Can It Be Bad When It’s So Useful?
Management Science as a Carrier of Modernity
Wong Chai Kee
Published in
Global Missiology, Contemporary Practice, January 2004, www.globalmissiology.net
The Need for
Intellectual Battle Lines
When a Time magazine feature on “Our Cheating Heart”1
contended that evolution shaped human
love and caused marriage to self-destruct, it triggered a vigorous chorus of
objections. Human beings, the article
argued, were designed to fall in love but not to stay in love. This thesis from evolutionary psychology drew out the fire in
readers of Christian persuasion because the challenge was direct and clear. It was a frontal assault on the sanctity
of marriage and the reality of sin. The response was an unflinching
counter-offensive.
Christians are no wimps when the intellectual
battle-lines are clearly drawn. Conventional conflicts between Christianity and
the sciences have seen open and sustained debates. The staunch, if sometimes misinformed and misguided,
defence of the Christian faith against Darwinian
socio-biology is a classic case in point. The ingrained suspicion of
evangelicals toward psychology has
put them on a watchful guard against any pernicious infiltration by a field long known for its secularism, be it the starkly
repugnant mechanistic-behaviourist model or its openly seductive longtime holistic-humanist rival. The feeling is
mutual: few Christians have become psychologists, and fewer psychologists have
become Christians.
The
battle-line between the Church and management science2 is, however,
far from clear. Some Christians may wonder
whether there is any conflict in the first place.
Management science is not perceived as an enemy,
hence there is no need for battle. Indeed it may even be a good thing. Who would object to better planning, better
people management, better resource and talent utilisation, and better public
relations in the running of churches? Surely
a good dose of well-regarded corporate practices can do church management a
world of good! Church management should be an epitome of good
management, so says the conventional wisdom.
An
increasing segment of the congregation are working as managers and executives
in industrial and commercial enterprises. Some are heading these
outfits and many have been exposed to the organisational
culture and practices of multinational corporations. The stark contrast between
the professionalism of their workplace and the relative lack
of sophistication in the churchyard is more likely to present
management science as a saviour than a scourge. Having seen corporations become more effective through the use of sound
management techniques, it seems sensible to apply these techniques for church growth. Christians will expect their
churches to be more professional; they
are unlikely to warn them of the perils of modeling after successful corporations. If the right kind of Chief Executive
Officer can turn around an organisation on the
eve of demise, why can’t the right kind of church leader,
godly or extraordinary, be despatched to ailing
churches on “turnaround” operations?
A parallel can be drawn from the world of politics.
Life was simpler when there were good guys and bad guys. When there were real communists to fight against, the
battle call was loud and clear, and witchhunts were run like crusades.
Now that communists are not even sure about their doctrines (with some behaving more capitalistic than the originals), the
Western world is in a state of sustained ambivalence and suspended animation.
The bad guys aren’t so bad after all, and
the good guys are no better. The delirium that greeted the former Eastern
bloc’s liberation had since turned
into disillusionment. One former East German said that she spent thirty years grappling with the contradictions of communism and
now she would likely have to spend the next thirty years wrestling with the
contradictions of capitalism. The great divide became the grave confusion.
Likewise, when it is hard to make a villain out of
management science, there is no perceived need for wariness and watchfulness.
Astrophysicists, nuclear chemists, socio-biologists and clinical psychologists are sitting ducks. Their
mind-boggling grasp of cosmological infinity and infinitesimal matter, their exhilarating exploration of the labyrinths
of life, can be readily portrayed as
tempting human arrogance and taunting godly awe.
Darwin and Freud. These two intellectual giants
trigger knee-jerk reactions among Christians. Their names spell trouble. They are seen as wolves in wolves’ clothing.
Domes of Christian articles and books
have attacked their agnosticism and arrogance. The battle-lines are not only clearly drawn, they are deeply personalised.
While Einstein is spared such vilification, his
look of helpless innocence and image of benign religiosity does not fool discerning Christians. While he did object to
the indeterminacy of quantum
mechanics with his pithy comment that “God does not play dice,” we know that
his god is an impersonal pantheistic
force, not our personal monotheistic God. We recognise that he is from the opposite camp, an anointed secular saint
of spiritual seekers and intellectual inquirers of our time.
Church leaders will be hard put to name any
management thinker that will give them nightmares or day rage. With the success of Western
corporations credited to the Protestant work ethic, and with industry
leaders avowing corporate values that bear the shape and sound of Christian
truth, management science enjoys good public
relations in conventional Christian circles. Church circles are threatened by
purveyors of ideas, not worried about conveyors of service. They perceive
established sciences as being about thoughts and ideas, hence their wariness.
They see management science as a toolbox and
technical manual, hence the unguarded openness. Ideas in the established sciences may undermine the
Christian faith, but isn’t management science merely about helping to
get the work done? Science may challenge Christianity, but surely management techniques can come in handy in church matters?
Unlike
its face-off with the established sciences, the Church approaches management
science in a less conceptual and more pragmatic way, and is as shrewd as doves
in a field packed with “witch
doctors” (Micklethwait
& Wooldridge 1996). The danger lies in becoming fixated on what will work rather than being fixed on what is right. This
expedient mindset may blind the Church to the stealthy and steady
intrusion by management science into its sanctuary and the consequential shredding of the spiritual fabric and fibre of the
Church.
Church leaders are unlikely to do battle with
management science. They are more likely to enter a marriage of convenience with management science
to prevent their churches from fossilising toward obsolescence and propel them into the next century as
state-of-the-art organisations. Numerous
church seminars and sermons have been conducted on the conflicts between the sciences and Christianity, materialism and
spirituality, and being practical and being principled. Any flirtation with the behavioural sciences is
frowned upon but fault-lines in the marriage of convenience are hardly noticed. As conflict has not surfaced, its latent
reality is too easily ignored.
In the author’s experience, Singapore churches are
eager to apply
task and people management skills in
church leadership, youth work and pastoral ministry. But he has yet to be asked
to advise on how churches should view management science from the biblical
rather than merely practical standpoint.
Churches do not even ask whether management science is relevant, they assume
that it must be. They are more
concerned about how it can be customised to the context of church and parachurch leadership. They have yet to ask
whether management science is conceptually congruent with the spirit and
substance of their vision and mission. Skipping immigration clearance of aliens, management science slips into
the clothes of a potential church ally.
The Case for Scepticism
Should church leaders view management science with
a sceptic’s eye when it appears to play a workman’s role in helping to make
things work better? What harm can it do when it merely plays the role of a facilitator? For all the help that
management science can give, perhaps we should not look a gift horse in the mouth. Might resistance against management
science be a regressive step? Will
putting management techniques through a fine tooth comb turn out to be a cover
for the “NIH” (Not Invented Here)
syndrome? Is this paper merely stirring up a storm in a teacup?
