the nexus where the liberal arts and sciences converge in practice.
This approach requires recognizing the importance of a Liberal Arts education.
Drucker is quick to point this out. Management is not only a form of Humanism, it also is our way back to an authentic appreciation of the liberal arts. A liberal arts education is no longer a luxury, it is a necessity and, …management will increasingly be the discipline and the practice through which the “humanities” will again acquire recognition, impact and relevance.” (Pg. 231)
This point is as radical as it is important. One way back to a purposeful understanding of the liberal arts is through the practice of management as Humanitas.
This requires rethinking management studies to include the arts and reconstituting the arts as a type of managing.
As with the retrieval and application of the trivium, here too we must recognize the emergence and re-convergence of ancient and medieval paradigms as effective adaptations to our most pressing contemporary needs.
Hence the “Ideal” College is not to produce gentlemen and gentlewoman with no visible means of support, but managers, orators, Kalakagathons who know how to put their learning to work for their own benefit and the benefit of others.
For the practice of management in today’s world requires the retrieval of three ancient themes:
• The Trivium applied to learning the language of the new organizational structures being constituted by the onslaught of the new technologies.
• The Renewal of the meaning of Practical Wisdom as the subject of Management
• The Retrieval of Humanitas “knowledge being put to practical use” as the mission of higher education in the 21st century.
The post-capitalist society—the knowledge society—thus needs exactly the opposite of what deconstructionists, radical feminists or anti-westerners propose. It is the very thing they totally reject: a universally educated person.
Peter Drucker
The Ciceronian ideal of the doctus orator is current again.
Marshall McLuhan
I
The Trivium @Work:
Where are the Liberal Arts Now That We Really Need Them?
If we ask the question “Where are the Liberal Arts now that we really need them on today’s college campuses?” and base our answer on direct observation of fact, we may be surprised to discover that:
• Looking for the liberal arts, we will find that them at work in the world of management studies and
• Looking at the study of management, we will find that it belongs in the world of the liberal arts though it is generally assumed to belong somewhere outside of that world.
From these observations, we will explore three conclusions:
• The liberal arts are alive but not well living in the world of Management;
• Management is not merely a technical or vocational course of study but a type of wisdom and must be recognized as such; and
• That to restore the Liberal Arts to their preeminence, allowing them to achieve their primary purpose as Humanities, requires recognizing that the study of management is an integral part of what it means to be a liberally educated person.
This will requires recognizing the following distinctions.
Distinguishing in order to unite
1. Distinguishing Management from Business Management
In order to follow this exposition, I must ask you to “suspend your disbelief” and try to dissociate the word ‘management’ from the word “business” and the term ‘liberal arts’ from what is being currently being taught as “The Liberal Arts.”
Peter Drucker points out in Management Challenges for the Twenty First Century that the word “management” does not mean “business-management.”
It is important to assert—and to do so loudly—that management is not business management, anymore than say, medicine is obstetrics. (Pg. 8.
Which means that business is the subject of one type of management, but business is not what management is. Management is an activity. It is a doing specified by its object. There are many different types of management as there are things to manage.
There are, of course, differences in management between organizations—MISSION DEFINES STRATEGY, AFTER ALL, AND STRATEGY DEFINES STRUCTURE—But the difference between managing a chain of retail stores and managing the Roman Catholic Church are amazingly fewer than either retail stores or Bishops realize.
So whether you are managing a software company, a hospital, or the Boy Scouts the differences apply to only 10% of your work. This 10% is determined by the organizations specific mission. Its specific culture, its specific history and its specific vocabulary. The rest is pretty much interchangeable. (Pg. 80)
Mission defines strategy and strategy defines structure. This is true if you are managing a business, a college or a tradition. Management as a discipline not only orients toward an end it also acts and produces results in accord with those ends it hopes to achieve. It puts ideas into action to produce results.
In this sense, by defining our mission and what we mean by results, it is Management that offers the structure needed to bring an ideal of education into existence as a working college full of imperfections and continual room for improvement and change
Not only is management not business management, but it sounds very much like a discipline belonging to the great humanist traditions of Isocrates, Cicero and Castiglione. In a talk delivered at Harvard’s JFK School of Government Drucker both not only distinguishes management from business process, he defines it as liberal art and social function.
