Category: Business

From Insty, talking about some guy who quit Notre Dame in disgust:

“Members of the managerial class care more about their reputation within that class than about the success of what they manage.”

(Please follow the link first so that the rest of what follows makes sense.)

Glenn’s absolutely correct, if the above is applied (as he does) to academia.

In the real world?  Not so much, because managers there need to ensure that their operation survives in the marketplace, which is more important than collegial reputation.  Perhaps an organization like Notre Dame can shrug off the resignation of one of its star performers, but it’s a rare business that can do so without suffering some form of service- or product degradation.  (Of course, nobody is irreplaceable, especially in a country like the U.S. which is blessed with an abundance — sometimes even a surplus — of talent.)

I would suggest, however, that in contemplating the above, the loss of a star senior manager for the reasons given by the Notre Dame professor (i.e. dissatisfaction with the corporate direction) should be read as an alarm bell by his erstwhile superiors — and it often is.

If that alarm bell is disregarded or belittled, however, there are generally speaking only a couple of reasons why this would be the case.

The first reason might be that the corporation is so rotten and the top executives so incompetent or misguided that the resignation may not only be accepted with a shrug, but welcomed.  If this is the case, then the corporation is doomed.  (Notre Dame, and by extension most of academia itself would be a prime example of this.  When student numbers fall because the product is too expensive and the product’s value is regarded as irrelevant — as with most non-STEM undergraduate degrees — and potential students are drawn instead to trade schools or industries which do not require a degree for admission, it’s hard to argue that a reassessment and redirection of the corporate mission or product isn’t critical.)

The second reason why the resignation of a key player wouldn’t be important to the corporation’s directors is that the value of their product is declining in the market, generally speaking.  It’s an extension of the first reason, of course, but what that says is that the upper management is either oblivious to that reality (i.e. truly incompetent) or else they are fully aware of that product’s decline, but are intent on riding the gravy train even if the train is heading for a distant cliff.  Given the advanced age of senior management in general, this would be entirely understandable albeit contemptible.  Why try to effect change to a long-revered product when that effort would be exhausting, and when your own tenure is soon to end anyway?

Now add to that mindset the fact that attempting to change your product would bring opprobrium and even resistance from your managerial peers in the market — no more invitations to industry conferences in Geneva or Fiji, reduced esteem in the rarified air of the industry oligarchy — and it’s easy to see why such change would be resisted.

And the larger the industry, the more difficult the change.  Imagine trying to change the corporate direction of Microsoft or Oracle, for example, and the scale of the thing becomes clear.

Now imagine the difficulty of changing the corporate direction and mission of an unimportant entity such as the United Nations.  In this situation, the resignation of a key manager — the United States — might well be injurious to the corporation;  but the mission (as it has been transformed from first principles) has become so entrenched in their Weltanschauung  that change would be regarded as not only impossible but destructive.

And by the way:  as with the United Nations, so too with academia.