In an article
analysing the idolatry of immortality inherent in all organisations, Alonzo
McDonald observes that people today “think
of management generically as a purely commercial activity,
and one that is therefore secular. But sound
management is thoroughly biblical. Essentially it is another word for stewardship. Many of the most
tried and true management principles are taught or practised in the Old Testament books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes and
embodied in the example of Jesus
Christ Himself” (McDonald, 1992, 148).
This
view is tantamount to saying that just because many of the best childrearing
and psychotherapeutic practices are found in the Bible,
effective parenting and psychotherapy are essentially
biblical. But sound psychotherapeutic practices, with the validation of
efficacy, may be an anathema from the Christian standpoint. What
works in bringing up Hao Congming [very
bright in Chinese] in Singapore may not be what Christian
leaders should urge their congregation to
follow. Likewise management practices with a proven track record may not be
what churches should implement. Sound management cannot be incontrovertibly
classified as good stewardship,
for
the roots of management science are essentially secular. Despite the numerous
models of matchless biblical leadership and management, management science --
like physics, chemistry, biology and psychology -- was not developed from the
Bible. We will want to avoid the NIH syndrome,
but management science was not invented by the Church.
Taking the fundamentalist view that the Church was
a founding father of management science only serves to perpetuate a
fundamental error. For failure to separate the spiritual chaff from the practical grain in management science will suck
Christian leaders into the drain of modernity.
A symptom of modernity in the management conduit is
the belief that the latest is the best. Management gurus keep coming up
with cutting-edge systems and practices. Sometimes it is old practice in new language. Other times see a removal
of the old order as a new generation of young turks edge out the old guards. It is unwise to go along with what
the market throws up as one can look
quite silly later. Being grounded on biblical principles, churches and
parachurch organisations should not
fall prey to fad and fashion. Especially when they did not invent the science, they must carefully chose the practice.
The practices
swing like a pendulum: in one fad cycle people are emphasized as the
performance drivers, and in another
re-engineering gives management science a renewed task orientation. In the seventies and early eighties Japanese
management was the saviour as American industry lost self-confidence. In the
nineties, as Japan loses its grip on the economic rudder and America loses its
patience with incremental zero-defect practices, American-style management
dives into re-engineering.
In Singapore participative management was the rage
of the eighties, with managers trying to look participative, at least when they responded to management questionnaires
and psychometric instruments. Now
industry captains are doing turnaround operations, with very few considering
whether non-invasive surgery or primary health care might be more
people-sensitive as well as a better
option.
The point is: sound management is as much about
perception and fashion as it is about substance. Progressive churches may not run the risk of supping with the devil but
merely flowing with the passing waves
of cutting-edge management practices may throw them onto roller coaster rides with so-called progressive companies.
Choosing a management approach solely on pragmatic
grounds may turn out to be a rational cover
for dumbly following the crowd. Churches need to look deeper before plugging
into the management grid. Instead of
gulping what is marketed as the best, church and parachurch leaders must take
two fresh initiatives. First, their choice of management practices must be
values-based rather than success-driven. Second, they must define the
management philosophy that is at least consistent
with the Christian faith.
McDonald
goes on to say that precisely because sound management is essential for
corporate success, it is subject to the idols of excess, and that unthinking
managers often end up focusing more on technique than
accomplishment, thereby getting bogged down in marginally useful
forms and data
(McDonald, 1992, 148). He takes the stance that management science is potentially good, that it merely plays the role of
a facilitator and that whether it turns out to be good depends on how people use it. His warning
about the dangers of using management science is not uniquely biblical: it is something that any corporate
practitioner will take note of. His warning does not quite address the peculiar
dangers of using management science in churches and parachurch organisations.
The dangers are more than that of letting
technique supplant accomplishment. On this point, time management texts will say that good management is
results-oriented rather than technique-fixated.
Put in bottom line terms, management emphasis should always be first on doing
the right things (accomplishment),
then on doing things better or merely faster (technique) -- not the other way round. But the real danger for churches and
parachurch organisations is that management science can and has been a key success factor in their accomplishments.
No church, indeed no organisation, should become obsessed with form-filling and
rigid about planning. But the deeper issue
is that using management science as a means to accomplishment can enmesh a
church unwittingly into idolatry --
the very kind that C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape likes for dessert. Effective management produces the desired corporate results. For the church, the question
must be whether it produces the desirable results: whether the desired achievement may turn
out to be a case of winning a battle
but losing the war, or even that of winning the world only to lose one’s soul.
The Church Under Scrutiny
McDonald indicts churches and parachurch
organisations for performing much like voluntary organisations. His ranking of the performance expectations the American
public places on various
organisations, in progressive order, is as follows: civic and voluntary
organisations, educational institutions, government, commercial
operations, and professional practitioners. To illustrate, surgeons are not allowed such excuses as domestic problems
and overwork for botching even a
minor surgical procedure. On the other hand, because little or no financial reward is involved in voluntary organisations, any
contribution is bonus issue in the public’s mind. McDonald contends that Christ-centred activities should top the
list.
Where do churches and parachurch organisations sit
on the Asian performance expectation list? Here one should note that the performance expectations in the Asian
context may be quite different, and
may even vary from country to country. In some Asian countries, the government
may be accorded low expectations, and commercial operations may be understood
in terms of personal connections (quan xi). Professional practitioners are
still likely to be ranked high; Asian mothers
hope for a son as much as they strive to turn him into a doctor.
In
comparing American and East Asian governments, Fallows (1994, 216), observes
that the latter “are more competent because the great prestige of
the civil service continues to attract the best-educated
people in the country. For historic and social-status reasons, jobs in the government
bureaucracy are still among the most desirable jobs in Korea, Japan, and other Confucian-influenced
East Asian societies.” Above the politically shifting sands in such East Asian states as Thailand
and Japan (where lasting a full electoral term makes a prime minister a political icon), the civil service rises in
integrity and dignity.
In
Singapore much is expected of the government. Even community service
organisations are scrutinized in terms of how much
of the donation dollar actually goes to the needy. The prevalence of
multinational corporations in Singapore exposes Christians to modern management
practices, systems and software.
Whether they work in government bureaucracy,
community service organisations or private companies, Christians and would-be Christians in Singapore are therefore
well exposed to cutting-edge management practices and quite road worthy about
what is good and bad management
practice. They are likely to apply these same criteria and expectations to churches
and parachurch organisations.