Management, in most business schools, is still taught as a bundle of techniques, e.g. budgeting or organizational development. To be sure, management, like any other work, has its own tools, and its own techniques. But just as the essence of medicine is not urine analysis, the essence of management is not technique or procedure. The essence of management is make knowledge productive. Management… is a social function. And, in its practice, management is truly a liberal art.
“To make knowledge productive,” is the role of practical wisdom. If this is the essence of management, then could we ask “Is Management the place where the humanist ideal is put to the test, the place where corporate responsibility, honor and benefit converge to create value in the world?
But is Management a form of practical wisdom? What evidence do we have that the practice of management is in essence a liberal art discipline that serves a social function? If so, where does it belong in the liberal arts? What is its subject matter?
The answer will come to us if we are willing to look at the evidence.
If we look at the way it works, we will see that management as a discipline is nothing but the original Liberal Arts of Rhetoric, Grammar and Logic applied to the language of organizational practices.
2. Distinguishing The Liberal Arts from what is being taught as “Liberal Arts”
Just as it is a mistake to equate Management with Business, it is an error to assume that the Liberal Arts are that which are currently being taught under that name in most colleges and universities. In fact, most Liberal Arts courses are really courses in applied social sciences, applied psychology, or applied political theory. They rarely are courses in applied Liberal Arts.
Today, the Liberal Arts are normally understood to be a group of subjects or books and not as a way or method of approaching or reading these subjects or books. Paradoxically, the Liberal Arts as a method of inquiry seem to have lost their applicability in the “Liberal Arts” as a form of education.
The original meaning of the liberal arts as a threefold path rarely is mentioned much less taught with any seriousness in today’s “Liberal Arts” faculties. Yet, it is precisely this older understanding of the liberal arts that is being taught in business schools as the practice of management.
If we examine the study of management as a discipline, the patterns which emerge have their roots in an ancient, medieval and early renaissance understanding of the Liberal Arts.
All through antiquity, through the middle ages and into the Renaissance, the goal of a Liberal Arts education was service to the community be it religious or secular. The whole point about scholarship as a cloistered pursuit was that these studies were so important for society that society needed to create a free space where they could be pursued at leisure. Never the less, a liberal arts education had rock-solid practical value: to put knowledge into action for the corporate well-being of the realm.
At the core of this understanding of education are the three liberal arts of Rhetoric, Grammar and Logic. Together they constituted the crossroads or tri-via that,
…prepare the mind for philosophic truth…since by these roads, the lively mind may enter the secret places of wisdom. (Hugh of St. Victor)
They are:
• Rhetoric as the art of transformation (i.e. persuasion, empowerment, negotiation) and was generally understood as the arts of eloquence and decorum. The goal here is transformation—changing the way people think or act.
• Grammar as the study of words and their inter-animation with other words– which means etymology (studying their roots and meaning in different contexts), exegesis (interpreting their meaning and exploring their consequences). The goal here is to study words, their interaction, their history, interplay and implications and how to read signs and situations.
• Dialectic (logic) as the art of following arguments, evaluating the soundness of thinking. It was about mapping things out in an orderly fashion and learning how to think things through. The goal here is abstract clarity and focus.
In Teaching as Interpretation, I. A. Richards points out that the original purpose of these three arts were,
To orient, to equip, to prepare, to encourage, to provoke, a mental traveler to advance by his own energies in whatever region may be his to explore; to make him or her think for themselves and make them able to do so sanely and successfully…(Pg. 63)
He goes on to explain that this,
…has always been the aim of a civilizing education … [and that] … Rhetoric, Grammar and Logic, if we set aside their repulsive terminology’s and associations, are the headings under which to arrange what the student we hope to help needs most to study.
His point being: “a training in Rhetoric, Grammar and Logic, as Arts not sciences, which is at present almost entirely lacking in the curriculum, is what is most needed.” Richards’ wrote this over 60 years ago and it was as true then as it is true today. You will still not find the liberal arts being taught with any seriousness as liberal arts in the “Liberal Arts.”
This is not to say they are not being taught or taken seriously anywhere else. In fact, if we take a look, we will find that they are being taught in the Business Schools as the practice of management.
Trivium is the core curriculum managers must learn to do their jobs.
What management programs teach, without realizing it, is the old Liberal Arts core curriculum of rhetoric, grammar and logic: that, along with the quadrivium (the four major sciences), made up a liberal-arts-and-sciences education.
