Worklife

Ramblings about workplace culture, life in Japan, and then some.

It’s about life in general

Jul 11, 2005 23:42 pm / Add a comment

I felt embar­rassed about read­ing Tom Peters’ In Search of Excel­lence after read­ing his other more recent books. Some­how, I felt com­pelled to make excuse like, well, good books often have valid points even after the fad pass away.

After start­ing to read it, I was shocked to find out that this book means more to me now than any other books I read by Tom Peters. That’s say­ing a lot, since I do hold his Cir­cle of Inno­va­tion, Brand You 50, Proffe­sional Ser­vice Firm 50, The Project 50 in very high regard.

All the things I have clum­sily been try­ing to express in my reports and in my entries at this site seem really poor attempt to things that are so log­i­cally and clearly explained in In Search of Excel­lence. This is one of the few books writ­ten by con­sul­tants that I don’t huff at, since it doesn’t just list the effects, it attempts to explain the cause, and most of the time suc­ceeds. I am now in the sim­i­lar state as I was in some years back, when I was read­ing the books about com­plex­ity. Every few pages, there is deep insignt I admire and want to pause, so I am mak­ing a very slow progress in reading.

I am per­haps quar­ter of the way through the book, but when I read the sec­tion called “The Ratio­nal Model”, it felt like high volt­age shock went through me. Read­ing some of the para­graphs, it dawned on me that para­graphs are inter­change­able in expla­na­tion about sci­ence, busi­ness, or … life in general.

Robert Mer­ton, a respected his­to­rian of sci­ence, describes the typ­i­cal paper:

[There is a] rock­bound dif­fer­ence between sci­en­tific work as it appears in print and the actual course of inquiry… The dif­fer­ences is a lit­tle like that between text­books of sci­en­tific method and the ways in which sci­en­tists actu­ally think, feel, and go about their work. The books on meth­ods present ideal pat­terns, but these tidy, nor­ma­tive pat­terns … do not repro­duce the typ­i­cally untidy, oppor­tunis­tic adap­ta­tions that sci­en­tists really make. The sci­en­tific papers presents an immac­u­late appear­ance which repro­duces lit­tle or noth­ing of the intu­itive leaps, false starts, mis­takes, loose ends, and happy acci­dents that actu­ally clut­tered up the inquiry.

Sir Peter Medawar, Nobel lau­rate in immunol­ogy, flatly declares, “It is no use look­ing to sci­en­tific ‘papers,’ for they do not merely con­ceal but actively mis­rep­re­sent the rea­son­ing which goes into the work they describe.

We have observed few, if any bold new com­pany direc­tions that have come from goal pre­ci­sion or ratio­nal analysis.

When I say how these are applic­a­ble in busi­ness, it was the thought of sheer num­ber of books on busi­ness in the mar­ket now. When I say how these are applic­a­ble in a person’s way of liv­ing, I am think­ing of falling in love with some­one, mak­ing friends, rais­ing chil­dren. Movies, TV shows, books, comic books, mag­a­zine arti­cles. Major­ity of what hap­pens in them do not hap­pen in real life.

So how do you learn to dif­fer­en­ti­ate the “real” to the ratio­nal model? As Tom Peters says in the book, through expe­ri­ence, and expe­ri­ence only. I am not THAT old yet, but I have enough expe­ri­ences in my life that I could say, at least that’s the way it works with me.

 

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