Moreover the Asian public’s history-tinted mindset of missionary organisations as an expression of Western
superiority (in firepower, economic might or educational brainware) perches churches and parachurch organisations at
the top of the performance expectation
list.
All things considered, the
effectiveness and efficiency of leadership in churches and parachurch organisations
are likely to be scrutinized by their members. Christian leadership has nowhere
to hide. And it must not even run.
Church and parachurch leaders must not put across
their indecisiveness as seeking God’s will. Failure to lead must not be explained away as leadership of all saints.
Poverty of ideas must not be
presented as poverty of spirit. Disorganization must not be glorified as
emergence from the rule of the law to
the freedom of the spirit. Spiritual stillness must not be mistaken for
management paralysis. Hiding under the apron of false spirituality invites
accusations of hypocrisy. A Christian leader who couches his management
inadequacy in spiritual terms awards himself
a halo that others will see as hollow. Sadly the perpetrator perpetuates the
problem when human denial slides into
spiritual delusion.
This close internal scrutiny must compel church
management to shape up. But it must not cause church leadership to swing senselessly toward any management trend.
Church
Leadership and Management: Worshipping God and Serving Man
A
modern trend in management is to be customer-centred. It is cliché to say “the
customer is king,” “the customer is always right,” or “the
customer may not be right but he is always the customer.” The “customer” used
to refer to the people who buy your products or ideas. Now the most progressive
organisations are looking after the interests of suppliers even though the
latter are the ones who get paid. The rationale is that treating them as
customers will make them more able and willing to serve you,
their paymasters, better.
In the past only service
providers in the private sector used to give consideration to the customer; government
nurses were impatient with the “fon” (“full of nonsense”) patients. Britain, an
English general once said, has the dubious distinction of
inventing a new missile named Civil Servant, one
which does not work and cannot be fired. Locally the civil servant was
considered to be neither civil nor servant. While civil
servants in most countries are either perched (too alive,
one might add) atop the public or too submerged (though somehow still alive) in
the sea of files to emerge, Singapore civil servants are
urged to look at and serve the customer, and
rewarded
for doing so. Until recently only front-line staff were supposed to serve the
customer. Now everyone, including the CEO and backroom boys,
should be customer-oriented. Organizational leaders are now
urged to see their staff as customers, and urge their staff, especially those from
different departments, to serve each other as customers. Even your wife, children, and family are your customers.
Just as client-centred therapy and pop psychology
have been carriers of modernity though their worship of the self, management science carries the modernity torch
through its emphasis on customer
focus. In this customer-centred stratosphere Christian employees in Singapore
are inhaling their 9 to 5. The issue
is not whether there really is service excellence. People in Singapore may not give good service. But they, and
Christians no less, expect pristine service. Christians may have been urged to
go into the world. But the ways of the world, not the brutally devious but the blandly decent kind, may be oozing
into the pores of their skin. They expect churches and parachurch organizations to treat them as customers. It is
after all in keeping with the spirit
of the times to pamper customers with what they want, to pander to their
wishes. In turn management of these
organizations is pressured to be customer-oriented. Christian leaders will no doubt object to this as conspicuous conformity.
But the ways of the management world can assume an innocuous form and thereby go easy on the Christian palate.
Certain things you instinctively spew
out of your mouth. Some others enter the Christian realm like a computer virus: it gets in unnoticed, settles in
unobtrusively and when you realise it’s there, you’re wiped out.
In management terms, one of the major deliverables
or goods and services of churches is the worship service. The worship service can become just a service proffered
to demanding customers. But what’s
wrong with that? After all, did Jesus not urge the disciples to wash each other’s feet and did he not command Peter to “feed
my sheep” (John 13). Is this not about serving one another and nurturing the weak and needy?
Church members, like other
employees, are generally spending more time at work. They feel the demands
of their customers, and they as customers will be most responsive to, if not
insistent on, help-on-demand. A worship service that is not helpful will feel
and look less attractive. Worship service becomes weekend mass
therapy for the week’s woes, rather than the launcher for setting the
week ahead in godly perspective. It will be a sad day if the worship service is
oriented toward what church members want rather
than how they must be led to worship God more deeply.
One wonders how Martyn Lloyd-Jones will be
received in modern-day Singapore. He urged that preaching should be serious, though Christians may be looking for
light-hearted relief or a psychological
massage. Preaching is not infotainment or edutainment, which formulates and formats a message to fit into the
attention-deficit bandwidth and to amuse the bored brain of adults still surfing the learning medium of Sesame
Street.
I was once told by a young member
of a congregation that my sermon reminded her of Zig Ziglar. I
wondered whether she had given me a left-handed compliment, but she appeared
genuinely enthusiastic about my sermon, which made me all the
more worried - for Zig Ziglar is a renowned motivation and sales
trainer. My sermon must have to met her need, perked her up or
at
least captured her attention, but did she worship God more wholly or would she
follow Him more fully?
The next kind of customer service focuses on the
non-believer who seeks a God-less spirituality. The latest in-thing in church leadership is to conduct, in
American-style alliteration, "Seeker-Sensitive Services." Sunday
services are attuned to the needs of spiritual non-seekers, catching them on
their day off to give them “petrol-kiosk” service. Tailoring the main Sunday
worship service to relieve their
piled-up weekday stress serves the good intention of drawing them to God. Christians will have to do their worship and
have their spiritual needs met during weekday worship services.
This SSS approach in delivering a regular church
production can for all intent and purposes be made to sound biblical. After all
aren’t we supposed to reach out to the world and be the salt of the world? But the essence of this SSS approach is
conceptually no more than the customer-centred service of the eighties and
nineties, and the client-centred therapy of the sixties and seventies.
A trend in modernity revolves around the desire for
a secular form of spirituality that addresses the spiritual needs of seekers without directing them to God, drawing
them inward without taking them
upward. Thomas Moore’s Care of the Soul (1992) exemplifies such a trend. The book by the former monk stayed on the New York Times
Bestseller List for over forty-six weeks. It elicited a rapturous response from Sam Keen, a high priest of spiritual
humanism, who wrote, “This book just
may help you give up the futile quest for salvation and get down to the
possible task of taking care of your
soul. A modest, and therefore marvelous, book about the life of the spirit.”3 Spirituality, less God, is
more -- in the balance sheet of spiritual secularism. But Godless spirituality is idolatry of the self.
Secular humanism has for decades evoked a spirited
and sustained challenge from Christians, who sees it as a wolf in wolf’s clothing. Spiritual humanism is
seductively soothing to Christians and
non-Christians alike. Christians might even see this sly fox as a sheep in
sheep’s clothing. The deception is
harder to uncover because the inner satisfaction emits the sights and sounds of
biblical spirituality.