• Rhetoric is learning how to work with people, how to facilitate meetings, sell ideas, empower fellow workers, make presentations, talk on the telephone or in front of people, write memos, market and advertise products. It is about using words and media to transform the way people think.
• Grammar is the study of organizational and informational interfaces, the art of interpreting the processes that make up an operation and then learning the true meaning of an organization. It is about a deep exegetical analysis of the meaning and the manner of organizations. How people and processes work together to produces results.
• Logic is “what if” analysis, strategic models, statistics, policies and procedures.
Management is at its core a Liberal-Arts discipline. The Trivium is what MBA’s Do.
3. Distinguishing between the Ancients and the Moderns
Discovering the trivium at work in management is important for two reasons. First, it makes it very clear that management has every right to call itself a Liberal-Arts methodology or discipline, albeit a discipline that is quite different from the one currently being taught in today’s Liberal-Arts faculties. Second, it reintroduces grammar and rhetoric as a legitimate and not just remedial or preparatory course of study.
This brings us to “the battle of the books,” that is, the history of the trivium as the history of a “battle” over the control and definition of the meaning of the Liberal Arts.
This battle began when Plato threw Homer, The Sophists and The Orators with their “MBA programs” out of his ideal Republic. In the Middle Ages this battle raged as a civil war among the scholastics between the Ancients (The Grammarians and Rhetoricians), and The Moderns (the Logicians).
Today it is the yet-to-be-declared turf war between the Management Schools and the Liberal Arts faculties over the direction and goals of higher education. Ironically, the Management schools represent the ancient alliance of Grammar and Rhetoric, while the ”Liberal Arts” faculties are the descendants of the opposition: Logic. This war is “yet to be declared” only because the question on most campuses is how do we get management majors to take an interest in the arts when in fact the real question is when will the arts begin to take a real interest in management!
The problem is that “the liberal arts of management” (the trivium) are directly opposed to the way the Arts Faculties have in fact been managing the Liberal Arts (abstract constructions and deconstruction’s of ideas, political theories and applied social science). Hence the battle lines have already drawn and the best we can do is anticipate this conflict and try to resolve it before it gets out of hand.
4. Distinguishing the Complexes at Work in this Battle
This age-old battle between the Ancients and the Moderns (pre-post-or present) has to stop and it has to stop now. There is too much at stake.
The first step toward ending this conflict is to break through our denial and admit that such antagonism really does exists and that it has a long history. The next step is to approach this problem psychologically and in depth to look for the intellectual and psychological complexes, fears, and anxieties that are instigating and perpetuating it. I am talking here about exposing the immense, and largely unconscious, sea of resentment and distrust that lie in the way of any real integration of Management and the Liberal Arts.
If we can recognize that this is a 2500 year old feud that carries with it all the ferociousness of a tribal vendetta, a balkanization as it were of the Liberal Arts and if we look at this relationship with the consciousness of some one who is tired of acting out these destructive complexes, then we can work together on reintegrating all of these shadowy elements by looking at them in a totally new way. This requires courage and the willingness to let go of old identities in order to rethink who we are as artists, managers and educators in a far more honest and effective manner.
Doing this will require that everyone take on new roles and responsibilities. It requires recognizing that one’s old expertise has now become one’s new ignorance.
This restructuring of our own self-identity will produce a lot of stress, with ignorance taking the place of certainty and dialogue taking the place of set rules and regulations.
But this new ignorance is systemic and must be accepted as a prerequisite for survival. It has to be depersonalized and seen for what it really is: a byproduct of reintegration and a rich source of new insights and awareness.
5. Distinguishing Ignorance for Knowledge
Ignorance is to knowledge what ignoring is to folly. This is our axiom and guiding principle.
Ignorance is to this new learning what ignoring is to the folly of trying to upgrade the old system. Ignorance will lead the way either to hope or to disaster.
Recognizing our collective ignorance requires a team approach. It also requires the courage to be open, honest and willing to learn anything from anyone. This is the type of interdisciplinary humility is expressed by Hugh of St. Victor in his Didascalicon, which is a 13th century treatise on Liberal Arts education. For him,
Humility is the beginning of discipline, and although there are many examples of this, these three especially are important to the reader:
• First, that he should hold no knowledge and no writing cheap;
• Second, that he should not be ashamed to learn from anyone;
• and third when he himself has attained knowledge, he should not scorn others.
