But I will concede the point that I thought was a given — there have indeed been good things that have happened in the past fifty years.

50-year blip of uncreative capitalism? Have we been living in the same 50 years? (Well. Obviously no. I’m not even 50 years old.)

Computers are not nothing. The Internet is not nothing. The entire cable television infrastructure, both physical and intellectual property. The entire wireless industry. Satellite communications. The modern shipping industry (the one that depends on the standardized container). The massive growth of air-travel. Countless advances in weaponry. Nuclear, solar, and wind power. The green revolution. Biotech. Pharmaceuticals.

All of these things got created or dramatically built in the past 50 years. They aren’t unproblematic examples. There is much to regret about them as well as celebrate. But the same can be said of the coal-smoke era.

I think Schrieber has some excellent points, but he and Haque both live in a bubble called Cambridge.

From TNR:
“Which meant that, even if a student aspired to become a top operations man (or woman) at a big industrial company, the infrastructure to teach him didn’t really exist.”

Indeed! How can one learn something if a concentration for it doesn’t exist at HBS? Clearly, this knowledge has passed from the earth, like the secret porcelain glazes of the Ottoman Empire.

TNR again:
“A recent Harvard Business School case study about General Electric shows that the company had so much trouble competing for MBAs that it decided to woo top graduates from non-elite schools rather than settle for elite-school graduates in the bottom half or bottom quarter of their classes.”

This is better phrased as: A recent HBS case revealed that the bottom half of their graduates get beat in recruitment by top graduates of non “elite” schools.

I can go on, but really, the flaw in the argument is encapsulated in the first quote. The “elite” business school, and the MBA degree in general, are greatly overvalued.

Now, the idea that our economy overallocates to sectors (finance) at the expense of others (manufacturing), and that this leads to inefficent outcomes, is an interesting one worth exploring. I’d like to hear more from Tim (or Gladwell) about how we can more efficently utilize American talent and ingenuity. Even if we have to do it outside of Harvard Business School.

Umair’s article is awful. Near as I can tell his thesis is “builders are cooler than leaders, and people I like get to be in the builder club”.

My favorite quotes:
“The very word “leader” feels like a relic of 20th century thinking.”
Thank God we have Builders and Constructivism to free us from that double-minus badspeak! I look forward to being a super MakeBetterer in the 21st century.

“Bill Gates, in contrast, was just a leader. He led just another run-of-the-mill corporation to yet another monopoly — a total black hole of Buildership.”
Yeah Bill! Microsoft is just another mill product in the black hole monopoly! Millions of products sold; 93,000 jobs created; 274 billion dollars of wealth built — but you couldn’t hack HARVARD, you non-Builder. Next time try Brown, I hear they have pass-fail.

“The boss makes work a drudgery; the leader makes work a game. The Builder organizes love, not work.”
WTF is this hippy shit? I organize my own love, thank you very much.

“The Sociopaths defeated the Organization Men and turned them into The Clueless not by reforming the organization, but by creating a meta-culture of Darwinism in the economy: one based on job-hopping, mergers, acquisitions, layoffs, cataclysmic reorganizations, outsourcing, unforgiving start-up ecosystems, and brutal corporate raiding. In this terrifying meta-world of the Titans, the Organization Man became the Clueless Man. Today, any time an organization grows too brittle, bureaucratic and disconnected from reality, it is simply killed, torn apart and cannibalized, rather than reformed. The result is the modern creative-destructive life cycle of the firm, which I’ll call the MacLeod Life Cycle.”

As far as uncreative capitalism goes, the health care situation in this country also contributes, in part by giving “leaders” of existing organizations an advantage over “builders” of new ones. These two quotes begin to tell the story.

I have to disagree with Haque here, or at least speculate that he has never personally experienced what happens in a team when the leadership changes from bad -> good or vice-versa. I have, and fortunately in the bad -> good direction, and I have to say that it makes an incredible difference.

The situation is really much more complicated than “the organization creates the leader.”

Leaders do lead. Leaders also build: They build the organization that then enables great success for all.

In a previous life, I worked on a team with volatile and lukewarm leadership. We got to know a series of itinerant managers, none of whom really knew what they were doing. The team got nowhere. Then we got a new manager who understood that to succeed, the team needed to a) understand what it’s actual business was (that is, not just what the surface level job was, but what core customer problem the team was supposed to be solving), b) be empowered to pursue that _problem_ regardless of what form the solution took, c) rebuild itself with the right staff.

That last part is particularly important. Mediocre managers are mediocre at hiring, as well as leading. So long as they have warm bodies filling seats and doing the surface level job just well enough to turn in decent numbers to their superiors, that’s all they care.

Great leaders know that hiring decisions are among the most important they ever make. They understand that in order to hire the right people, they have to intimately know the customer’s problem, and what skillset is likely to be generally applicable to that problem (because, again, they’re not pre-judging the solution), and they have to know how to spot that talent in an applicant.

It takes years for the mediocre hires to shuffle off to other pastures and be replaced with motivated, high-talent individuals with a passion for solving the customer’s problem. But the good leader will spend years making that happen. And when they do, the change in the overall team dynamic, the sense of team identity, morale, and yes, ability to see what job needs to be done and go do it, is remarkable.

A good leader builds the right team, points them in the right direction, and then gets out of the way. A good leader creates a virtuous circle between themselves and the team.

But having been brought together, the leader is not irrelevant. You can’t just replace the head and let the awesome team turn the new head into a great leader. Quite the opposite. It is stunning to see how quickly even an awesome team can fall apart when some stupid organizational re-alignment takes the leader away from the team they have lovingly and laboriously built.