Herein lies the virulent danger of the SSS
approach. Its paradigm pictures the seeker as a customer and reduces the church to a restaurant. Operationalizing this
paradigm may cause the secular seeker to come, and keep coming back, for the
soul-soothing menu but he will feel so satisfied
that he does not bother about seeking God. The medium becomes the massage, no message needed.
In
their over-anxiety to attract external customers, SSS-type churches have done
their congregation a disservice. Expecting members to worship during the
mid-week service will likely result in most
church-goers being fed with spiritual congee on Sundays with no assurance that
they will come for solid nourishment on a busy weekday. In the end, the seekers
will learn to feel better about themselves without getting
anywhere near God, and the worshippers will feel
good
while losing their grasp of God. After all how many church members would bother
to savour the real thing during the weekday on top of
attending the Sunday service.
Christians have no bone to pick with this customer
orientation if it were merely a case of selling a product or service according to what the customer wants or giving a
therapy that suits the client. After
all it is the customer and the client who pays for the goods and services. It
is selfish and silly to give service
that is convenient to us rather than the people we serve, or to offer therapeutic solutions that soothe us but suit
nobody else. And we can indeed be a good Christian witness by serving customers and helping clients
empathically. The problem is something else: the more fundamental one of modernity’s exclusive focus on the “self”
through the vehicles of customer and client-centredness.
Client-centred therapy encourages the client to
seek for what seems right to him rather than what is right. While it makes initial sense in terms of
therapeutic efficacy, for the client must work out a way of living his own
life, this therapeutic stance encourages man to deny his dependence on God, and to see life as a universe unto himself. In
other words, man can live by his vibes alone. Customer orientation takes this self-focus onto a far broader stage --
beyond neurotics to the populace. At
first glance this stage may seem to advocate thinking of others instead of
oneself. In the end it encourages people to think much too highly of
themselves. There is a curious twist to courteous service: we pay to enjoy being “somebody” when deep inside we
fear we are really nobody. Screwtape would have sanctioned this deception.
The message of customer service has raised the
standard of customer service. But it has catapulted people’s expectation of service. While striving to groom
service providers to perform like a
real prima donna,
it has inadvertently licensed service recipients to act like pretentious prima donnas.
In his analytical survey of the inception and growth of consumerism in America,
William Leach stripped customer service of
its altruistic gloss and glitter. In exposing its Christian pretensions, he noted that customer
service “focused on the self, not on the community or on public duty or
on holiness. Although it attempted to meet community needs, it was largely hedonistic, in pursuit of individual pleasure,
comfort, happiness, and luxury” (Leach, 1993, 122).
Like any organization, churches and parachurch
bodies must be sensitive to fellow servants and outside seekers. Christian leaders cannot hide under the banner of
godliness when they lack people sensitivity. They cannot continue an
ineffective form of service delivery in the name of substance. When the seeker does not “get” you, your message is a
soliloquy. Pearls are not always
thrown at unappreciative swine. The manner of throwing pearls might be
swine-like.
Choosing or fine-tuning the right medium per
se does not cast one into the net
of modernity. But being fixated on the
medium and dictated by the channel-surfing audience does, sucking the undiscerning users of modern methods into the
seductive arms of modernity. Business management
has no choice: to thrive, or just to survive, it must be customer-oriented. But
churches and parachurch organizations
should not and need not ape the business world.
How
then should leaders of churches and parachurch organizations function? The
answer revolves around when and how they should lead and manage.
The distinction between
transformational
and transactional leadership is pertinent here. The concept of transformational
and transactional leadership was first mooted by Burns (1978). Transformational
leadership is taking people where they should go. Transactional leadership is giving
them what they want in exchange for their
followership.
In matters of substance Christian leaders must
lead; where form is the issue they should manage. It is desirable for church management to be
transactional and imperative for church leadership to be transformational. They must lead others to go
where the latter do not know or dare not go alone. They must manage systems and feelings in order to help their
members to obtain what they need,
ensuring that the desirable goals are not derailed by disorganization. As
leaders they must be directive -- as
directed by God. As managers, they must be consultative - sensitized to the needs and concerns of their constituents.
Imagine what churches and parachurch organizations
will become if their leaders were to be mainly directed by the members and merely sensitive to God’s feelings.
This is the danger of treating members as customers or constituents. The
service provider must always satisfy the customer, the parliamentary member
cannot afford to upset his constituents. Under the direction of God, the Christian leader’s main purpose is
neither to satisfy his fellow servants nor to gratify seekers. While he
should avoid insulting church members inadvertently, the church leader must nevertheless muster the courage to do or say
needful things that will offend their sensitivity. While trying not to run down non-Christians, he
must with verve and valour question the sensibility of their religious outlook.
In matters of theology and mission for instance,
Christian leaders must not live by the canons of political correctness: they should lead without fear or favour. In
matters of how best to use the resources
available to realise the vision, they cannot afford to go it alone: they must
manage without arrogance.
Worship must primarily be God-sensitive rather than
servant or seeker-sensitive. In the biblical order of things, true worship of God must have the ripple effect of
practical service to man, not the
other way round. Being servant or seeker-sensitive is fundamentally flawed
because it requires God to propose, in a suitable
way, and encourages man to dispose, in his own way. We should worship God, then go on to serve man -- not cater to customers’
wishes, then think of worshipping God.
Spiritual Strength and Management
Science
How
then should church leaders use management science? How does greater or lesser
usage affect the church? As an initial attempt at answering such
questions, the consequences of spiritual leaders operating the
levers of management science may be analyzed with the following matrix:
CHURCH High
Application Low
Application
LEADERSHIP’S: of Management
Science of
Management Science
|
Spiritual/Organized
1
|
Spiritual/Organic 2
|
|
3
Secular/Mechanistic
|
4 Secular/Disorganized
|
Quadrant-1 churches are those that are spiritually strong
as well as highly attuned to the use of management science. The question is whether the use of management
techniques causes them to grow, or
the growth causes them to use management techniques to manage the practical
requirements of growth.
Being first and foremost spiritual, such a church
ensures that management techniques are kept in their place. It follows the rule best expressed by Sir Winston
Churchill when he said that the expert
should be put on tap, not on top. The recognition that Spirit-led growth of
numbers requires practical support draws
the church into the management groove. Prima
facie a Quadrant-1 church appears to have the ideal combination,
the best of both worlds so to speak, coupling spiritual rootedness with usage
of a modern tool. I contend that taking the management science route is merely
an expedient choice rather than a badge of honour. There is no intrinsic virtue
in the choice beyond realizing that
stupidity in the church is no excuse for spirituality. Moreover, a low usage of management science is not necessary
an indictment on the church administration either, for Quadrant-2 is a different choice, not an absence, of
administration. On the other hand, over-fascination
with management wonders may suck the church into the spiritual blackhole of Quadrant-3.
