EXCERPT
Lucy Kellaway. Honking for Harvard. Financial Times, September 25 2005.
On a perfectly normal day at Harvard a couple of weeks ago, a dozen future leaders of the world sat in a circle and cried: honk! honk! honk!
For an hour or so these 12 stopped being second-year masters students at the Kennedy School of Government. They became geese.
The transformation was intended to serve two purposes. First, it was meant to get them to bond as a team. Second, it was to teach them that human beings, even ones with the finest education and who will rule the world one day, can learn a lot from geese.
Each of the 12 was told to stand up in turn and read out a sentence about geese, while the others made noises.
"Fact! When the lead goose gets tired, it rotates back in the wing and another goose flies point," said one.
"Honk! Honk! Honk!" went the 11 other future leaders, as instructed.
"Lesson!" shouted a second. "Each of us needs to take our turn in giving direction for the good of the group."
"Honk! Honk! Honk!" was the refrain.
In the name of team-building, sensible people do some very silly things. Grown-up accountants go on courses to learn circus skills. Experienced managers scramble through freezing mud. They bake bread. They sing. They bang on African drums. It is all thoroughly baffling and embarrassing and will no doubt give anthropologists of the future a lot to puzzle over. In fact, it has all been so mad for so long that I'm no longer surprised at any new team-building course. If someone said they were doing open-heart surgery as a team-building exercise I wouldn't turn a hair.
And yet the goose story at Harvard still manages to shock. It shows that a sharp brain and a huge amount of education are no protection against management stupidity. When <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">America</st1:place></st1:country-region>'s pre-eminent graduate school of politics starts honking it is time to admit that intelligence can no longer triumph over claptrap.
In this particular case there wasn't even any need for bonding. These 12 had simply volunteered to be class advisers, which meant they were responsible for helping the new students settle in. (Which is a thoroughly good thing to do – and something US universities do much better than <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">UK</st1:place></st1:country-region> ones.)
However, to fit this role they had to attend an eight-day bonding course which, as well as teaching them to honk, had them holding hands in a circle and sharing their wishes for the group's achievements. How much better if they had just sat down and agreed what to do with the newcomers – take them to a bar, arrange some guided walks etc – and then they could have spent the rest of the eight days studying, or taking recreational drugs, or whatever it is grad students do for pleasure these days.
Yet it isn't true to say that the geese exercise achieved nothing: it did bring the 12 very close indeed. But that wasn't because they had spotted the uncanny parallels between geese and themselves. It was because they found the exercise so embarrassing, so puerile and so utterly pointless that they united against a common enemy. Indeed, the team-building experience may have proved so successful that when they meet each other in the corridors of power at the White House in 15 years' time they may whisper an ironic honk at each other, a signal that could be more powerful than a masonic handshake.
To be united against a shared enemy is one of the strongest bonding forces there is. Yet for company employees this is not an option, no matter how staggeringly daft the course. Indeed, a strange thing seems to happen to perfectly bright and otherwise well-balanced managers when they are sent on team-building courses.
A normal response to being asked to scramble through mud/juggle/get up and sing would be: no way. Yet in ever growing numbers they succumb without heckling or moaning or honking ironically. These activities have become part of the quasi religious side of management. Under this doctrine, dissent is heresy. Irony, doubt and cynicism are no longer allowed. The emperor wears very few clothes so mentioning his state of undress, however obliquely, is dangerous. If you don't go along with the course, the implication is you are not a team player and therefore do not belong in the company. When the feedback form comes along you have no choice. You tick the boxes that say the course was "highly relevant", "inspirational", "provided many key learnings".
[....]
One question remains. What do geese have to teach leaders, according to the Harvard exercise? There are five lessons – one of which I quoted at the top of this column. Another rule explains that the flapping of the wings makes an uplift for the bird behind, so flying in the V formation means they can go further. "Lesson: People who share a common direction can get where they are going quicker and easier because they are travelling on the trust of one another."
I don't know anything about travelling on trust. But I do know about air: geese fly in a V because of air resistance. Managers are held together by air, too: hot air. There is another similarity between the bird and the manager who likes to honk. He is a goose in more ways than one.