Questioning Continuous Improvement (part 1 of 2)

The relatively new term "continuous improvement" is one of those buzzwords that by its very connotative penumbra manages to project a kind of positivity, and it burrowed its way into and eventually set down roots within education circles some time ago.  That's not surprising -- there's a continual back and forth flow between the worlds of education and business, along the channels of marketing, management, training, and that ever-so-ambiguous domain of "leadership."

Throughout my own career in academia, first as a student, then as a professor, a writer, and a coordinator of faculty development and assessment of student learning, a constant background  has been this discourse between the world of business and that of education, sometimes low as an almost soundless murmur, other times out in the open, seemingly subsuming all the available attention from every other kind of activity.  I'd say that in the last five years in particular, "continuous improvement" has shoved and elbowed its way to the front off the line of formulations frequently on the lips and minds of college and university administrators, trickling down to department chairs and committees detailed with laboring that concept, producing plans, reporting data, then doing the whole thing all over again.

Questioning Continuous Improvement

Recently, Harvard Business Review blogger Ron Ashkenas argued a case that It's Time to Rethink Continuous Improvement -- a very welcome suggestion.  I've noted myself, in an Orexis Dianoētikē blog post, that too much weight given to a closely related and similarly endorsed notion, "best practices," not only can easily become a substitute for real thought and good practical reasoning, becoming counter-productive in the process -- the uncritical attitude towards these sorts of buzzword concepts is often indicative of a deeper failure, one which assumes form as institutional culture.

Bernie Madoff, Happy at Last?

It has been several years since the Bernie Madoff story first broke, gradually  exposing more and more portions of a financial investing scam perpetrated for years, a genuine Ponzi scheme, whereby investors were bilked put of quite literally billions of dollars, which were then used to maintain the appearance of high financial yields for investors earlier in, higher up in the pyramid.   It became a more and more desperate juggling act, bound to bust eventually, but only after the sheer number of accounts in the air became unmanageable.

Much has already been written about the elaborate structure, scope, and details of the scam itself, and the lengthy lists of those individuals and institutions which lost money -- often money they could ill-afford  -- has long been worked out.  In fact, one might think there is little left to say about the whole Madoff affair, if it were not for the recent publication of truth and Consequences: Life Inside the Madoff Family, penned by Laurie Sandel, who interviewed in depth the surviving members of Bernie Madoff's family -- his son, Mark, killed himself after the revelation of the scam, in which he appears to have been unwittingly involved.

HBR: The Secret to Dealing with Difficult People

Tony Schwartz, among other things a blogger on the Harvard Business Review network, recently offered advice about a common issue both in the workplace and in one’s non-work life: the need to deal with difficult people, those who fit this description:

Do you have someone at work who consistently triggers you? Doesn’t listen? Takes credit for work you’ve done? Wastes your time with trivial issues? Acts like a know-it-all? Can only talk about himself? Constantly criticizes?

Such people, of course, are not a new or unique feature of modern society.  In his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle discussed such people, as did Plato, Epictetus, Augustine and a number of ancient philosophers in their turn.  Aristotle is particularly interesting to point to, though, because he analyses the emotional response of — and virtues and vices associated with — anger.  I've written about this in greater depth elsewhere on the web (here, here, and here), so I'm just going to mention a few features of Aristotle's theory relevant to Schwartz's advice.

Forbes: Happiest vs. Most Hated Jobs: Is Bureaucracy a Bad Thing?

Teach an Ethics class, and ask students early on what they consider to be major goods in their present or anticipated future life — what will make them happy, what they deeply desire and value —and in addition to family and friends, money, and occasionally education, they will often tell you: career, work, the job for which they are training.  And yet, what makes for the likelihood that one’s profession will realistically render one happy? Jobs are incredibly diverse, and in our present environment, culture, and economy, subject to change.

Steve Denning, author of The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management, recently published and discussed lists — emerging from a recent surveys by CarreerBliss and the National Oganization for Research — of the Ten Happiest Jobs and the Ten Most Hated Jobs, pointing out important features common in each list.  First, the jobs perceived as worst:

Rogue Hormones,Trading, and Courage

An Economist article, Trader’s Brains:  Rogue Hormones, warns us that rogue traders — those who, caught up in the euphoria of successful market trading, allow their normally risk-averse stances and strategies to be overcome — might not be so uncharacteristic of high-volume, high-value, high-reward traders in general.  The research of Cambridge neuroscientist John Coates

suggests that hormones drive investment decisions to a far greater extent than economists or bank executives realise.

This might be somewhat bad news for those of us whose investment stakes and positions, mediated through institutional retirement funds, are measured by a much more modest scale as well, but also — for us Virtue Ethicists — provides an interesting occasion for thinking about the virtue of courage, the vice of foolhardiness, the phenomenon of lack of self-control, and the nature of prudential practical reasoning.

"Corporate Culture" Top Priority for Ethics and Compliance Leaders

A recent report (full version here) by LRN, a company that aims at “fostering ethical cultures” within business environments interprets results from a survey given to Ethics and Compliance executives, and raises some interesting issues adequately visible, perhaps, only from a Virtue Ethics perspective.

The report suggests that, at least for those tasked with promoting some sort of ethics within companies and corporate culture, there is a vital concern with the sorts of moral issues and problems that arise inevitably within business.

Ethics and compliance leaders who participated in the survey see themselves as the champions for creating ethical, values-based cultures: 58 percent of them agree that the primary mandate of their efforts is to ensure ethical behaviors and alignment with core values. In contrast, only 42 percent believe their core mandate is legal and regulatory compliance. Further, 68 percent indicate that creating long-term value for the business is a principal benefit of promoting an ethical culture

Three things need to be pointed out.