Quadrant-2 churches are those that are spiritually strong
but do not rigorously apply management
principles . While conventional thinking may typecast such churches as being so
heavenly as to spawn earthly
confusion, and some churches do make easy targets, the low application of
management science in this quadrant merely means that the church chooses to
evolve organically its own way of doing things rather than to systematically
change the organizational structure
or install various management processes. While size makes a spiritual church more likely to shift into the Quadrant-1
gear, big and growing churches may still be quite productively parked in Quadrant-2. While some
members may feel that their Quadrant-2 church can be better run, the church
somehow manages the growing pains without systematic treatment.
Insisting
that all growing churches must sooner or later enter Quadrant-1 is to confer
upon management science the status of being a necessary and
sufficient condition of spiritual growth
of the
church - that is to say, the church will grow, or continue to grow, if and only
if it uses management science. The spiritual growth of the
church is independent of management science. On the
other hand, growth in size can be effected by marketing techniques, sales pitch
and premium service with spirituality as an appendage or a
cover. To elevate the role of management science
is to let organizational dynamics supplant spiritual substance -- a problem
inherent in Quadrant-3 churches. In computer language,
management techniques should be treated as add-ons (sometimes no more than
bells and whistles), which the church leadership may choose to install.
Quadrant-2 churches will not be tempted into
abusing or subjugating the spiritual message for the cause of
organizational development (as Quadrant-1 churches might succumb or, as we
shall see, Quadrant-3 churches have already
succumbed). At worst it may raise the blood pressure of the professional and management Christian elites. At
best this church is organic in its flexibility, and is freed from the bureaucratic woes that tend to
beset large organizations. Instead of seeing it as being low on management octane, some management
gurus may yet consider this to be an emblem
of post-management simplicity. Thus glorified, it faces a different temptation:
its organizational simplicity may
supplant its essential spirituality.
Quadrant-3 churches are those that are cosmetically spiritual
and vigorously thorough in applying
management principles . Such a church may have an impressive congregation. Its success may delude it into regarding itself as
being spiritual. But having lost its own soul while gaining the world’s esteem,
the tool of management science only serves to make it mechanistic. It is a spiritual blackhole because the pull of
management successes prevents it from realizing that it has lost its vision. It may still sing spiritual
tunes but the lyrics are essentially secular. It celebrates success in conventional terms, and is successful in helping
its people to be successful. Spiritual
messages have become the tool of management practices, ending up as wearables
or disposables, depending on whether
they suit organizational growth - rather than godly worship.
Quadrant-3 exemplifies the point that while
spiritual growth will lead to physical growth, the latter may be due to factors other than spiritual.
Management science, or the charisma of the guru, charlatan or cult leader, may be the cause. At best, its
preoccupation with methods for success
rather than the message on spirituality leaves its members high and dry, and
stifles its growth. At worst, subjugating the spiritual message to the gods of
organizational growth makes it a more
pernicious threat than frontal assault by worldly orders. For it has become a
wolf in sheep’s clothing, drawing
people away from God unto themselves. It becomes the church most favoured by
Screwtape because it has all the sound bytes of spirituality and the hollow
ring of secularity.
Quadrant-4
churches are spiritually and practically lost. Being spiritually weak and
highly disorganized, they will diminish and dwindle away. Such
a church is spiritually helpless and organizationally hopeless. It is
likely to stagnate as a cozy club with members contemplating their
navel or wallowing in mutual commiseration. There is neither an organized drive
nor a sense of being called. It holds no promise and can do no
harm.
Whether
management science is for better or for worse depends on the church
leadership’s spirituality. If it is spiritual, it does not
really matter whether it chooses to run the church like a multinational
company, so long as it does not canonize administrative chaos. Perhaps sheer
size makes management science more attractive, but size brings
with it the baggage of bureaucratization. Spiritual leadership needs special
grace to pry off this albatross, for bureaucratization is the bane of
even the best and brightest among world-class companies (not just
the civil service).
Americanization of companies, be they Singapore
or British, has gained impetus in recent years. This goes deeper than the cosmetic re-titling of positions into various
levels of presidency (Every executive
seems to be some kind of vice-president - senior vice-president,
vice-president, deputy vice-president,
assistant vice-president, deputy assistant vice-president). On a whole stodgy
companies are given a marketing face-lift and a service re-orientation, and
compelled to take on the responsibility of being a cost or a profit centre.
Churches in
Singapore are also likely shift in this direction - from their more colonial maintenance mode to a more American emphasis on
efficacy. While this has clear benefits, the process of culturalization must be taken for what it is --
culturalization, without being given a spiritual
coating. On the one hand, the impact of American marketing and management must
not be treated as the invisible hand
of God. On the other hand, converting various domains of church work into SBUs
(Strategic Business Units) must not be seen as the only way to go. A particular
mission work should not be abandoned
just because there has been “no bottom line results” (translated to mean “no converted souls”) -- the
way a top conglomerate would sell off SBUs that are not the top three in their market segment. Management-by-Objectives
and performance appraisal are the
things to do for progressive companies. Quadrant-1 churches would be eager customers of such performance management tools.
This is good and fine so long as Quadrant-2 churches are not viewed as country cousins. Preoccupation with numbers
may equate big churches with good
churches. Money may be re-directed to where we can see the impact of our work, where is return-on-investment is higher,
rather than where God tells us to invest, where the return-on-perseverance may be dismal and
disheartening. These are pot-holes that Quadrant-1 churches must avoid.
Quadrant-1 and Quadrant-2 churches are both spiritually
strong. They are rightly steadfast on the matter of spiritual principle. Churches can choose their preferred
quadrant of management practice
depending on the readiness of the leaders and culture of their people. They can
afford to, and indeed should,
compromise here. The problem of choice is of greater consequence when the leadership’s spirituality is low. When a
ostensibly spiritual and substantively secular church leadership adopts management science, the
combination effects undesirable potency. Quadrant-3 churches that are successful are too blinded by
their scoreboards to return to God. There might be hope yet for Quadrant-4 churches because they are
too ineffectual to succumb to conceit - for “there is more hope for the fool” (Prov 26:12)
How Then Shall We
Lead?
