Philosophy: The Managers - Philosophie Management

environmental history, the twentieth century qualifies as a peculiar century because of the
screeching acceleration of so many processes that bring ecological change. Most of these
processes are not new: we have cut timber, mined ores, generated wastes, grown crops, and
hunted animals for a long time. […] For the most part the ecological peculiarity of the twentieth
century is a matter of scale and intensity.”
Indeed, the scale and intensity of environmental changes in the twentieth century were so great,
that matters which for millennia were local concerns became global, and started to endanger the
very existence of mankind. To be sure, this is “something new under the sun” (the title of Mc
Neill’s book) and that “something” is intimately linked to the emergence of management as a
discipline and as the dominant concept in our time.
But let us be clear: management, even poor management, is not a problem as such. The
problem is rather the ideology that may accompany it and which blindly pursues particular forms
of performance and efficiency, such as “profitability”, “shareholder value” or “utility
maximization". Management is sometimes said to be “the alternative to tyranny and our only
protection against it”. But it is also said to be a tyrant intruding into previously autonomous fields
such as culture and education 26 , health care and political government….
To understand what is at stake here without falling into the old left vs. right arguments, it is
useful to consider Professor Ulanowicz’s observations regarding the sustainability of complex
living organisms and ecosystems. As Bernard Lietaer explained during a seminar at Philosophy
& Management, Ulanowicz has showed that to ensure the sustainability of a complex system,
there is an optimum to be found between the efficiency and the resilience of that system.
Resilience can be raised by increasing the diversity within that system. Efficiency, on the
contrary, can be raised by decreasing diversity.
Fig. 9. Ulanowicz’s model: sustainability in a ecological complex system
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For example, Professor of Management Richard R. Ellsworth suggests, the idea that the most important goal of business is to
maximize shareholder wealth has permeated the entire curriculum of many business schools. See also Dardot and Laval (…).
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