The Pond Metaphor

Both Shawn and Mark at Anecdote have blogged about James Harlow Brown’s “Dangerous Undertaking: The Search for Transformation“.

The book is on my reading list, but I have several others ahead of it in the pipeline at the moment, however this metaphor reinforces why it looks interesting to me. Yes, overlapping patterns of involvement in the unfolding of reality, and reality as metaphor – but also seen as writing one’s own narrative. Rayner & Pirsig, Hofstadter & Lakoff, and Al MacIntyre & TE Lawrence all in one ?

Enlightened MBA ?

It’s fair to say that doing an MBA back in the late 1980’s was instrumental in developing my focus on the psychological aspects of the question, “What, why and how do we know?” I’ve referenced my dissertation once or twice before and acknowledged the input from the tutors in the “organizational behavioural” subjects.

Of course the MBA I did, like all MBA’s then and for some time since, probably deserved the backlash to the idea that by doing an MBA, an otherwise unseasoned individual had learned how to do business. The steady stream of (expensive) Harvard “Case Studies” – where having “done the numbers” students were expected to pronounce on the rights and wrongs of business decisions made, propose courses of action and (in some cases) compare predictions with real outcomes. Right ? Err, Mu. Causation is weirder than that.

Tom Peters was already become the guru of excellence or quality – sequels to Peters & Waterman “In Search of Excellence” were already required reading. Apart for dynamism and difference and a focus on people (staff and customers) Tom’s bombastic style continued to promote his own consulting guru business, but of course flatly refused to reduce advice to fixed repeatable prescriptions – or rather only ever prescriptions for “style” of doing business, never for predictable success for specific actions.

Interesting to see this recent Tom Peters conclusion from two health-care related pieces, one on “architecture” the other on the “shape” of winners.

(1) Process “beats” outcome in evaluating an “experience”–even one as apparently “outcome sensitive” as a hospital stay …
(2) Happy staff, happy customers. Want to “put the customer first”? Put the staff “more first”!
(3) Quality is free–and then some.

Never trust a man …


Who doesn’t work with his hands.
He looks at you once,
You know he understands.
[Peter Gabriel – Lamb Lies Down …]

Interesting to see “Shop Class as Soul Craft” by Matthew Crawford is making a buzz. The parallels to Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance are noted in reviews, but not apparently in the book (?) which I’ll review myself once I’ve read it.