Given the concept of
transformational leadership and the preceding analysis, the question then is: How
then shall church leaders lead? Conventional management wisdom says leaders
must be
flexible
-- in other words, they must choose the style that suits the situation and the
followers. While the “It depends” answer appears trite, the
complexity of leading the modern congregation makes it inevitable.
Beyond this general response, there is nevertheless a case for prescribing a consultative rather than either a directive or a
participative style of leadership.
Directive leadership is here defined as “a distinct
style in which the leader decides and announces his decision without consulting subordinates beforehand” (Bass, 1990,
437). Such a style can be with or
without explanation. Participative leadership refers to “a simple distinct
style of leader-subordinate
decision-making in which the leader equalizes power and shares the final
decision-making with the
subordinates”(Bass, 1990, 437). Here consensus is sought. In this paper, consultative leadership is defined as making
decisions after serious consultations with one’s people though the decision may or may not concur with their views. It is
a style of clear and unapologetic
leadership that is sensitive to the needs and concerns of the people. It is
top-down in decisiveness and
authority but bottom-up in its strong regard for the feelings and opinions of
the followers. It is not consultative
in a “going-through-the-motion” manner, nor is it meant to appease people. The consultative leader is fully in
touch with his people, and ready and able to listen to their points and passion. On the other hand, as Calvin Miller
points out in The Empowered
Leader, “Good leaders never give
their leadership away” (Miller, 1995, 158). Chosen as leaders, whether in
testamental or modern times, the church leader must lead -- and lead humbly. Hence the emphasis on servant
leadership throughout Miller’s book. After all, the church leader communes in a fellowship of saints,
who can behave like prima donnas. The
saints’ standing in commerce and society must not
compromise him; he must neither patronize nor lionize them. The church leader must lead with authority, not
autocracy, and with sensitivity, not
knee-jerk reactivity. He must be a mentor, not a tormentor.
Our four-quadrant joint analysis of spiritual
leadership and management science shows that the priority must be on spirituality so that the planning can then rest on
management techniques. The church
leader must not be possessed by bottom line results. If God were to think of
bottom line results, earth is a poor investment -- with meagre returns and
major heartache. Companies must think of bottom line results or else they will
not be around to work on beyond-bottom line issues like community values and environmental
responsibility. But the church must without the slightest hesitation go beyond the bottom line for we are into matters of
eternity. The benchmarks are
different from the performance standards and measurement of management science.
The church is on the right track when the world
calls it stupid for investing in lost causes. Church leaders must also look beyond results before
aiming for the very same results, because ungodly powers can heal, Rolls Royce-chauffeured gurus can
number unmaterialistic PhD’s and wide-eyed
celebrities among their disciples, and management science can be harnessed for organizational growth in a health-and-wealth
church. The church leader must be called to focus on the value of some things rather than be
preoccupied with the price of everything. A management science that detracts him from his pilgrim’s progress must be
discarded, however politically sanitized it is.
The
church leader must be wary of the seductive powers of management science, not
because it is a bad thing but because it is so captivating. A
young church leader I knew is a case in point.
Exposed
largely to a puritanical and directive brand of leadership, he was deeply
spiritual until a job opportunity with a top
multinational computer firm led him to sing the wonders of management
science accompanied by telling silence on matters of the faith. His was a case
of jumping from a complete ignorance of management science
into an ecstatic embrace of its sense and
nonsense. Another once-fervent Christian manager is now engrossed, at the
exclusion of her faith, with the organizational
development of her multinational fashion company, which has been consistently
selected as one of America’s most admired companies.
I am not for
a moment calling management science the devil incarnate. But critical threats
to Christian leadership rarely take the form
of an abominable snowman; they may look like something capable of doing good,
even doing God.
Management Challenge and the
Spiritual Imperative
While this paper has cautioned
against a careless or carefree embrace of management science, a positive trend in
corporate management poses a challenge for church leadership. Corporations are becoming visionary and missionary. Having a vision
is not regarded as seeing things and making a mission statement not as going religiously cuckoo. While cynics will
say that the mission statement and
declaration of corporate values are only words carved on lovely plaques near
the reception counter, and that often little of the values message goes beyond
the service wall to the service counter, the mere expression of values
in the cold reality of business facts and figures is a watershed event. It is an indication that management feels compelled to
go beyond bottom line.
A recent study showed that managers used mission
statements more than any other corporate tools (such as customer survey,
pay-for-performance, total quality management and re-engineering), and were also more satisfied with it
than with any other tool (Jones & Kahaner, 1995, ix, citing the 1994 survey by Bain & Company and the Planning
Forum).
Stockbroking is synonymous to making money (“Money
is not everything, it’s the only thing,” a stockbroker might well have said), but the management team of one such
Singapore-based firm recently spent a
weekend working out the firm’s mission statement. In this statement, professionalism sits alongside with integrity,
developing innovativeness with nurturing people, and aiming to be number one
with aspiring to make the workplace rewarding for its people.
In a comprehensive study of visionary companies by
two Stanford University Graduate Business School professors, Collins and Porras (1994, 7-11) observe that these
companies:
1. Are significantly less
likely to have early entrepreneurial success, often getting off to a slow start, but winning the long race.
2. Do
not require a charismatic leader, with its leadership more concerned with
architecting an enduring institution than on
being a great individual leader.
3. Seek
profits but are equally guided by a core ideology -- core values and sense of
purpose beyond just making money.
4. Ask
the question, “What do we actually believe deep down to our toes?”
5. Almost
religiously preserve their core ideology -- changing it seldom, if ever, and do
not drift with the trends and fashions of the day.
6.
Are not afraid to
commit themselves to audacious goals, using them to grab its people in the gut, get their juices flowing, and creating
immense forward momentum.
7. Are so clear about what
they stand for and what they’re trying to achieve that they simply don’t have room for those unwilling or unable to
fit their exacting standards.
8.
Make some of
their best moves by experimentation, trial and error, and opportunism than by brilliant and complex strategic planning.
9.
Tend to rely on home-grown leadership than imports
to stimulate fundamental change.
10.
Focus primarily on beating themselves than beating
the competition.
11. Transcend
the “Tyranny of the OR” - believing that stability and
progress, and conservative practices and
audacious goals should and can happen together.
12. Use a
mission statement only as one of thousands of steps in a never-ending process
of expressing the fundamental characteristics listed above.
The
authors use these twelve findings to challenge the corresponding myths about
effective and enduring companies. If successful secular
corporations are, contrary to conventional expectations,
concerned with core values, church and parachurch organizations must do no
less. These twelve destroyers of management myths challenge the church
leadership to re-examine its way of effecting church growth.
