Philosophy: The Managers - Philosophie Management

Interestingly, such a partitioning of the world by managers is supported, most of the time
implicitely, by “theories” and models of good practice, without much theoretical foundation.
Nobody knows, let alone cares where they come from, but they are practical and convenient to
use, and all managers do use them. In reality, the efficiency of these models stems from the fact
that their users accept the common language to describe situations and transformations of the
organisation’s world. Unlike sciences, the management’s models are functional: they are
instruments aimed at facilitating decision-making and increased performance.
Managers often think these models are neutral. But they are not. They structure our perception
of reality and orient our actions and behaviours. By using them to make decisions, we act upon
the world in a way that conforms to them. Our models and theories have therefore a prophetic
and self-fulfilling quality. For example, the Maslow pyramid, one of the conceptual pillars of
traditional marketing and Human Resources Management, has far-reaching consequences for
the way we manage and analyse performance. The same goes for the economic models based
on the maximisation of individual value, shaping our value propositions for the consumers.
Our models can also describe a state of the organisation’s world we want to realise. Think in
this regard about the leader’s vision. The vision gives at the same time the sense of the
direction and its meaning. Its main value is not that it is correct, but depends on its capacity to
mobilize the group. It can be stimulating to use analogies, metaphors borrowed from outside the
organisation. These are not neutral either. The analogy of the manager being the conductor of
an orchestra will stress differently the importance of certain qualities, activities,… than the one
of the manager being an army commander. Similarly, the games we think we play as managers
are not neutral either. They imply rules, players, specific objectives and ways to measure
performance. The way we play will be very different whether we believe we play a cooperative
game or a zero-sum game.
Therefore it is not surprising that the evolution of the management’s theories and models
reflects those of the way we look at the world. These are affected by fashions, herd instincts,
conformism,… They reflect our most profound beliefs on how the world should be. They reflect
our desires of unity about the world and about ourselves. They are reflected in each
organization’s “culture”, in its value propositions to clients and ethical choices. These in turn
reflect the existential positions of the individual member of the organisation. Even if most
organisations are still hierarchically structured, one can easily imaginge the chaos might ensue
from all this.
Well, once again, it is precisely one of the main tasks of the manager to attempt to put order into
this chaos, and make sense of the organisation’s world with a patchwork of representations and
models, which serve as sorting boxes as Fig. 3. shows.
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