Describing the age-old humility at the heart of Liberal-Arts scholarship, this passage also describes the humility required to be an effective educator, manager or consultant in today’s world. This type of “cross discipline” convergence is one more indication that we are way beyond the threshold of this wonderful revival of classical and medieval modes of understanding.
The resurfacing of the practical integrity of Rhetoric, Grammar, and Logic is only the tip of the iceberg. Medieval and pre-literate competencies and modes of awareness are everywhere.
Could it be that McLuhan was right? He observed that our world of instantaneous global communication is a paradigm for Medieval and Pre-literate sensibilities. His point being to manage effectively in today’s world one must learn and assimilate ancient sensibilities in order to learn how to orient oneself in today’s world.
The reappearance of the trivium is no trivial matter, because it is the efficacy of the trivium, and not some nostalgia for the past, or some common places about the importance of a classical education, that is responsible for its reinvention by and utilization in business and management schools. This “reinvention” is a response to a real need that the original Three Liberal Arts seem to meet. It is the need to learn how to navigate in today’s multi-technological trans-cultural global marketplace.
The fact that this adaptation takes on the form of the trivium hints that the keys to our survival in today’s world may well be age old and diverse and not what is touted today as post-modern and multi-cultural. The renewal of this integrated understanding of the Liberal Arts could mark the end of the hegemony of abstract western logic (modernism in all of its pre, past and post phases) and the pseudo unilogical-multiculturalism it has engendered.
It could mark the end of the fragmentation of Grammar, Rhetoric, and Logic into discrete specialties by pointing to the need to reintegrate the trivium as fundamental to a vital and relevant renewal of the Liberal Arts. The reintegration of the arts is the renewal of something very old, very rooted, and very well tested.
This renewal requires the restoration of management to its rightful place within the Liberal Arts not only as a discipline but also as a Liberal Arts subject. The subject matter of management is found in the field of practical action. It is that nexus where knowing shifts into doing, where wisdom moves from insight into action. It is the place where creativity and responsibility meet. This points us to the world of practical wisdom and the original meaning of the Humanities as Humanitas “knowledge put to the benefit and use of humankind.”
II
Practical Wisdom @ Work
Letting Ignorance Lead
It is very important to understand that management is about following patterns and not about following rules. It is not about taking orders and doing things right (being efficient). It is about seeing what needs to be done and doing the right things (being effective). But this distinction between efficient and effective which is commonplace in the school of management is incomplete and really belittles the task of the manager.
Management as a doing is fundamentally a moral activity and therefore good management needs to learn to do the right thing (which means being highly effective) for the right reason (which means having the courage and self-control to be honest, fair, and just). As we will see, managing is fundamentally a moral activity that lives for better or for worse in the world of the moral virtues: Prudence (Practical Wisdom), Justice (Honesty), Fortitude (Courage) and Temperance (Self Control and Soundness of Mind and Body).
To do the right thing for the right reason at the right time in the right way is precisely how Aristotle and Aquinas describe Practical Wisdom. It is also how Cicero and Quintillian describe Eloquence and Decorum. It means knowing what to do and doing it in a timely and appropriate manner. Castigleone called this “Sprezzatura” or a “wild civility.” Wild because it is effective and not efficient. Civility because it manifests actions oriented toward the common good.
Peter Drucker explains it this way. “Do first things first and second things not at all.” The point being that the “first thing” to do is always the next right thing to do. Doing first things first for the right reason in the right way at the right time with the right tone is what the Greeks called Phronesis, the Latin’s called Decorum and the Chinese call The Tao.
My point is that management as a practice entails all the discipline entailed in these various trans-cultural age-old understandings of practical wisdom. It is the study of eloquence or decorum ( a mix of effectiveness, beauty and The Good) and belongs to the Kairon Gnothi (seize the advantage in the moment) tradition of the liberal arts.
Now this notion of practical wisdom has always been understood to consist of two distinct components.
• First it has a intellectual component. It is a knowing that follows the way of things and their effects on us; and
• Second it is a doing. It is a way of being in action by developing plans, expediting options, producing results, making things happen and living in the world.
So that practical wisdom is a knowing that is a doing and a doing that is a way of being. It is who we are in the world.
As Aristotle points out in the 6th book of The Nicomachean Ethics of the five intellectual virtues and the four moral virtues, only phronesis, (practical wisdom…the management of things or oneself in the world) requires knowing about things and doing something with that knowledge.