As
these findings have direct implications on how churches should be run, we
present, in the same sequence of the above-listed
twelve findings, the challenges posed by the shattering of the twelve
corresponding myths, as follows:
1. The
Myth of the Great Start. Perhaps churches should not be
too bowled over by early successes nor disheartened by a
slow start, and should be more concerned about making a biblically
grounded start -- more steadfast about being true to God than to churning out startling
growth figures.
2. The
Myth of the Charismatic Leader.
Instead of waiting for a charismatic leader to appear, churches should look for how God has been trying to
stir its people to build a mission that lasts. Collins and Porras (1994, 7)
emphasize that a charismatic leader is “absolutely not required for a visionary company and, in fact, can
be detrimental to a company’s long-term prospects.” They cite the example of 3M as a model of a visionary
company, yet one that doesn’t seem to
have, and have had, an archetypal, high-profile, charismatic visionary leader
(1994, 11-12). Founded in 1902, it has had ten generations of chief executives,
none of whom are particularly well-known. This finding on companies that last
is especially pertinent when mega-churches
and their pretenders are increasingly being compared to multinational corporations and the pastoral leader to the CEO.
3. The
Myth of the Bottom line. Instead of being possessed by
bottom line results, churches should return, whether in the glow
of apparent success or in the mire of stagnation, to core biblical
values and the sense of being called than being driven. It is telling that
paradoxically, the visionary companies make
more money than purely profit-driven comparison companies. Likewise
focusing on the Bible rather than on purely getting results is likely to get
not only better results but the right kind of results. According to Dallas
Willard, “It is so easy for the leader today to get caught up in
illusory goals, pursuing the marks of success which come from
our training as Christian leaders or which are simply imposed by the world. It
is big,
Big,
always BIG, and BIGGER STILL! That is the contemporary
imperative” (Willard, 1988, 246, emphasis in the original
text).
4. The
Myth of a Fixed Set of Core Values. Asking the question, “What do we actually believe deep down to our toes?” must be the first right
thing to do, not “Which management technique
is most useful for church growth?” On the other hand, Collins and Porras (1994,
8) have also pointed out that there is
no “right” set of core values for a visionary company, emphasizing that “the crucial variable is not the
content of a company’s ideology, but how deeply it believes its ideology and how consistently it lives, breathes,
expresses it in all that does.” This
suggests that organizational success may come to a church even if it is not biblical, so long as it is passionate enough about
whatever beliefs it espouses. This should clearly alert us to the potent danger of fixating on an arbitrary set of
beliefs rather than on God.
5. The
Myth of Constant Change. If
temporal organizations know the strength that comes from not drifting with the trends and fashions of the
day, churches should keep their plumb line always drawn toward the Bible rather than toward what is touted as
leading-edge practices -- for what is
today’s management truth can be tomorrow’s throwaway.
6. The
Myth of Playing Safe. Called
by our Lord and empowered by the Holy Spirit, churches must not shy from setting audacious goals. The
Great Commission is bold to the point of appearing absurd, yet its very force has over the centuries fired the
imagination of God’s people and generated feats of missionary courage and
commitment.
7. The
Myth of Being a Great Place for All. If visionary corporations are not a cosy nest for everyone, with their clarity and commitment of
stand making workaholics out of some and cynics out of others, a church must not strive primarily to be pleasers
of men. Church leaders must not lead by promulgating politically correct
messages. If the church atmosphere is more like relaxation therapy than confrontation with truth, something is
fundamentally wrong for Jesus said, “If the world hates you, keep in
mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own”(John 15:18-19a).
8. The Myth of
Strategic Planning. Making things work by experimentation rather
than by following any textbook on corporate
strategic planning is the hallmark of visionary company. Such a finding is
reassuring to churches who feel like country cousins in a world of global corporations. Instead of going for MBA
pyrotechnics, churches should just give the visionary companies’ “Let’s just try a lot of stuff and keep
what works” (Collins & Porras, 1994, 9) a try.
9. The
Myth of the Outside CEO Saviour. According to Collins and Porras (1994, 10), “visionary companies have
“dashed to bits the conventional wisdom that significant change and
fresh ideas cannot come from insiders.” Forget or delay getting a turnaround
CEO from outside. Bite the bullet and let
the Spirit work from within.
10.
The Myth of Beating the
Competition. Leading the
church into being the community God wants
it to be rather than being better than the church next door ties in with
biblical values -- with the value of
being called rather than being driven, being perfected rather than being compared.
11. The
Myth of the “Tyranny of the OR”.
Conservative church leaders may fear that adopting new
methods will cost them their soul, while the so-called progressive ones may be
more apologetic about their church’s obsolescent practices
than steeped in apologetics. The Japanese have turned it into a
precise art-form: they have kept their culture while absorbing
advancements in technology
and management science. Likewise church leaders can work toward the synergy
that comes from keeping the faith and trying the new -- so long as the medium does not mangle the message.
12. The Myth of the
Mission Statement. Crafting a mission statement or making a banner out
of the Great Commission will not make it
happen. The church needs to say it and live it.
How Then Should the Church
Develop?
Apart from urging wariness and watchfulness in
handling the tools of management science, our analysis prescribes how churches
should develop. There are three routes to take, namely being technology, marketing or organization-driven.
The technology or product-driven companies are
strong on their product quality and product development -- to the extent that
one US electronics company used to market its product on the premise, “If the customer is smart enough he’ll
buy it. And if he doesn’t, he’s stupid.” Such companies tend to spend
little time and effort to market its products and develop its organization, believing that the product will sell itself.
Organizational inertia will widen the gap between its technological sophistication and the way it reaches
out to its customers and manages and develops
its people. Churches cannot afford to be smugly product-driven, though the
Bible is a great product. They cannot
justify boring sermons by avowing a greater concern for substance than for form. They cannot think globally while
refusing to act locally just because the message has universal truth. If Christ became the Incarnate Word to reach out to
man, the church must customize the
delivery of its message to reach out to different countries, cultures and communities.
Does it then mean that churches should be
marketing and customer-driven? We have cautioned against being customer-driven, whether the customer is an internal or
external customer. The church leader
must attend to the members, as Christ must begin with the people closest to Him
in the crowd. But Christ’s respect for
his followers, many of whom were of inferior social standing, is not be confused with the too common political
practice of pandering to the base wishes of the lowest common denominator. While the church leadership must act locally,
it cannot be overemphasized that
customer focus must not be the first priority. Putting customers first lets the
torch of modernity enter the Christian citadel by the front door. Practising
customer-driven leadership is really
massaging egos rather than pruning them with the glory and grace of God
Customization
must heed Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 famous dictum, “The medium is the message.”
