Dear Jack and Colleagues,
Well said, Jack. Yes, I agree with all of this. And actually there are a number who are teaching these things. I took much of my inspiration for Level Three Leadership (about how to manage at the VABE level) from Ed Schein and Peter Senge (the MIT group has spent a long time on learning how to identify and bring underlying deep assumptions to the surface for examination). We certainly teach these things at Darden. Peter Senge is clearly teaching systems analysis and its impact at MIT. (The Necessary Revolution is his latest). Csikszentmihalyi surely also addressed this issue with The Evolving Self. With regard to feel and performance my colleague and I have a new book coming out entitled "Powered by Feel: how individuals, teams, and companies excel." Chris Argyris certainly invented and taught double-loop learning. So I think it's out there. And I agree that we should be teaching HOW to continuously detect and re-examine our VABEs. The Ethics faculties also do this by introducing stakeholder analysis with harms and benefits.
And then Buruma in "Murder in Amsterdam" raises the very interesting point that the rational view of the post-Enlightenment Western world (separation of church and state, relative value systems, focus on scientific method [Descartes], etc.) seems weak and unable to compete by comparison with deeper more religiously oriented political systems (e.g. Muslim political states and immigrant communities). This set of issues is at the center of leading with an awareness of and focus on managing and leading (level three) VABEs. Business people it seems to me are going to be the "saviors" of the future since the political and religious leadership seem to be perpetuating global conflicts while business people are willing to overlook those issues for the sake of doing long-term and stable deals. The importance of teaching students who will be working in a global environment that they need to be facile with managing and leading in a world with swirling VABEs seems apparent. Should we be teaching people to be tolerant? To be inclusive? To be collaborative? To adjust to cultural VABEs in other regions? Are these not "normative" VABEs? What are the set of functional vs. dysfunctional VABEs that work in a global business environment? And then when we add to that the sustainability set of issues, what should we be teaching in order to provide for the next generation? One of Buruma's points is that if we question and retreat from a core set of VABEs for whatever reason, those with strong sets of VABEs are likely to win/dominate. I'm not saying these should be North American VABEs, but we should collectively be trying to find a global set of VABEs that work around the world. And putting those in front of our students.
Jim
James G. S. Clawson
Johnson & Higgins Professor of Business Administration
Darden GSB, University of Virginia
Box 6550, Charlottesville, VA 22906
100 Darden Boulevard, Charlottesville, VA 22903 USA
Tel: 434 924 7488 Fax: 434 243 7680
Web: http://faculty.darden.virginia.edu/clawsonj
Quite so. VABE's just are.
John Dillinger had VABE's, as did Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin and many other 'leaders.'
I strive to highlight examination of whether any given set of VABE's is the best set and whether anyone knows how to gain assessments of their current VABE's. Two ingredients seem to be necessary. First is a willingness to reflect on one's own VABE's. Second is the ability to engage in dialogue that examines the effects of one's VABE's. In short, who teaches double loop learning and who teaches implicit systems and second order cybernetics?
I simply suggest that educators of impending managers include lecture, lab and practicuum regarding acknowledging and assessing one's VABE's.
In my view Peter Drucker told us all of this and a few 'corporate universities' responded accordingly but few academic institutions have responded. Am I underinformed? Who teaches systems thinking, feeling and doing? Who teaches pragmatic foresight? Who teaches decision journals? Who teaches dialogue or other means for avoiding Descarte's Error?
I do not presume that any of us should be teaching the 'right' values. I do think all of us should be teaching HOW to continuously detect and correct our values and WHY this is fundamental to serving others.
Apologies for any confusion this may spawn.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, October 23, 2008 6:35 PM
I didn't quite understand Jack's note about VABEs. They just are. Everyone has them. Some have VABEs about objective assessments-but Descartes' Error was in not realizing that no human is purely objective. Values, assumptions, beliefs and expectations about the way the world is or should be. Jack seems to believe that we should be more objective in our analysis of the financial crisis. I have no argument with that. How people interpret the data, even what data they choose to interpret, will be a function of their VABEs... They exist-everywhere, the viruses of the mind (Brodie).