Practical wisdom is knowledge in action or knowledge in practice and everything that is taught in management belongs to this field of study.
Please note: What makes this knowledge practical is not that it belongs to a different type of reason like Kant’s distinction between practical and pure reason. What makes it practical is that one’s knowledge of the way things are is transformed into effective actions generating results.
Managing is a way of doing things, which means it is an ethics. This is straight out of the Aristoleao-Thomistic tradition. As Joseph Pieper explains in his The Four Cardinal Virtues:
An education to prudence [practical wisdom] means: to the objective estimation of the concrete situation of concrete activity, and to the ability to transform this cognition of reality into concrete decision. (Pg. 31)
Practical wisdom implies “a transformation of the knowledge of truth into decisions corresponding to Reality.” This is exactly what it means to be an effective manager.
As the habit of effectiveness, management is a form of Prudence. Put simply, to be virtuous is to be effective. It is to do the right things for the right reasons. But to be effective is not necessarily to be virtuous. You can always do the right things for the wrong reason’s (acting out of fear, self-interest or an addiction to power, greed, sex, etc.).
To be virtuous does not mean one has to be nice and proper (that’s merely being efficient); it does mean being truthful and honest (situation-appropriate). It does not mean being perfect, or always being right: it does mean to be unceasingly committed to “doing first things first” in a way appropriate to the situation.
This is why I think books like Steven Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, or Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive and Managing for Results should be required reading and built into the core requirements for first year Liberal Arts students.
Reading these books is the quickest way I know to get students to learn through their own experience the efficacy of ethics as a preparation for action. Moreover, the time to learn how to be effective is at the beginning of one’s studies. When I use these books in my freshman philosophy classes, I have seen students study habits change right before my eyes.
Once they have tested Covey’s suggestions and found them to work, I use their desire to be effective to whet their appetite to do good. The good decision is always better than the merely effective one and this is a fundamental lesson that needs to be taught and re-taught continually.
One can begin with Covey or Drucker and end up with Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Aquinas or one might end up with Confucius and Lao Tzu or The Bahavada Gita or Grimms Fairy Tales. On this one point world wisdom tends to be saying the same thing. To be good is to be effective but to be effective is not necessarily to be good.
Management in effect is “the practice of existential readiness.” For unlike the reflections of a philosopher, or the creations of an artist, the manager puts what he or she knows into action. He or she is responsible for getting things done and producing results
Understood in this sense, management is a way of being or comporting oneself in the world. It is about being effective, being innovative, and being entrepreneurial. It is also about embracing life, staying in touch with things and working things out. Management is an ethics without it being a moralism of set rules and regulations.
A good manager needs the courage to be fair without acting out. He or she needs to develop those habits (virtues) which will allow him or her capability to do the right things for the right reasons. The idea is to become response-able, to learn how to flourish within contexts, to be eloquent, decorous, situation appropriate– without being vacuous, devious, evil or mean.
This is what once constitutes a well-rounded Liberal Arts education. What the Greek’s called Enkuklios Paideia or learning the whole cycle of arts and sciences needed to be a civil and contributing member of society.
As practical wisdom, the practice of management is about being good by bringing goods into the world. It is about learning the meaning of bestowal. This is what makes up the effectiveness and practicality of an ethical way of life. It is what makes for good people, good societies, good cultures and good organizations.
The educated person will therefore have to be prepared to live and work simultaneously in two cultures–that of the “intellectual,” who focuses on words and ideas, and that of the “manager” who focuses on people and work.
Peter Drucker
It might be helpful to rid ourselves of the habit of always hearing what we already understand.
Martin Heidegger
© 2002 Jim Maroosis
Dr. James Maroosis is a Recipient of The Innovations Award in American Government co-sponsored by The Ford Foundation and The JFK School of Government at Harvard University. He has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Toronto and currently teaches a seminar on Leadership for the 21st Century: Innovation, Creativity and Responsibility and a seminar on The Giants in the History of Management: Peter Drucker, Mary Parker Follett and Marshall McLuhan at Fordham’s Graduate School of Business Administration and a course on Management as Humanism and Liberal Art for The Deming Scholars MBA Program at Fordham. He has had recent articles on Innovation and Creativity published in The Harvard Management Update and Leader to Leader the quarterly journal of The Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management.