While he is disliked by social scientists and his ideas are now seldom
discussed, according to Charles Van Doren (1991, 356-59), his
central idea that “the medium through or by which
a communication is communicated affects the content and effect of the
communication” is undeniable. Churches are
increasingly using the stage play to communicate the message of Christmas
and Easter. But just as a stage play becomes a different work when it is
transferred to film, the gospel narrative when
preached from the pulpit becomes different when presented on stage.
A free-flowing service gives a different colouration to the same theme conveyed
in a precisely scripted service. The answers may not be
forthcoming but when he decides to use a different,
perhaps more accessible, medium, every church leader must ask the question -
not
whether
the medium would affect the substance but “How will it enhance, adulterate or
simply change the message?”
By the
sheer Americanization of corporations, they are becoming more market-driven
while sustaining the technological and product edge. Few are
organizationally driven. By this we mean that few companies are as
painstaking in developing the fibre of its organization as it has been in presenting its fabric. For instance,
technological, marketing or other business reasons have led companies to merge but without much regard for how
the two former organizational subsets are gelling together (M&A,
standing for Merger & Acquisition, is sometimes more like murder and acquisition).
Generally companies develop a
product from the marketing and product technology perspectives, and
treat organization development as an after-thought. Though companies may
proclaim people as their most valuable assets, in
effect they manage people as their most valuable utility. Values-based leadership4
is a positive but infant development. Against the previous tide and
anticipating emerging trends, the Christ-led
approach is distinctly organization-driven: it focuses on how to
keep
the band of disciples together and get them reach out to others together. While
most organizations are either skeptical of the impact of
being organization-driven compared to being technology
or marketing-driven and chary of becoming too inward-looking to be of any use, Christ
spent his time developing those who would listen, not winning over those who
thought they knew better.
Declaring
that he is not a practising Christian, management philosopher James O’Toole asserts,
“The ultimate measure of Christ’s leadership is that the
movement he founded continued to spread after his death. In fact,
from the moment of his first conversions, Christianity belonged not to Christ
but to the Christians” (O'Toole, 1996, 11). We may not agree with his last
sentence, but his emphasis on discipling, from a non-Christian
perspective, is perceptive. Christ, he adds, realized
that he must create disciples, who each must become a leader of leaders
(O'Toole, 1996, 11).
The
idiom, “preaching to the converted,” suggests that the intra-family effort is
needless but, according to philosopher-minister Dallas Willard, that is
precisely what says Christian leaders should
do more of. Responding to the call to disciple-making leadership, he says, will
effect changes beyond the confines of churches. To reach out, Christian leaders
must not do outreach but should do what they have failed to do: make disciples,
in the New Testament sense of the term. Sounding quite
iconoclastic, Professor Willard asserts:
Ministers
pay far too much attention to people who do not come
to services. Those people should, generally, be
given exactly that disregard by the pastor that they give to
Christ. The Christian leader has something more important to do than pursue the
godless. The leader’s task is to equip
saints until they are like Christ (Eph 4:12), and history and the
God of history waits for him to do this job (1988, 246, italics in the
original).
We
have come full circle. Management science is not a Christian discipline,
certainly not a Christian invention. In sizing it
up, we urge watchfulness as well as openness. Watchfulness
because it can do good
and thereby tempt us with idolatry, because of the mental laziness that leads
us to go for what works rather than what’s right, and because even corporations
need to spot the witch doctors.
Openness because we must not swing into the NIH syndrome, for as the 19th
century minister George MacDonald wrote, “Truth is truth, whether from the lips
of Jesus or Balaam” (cited in Lewis, 1946,
27).
Just as we wander into open and unfamiliar
grounds searching for ways to avoid the pitfalls and minefields, we discover that a new trend in
management science has turned to spiritual, even Christian, roots. Values-based leadership, once patronizingly viewed as
an unbusiness-like excursion or shot
down as subversive intrusion, is gaining a toe-hold into the corporate chambers. Now the more profound management gurus
are preaching the value of putting values above expedience and techniques.
Just as we are exploring the world of practical
management, a small band of management thinkers
have discovered our world of values-based discipling. Just as mega-churches are
drawn toward the multinational CEO
model of leadership, hard-nosed business leaders are seeking the secrets of Christ’s leadership success. Just as
Christian leaders are trying not to be too heavenly to be of earthly use, corporate chiefs are looking
for heavenly inspiration to lift them out of mundane management into
exhilarated leadership.
Management science as a carrier of modernity cannot
and should not be ignored. It is naive to embrace it wholesale as biblical stewardship. Vilifying it is throwing
out the baby with the bath water. The battle-lines must be made explicit, and
we must know where to pitch battle and where to work things through.
We should use core biblical values
as a compass for navigating through the tides and trends of the
day. We may even set the pace by taking back the initiative for developing a
values-based, indeed Christ-centred, leadership.
Facing
the facts and fads of management science has taught us that modern is not
always the best. Latest is not the greatest. The constancy of
biblical truth is the ultimate and practical test.
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Endnotes
1Wright (1994a). Wright expanded his
thesis in The Moral Animal: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (1946b).
2The term “management science” is used broadly to
cover a systematic body of management knowledge and practices developed through theory and research
using conceptual and research tools borrowed from the more mature scientific disciplines. Coverage is not confined to
such tough-minded subjects as quantitative methods and operational research nor does it exclude the more
tender-minded approaches of tapping the intuition or experience of CEOs and
other organizational practitioners. While there is great art in managing
people, much science in needed to bring
order to the complexity of this art. Similarly, putting scientifically
researched principles into practice is considerable
art form. We prefer this term to “management art” because the field of
management is drawn toward the mainstream
of science and its methodology (even if purists may question whether it will
ever meet rigorous scientific criteria,
and critics brush it off as a potpourri of homespun wisdom, showbiz, hastily
churned out and speedily abandoned
“findings”, quack corporate remedies, and tough-minded business know-how). The
growing number and status of
management schools, professors and journals -- financially owing to the support
of industry -- attests to the enhanced
credibility of management as an applied science in the eyes of both academia
and industry. Retreating to “gut feel” and the school of “hard knocks” as the
sole justification for one’s management practice is no longer a credible defence, and common sense and practice
is being tested as hypotheses in organizational studies -- thereby affirming
the shift of the subject toward a more scientific platform.
3The blurb by Sam Keen appears on the back
cover of Harper Perennial edition published in 1994.
4Values-based leadership is best represented by
James O’Toole (1996). While the book has been hailed as a “deeply philosophical and eminently practical study of
leadership of change” by no less than James McGregor Burns, it is still
a rare gem amid the proliferation of standard how-to management primers that
organizational leaders rely on.