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In the past few weeks I’ve been trying to write something more business-oriented.

It seems to be an especially timely topic considering the critical point our markets are at (along with the global economy in general). It’s also one of my favourite topics, but one that I drift away from occasionally: too much of the same thing gets repeated so many times that it can seem like a total waste of energy.

But given the depth of influence that commercial enterprise has on our lives, I believe that it’s impossible to consider ourselves well informed and engaged if we aren’t conversant in it. So I make a point of always coming back to business in my work. I hope you can make the same effort…

Anyways, by chance tonight I found myself looking at McGill business professor Henry Mintzberg’s web site, where I found the right inspiration to write something business related.

Mintzberg is one of the most respected and controversial (and one of my personal favourite) thinkers on the discipline of management. He is perhaps most noted for his criticism of both strategic planning and business education.

This is what I found on Mintzberg’s site that inspired me: How Productivity Killed American Enterprise. It’s important to note the distinction between “enterprises” (as in corporations) and “enterprise” (as in innovation, creativity, concern, engagement, industriousness, aspiration, etc.).

Mintzberg’s general thesis is that the analyst-driven race to maximize short-term Shareholder Value, as measured in exclusively quantitative terms of productivity and efficiency, is choking out the people-fuelled engine of real, long-term, sustainable growth.

This isn’t an idealistic young person complaining about “the system”; this is one of the people best situated to understand and manipulate that “system.”

Another such person who would agree is Roger Martin, dean of U of T’s Rotman School of Management.

At first glance at his resume we might assume Martin could be a kind of conventional-thinking anti-Mintzberg: he’s the top administrator at a big MBA-granting business school, formerly a high executive at the kind of consulting group that goes around trying to quantify everything, and one of his mentor-advisers at Harvard was Michael Porter (who literally wrote the book on competitive strategy — the kind of approach that is criticized by Mintzberg).

But in a Business Week article from last year, Martin claims that scientific management is past its peak.

Martin’s argument is that customers and employees alike are “revolted” by things like CRM and TQM, and an over-reliance on quantitative analysis in general:

“While executives think they are doing the right thing by managing the numbers for the sole purpose of ‘maximizing shareholder value,’ they are perplexed that employees don’t find that to be a particularly inspiring reason for coming to work each day, and customers find the thought rather revolting.”

Martin talks about “the pendulum swinging” back to more qualitative and human ways of doing business; but I think the pendulum metaphor is misleading: we shouldn’t think in terms of back-and-forth, we should be talking about the proper mix.

The proper balance is to make sure that qualitative human factors are always the engine for growth, while we use objective measurements and structures to help steer.

Perhaps Jack Welch is the best example of this style: get all the information you can — or at least as much as you can manage — but when it comes time to really talk about what to do (and really do what you talk about), close the binders and go straight from the gut… just as long as you are always ready to go back to the data and regularly evaluate your assumptions and test your performance.

Here I’m going to cite two more of my favourite business thinkers: Bob Sutton and Jeffrey Pfeffer. I wish I had more time to write about their work now, but it’s getting late. Besides you should read their books yourself: Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense is the best business book of the past few years.

Objective measurements are important to show us how our actions, ideas, and interactions perform; without such instruments and metrics, organizations (and society in general) would not be able to function: they would be undone by subjective excesses and biases. But if objective measurements become the sole reason for doing something (i.e. going on acquisition sprees, laying off workers, or introducing convoluted financing schemes and instruments for the sole purpose of pleasing analysts to maintain stock price gains) then problems begin.

We can use them as instruments, but we’ve got to make sure those controls don’t get beyond our control — as I’m afraid may have happened with the complex mix of sophisticated investment instruments that has evolved in the past few years, leading us to the present turmoil (and towards…?).

Take a look at Mintzberg’s article. He wrote it in 2006, but it’s about 2008 (in a rhetorical and ironic way). His case makes a lot more sense in light of what’s been happening in the world’s markets and economies.

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