Con la Declaración de San Simón (4-VII-2010) se ha clausurado la cumbre de pensadores Estrategar que acaba de celebrarse este fin de semana en la isla de San Simón, en Vigo. Denominada la Isla del Pensamiento, este enclave ha hecho honor a su nombre iniciado su andadura con la reunión constituyente de los pensadores del grupo Estrategar procedentes de Colombia, Brasil, Estados Unidos, Portugal o Chile, así como de diversos puntos de España.

Entre ellos cabe mencionar al colombiano Guillermo Hoyos, Director del Instituto de Bioética de la Universidad Pontificia Javeriana de Bogotá y uno de los grandes filósofos de la actualidad. También acudió a San Simón la coruñesa Susana Martínez-Conde, directora del Laboratory of Visual Neuroscience en el Barrow Neurological Institute de Phoenix, en Estados Unidos.

Tal y como nos explica su director, el profesor Emérito Complutense, Rafael Alberto Pérez, Presidente del Foro Iberoamericano Sobre Estrategias de Comunicación (FISEC) www.fisecforo.org este proyecto aspira a dotar a los hombres de acción de otra forma más articuladora de pensar y hacer sus estrategias.

Los expertos recuerdan que la sociedad nunca fue tan estratégica como lo es hoy, que los cambios jamás fueron tan rápidos e inesperados y que la estrategia es una ciencia de acción indispensable para enfrentarse a los grandes retos del siglo XXI, en los ámbitos de la salud, la educación, el desarrollo, las migraciones, las relaciones internacionales o el reparto de la riqueza.

Por ello ya ante el alto nivel de fracaso de las estrategias que se están implementado y que numerosos estudios sitúa en torno al 80%, los miembros del grupo Estrategar aspiran a proporcionarnos nuevos y mejores modelos estratégicos. Para ello siguen un abordaje transdisciplindar que se manifiesta en los 60 expertos de 18 disciplinas (dos equipos por disciplina), de 21 Universidades y 12 países que lo integran bajo la tutela del padre del pensamiento complejo Edgar Morin.

El Grupo de Investigación Estrategar fue residenciado en la isla de San Simón, en virtud a un convenio firmado en mayo pasado en la Casa de Galicia de Madrid, por el director-gerente de la Fundación Isla de San Simón, Francisco Javier Alonso González, y el presidente del Foro Iberoamericano sobre Estrategias de Comunicación (FISEC) Rafael Alberto Pérez. El objetivo es que este espacio natural único se convierta en un catalizador del pensamiento creativo, mágico, artístico y crítico. Y todo indica que la cumbre de pensadores Estrategar ha sido un buen inicio

During a first phase which lasted throughout the 90s the critiques to the management passed by (or even better, slipped by) without shaking up or altering the discourse of its powerful gurus. Its was like an intermittent idea that appear and vanish.

But this appearance of “there is nothing wrong here” could not avoid these concerns from advancing underground until it broke out in other authors, also anxious and brave. Thus in 1997 Alvin and Heidi Toffler (1997) comes back to the critique of Ormerod to the classic paradigm proclaiming that “on the basis of linearity and equilibrium assumptions, and highly quantified, the dominant paradigm in business management ran parallel to the mechanistic assumptions of western economics which, in turn, tried to limit Newton’s physics”.

Two years later, in 1999, Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger in The Cluetrain Manifesto- www.cluetrain.com- brings a conception of markets as conversational networks, and they berate the loss of real human dialogue between companies and their audience and they sting them into recovering it.

But it would be the 2002 Nobel prize winner, Daniel Kahneman who would moulder the keystone of the classic paradigm by making the weakness of the economic rationality assumption apparent and revealing this and the remaining anthropological assumptions of the economic theory do not correspond with empirical results (Ovejero 2005). What is ultimately being condemned is the dehumanised way with which Management conceives its own operators replaced by simplifying beings (“homo oeconomicus”, “rational being”, “player”, etc.) which in theory behave according to a “rational principle” which does not correspond with the real behaviour of real people. To these critiques we would have to add a wide trend of thought that advocates a recovery of the collateral (Del Bono, 1994) and intuitive (Malcolm Gladwell, 2000, 2005) strands of thought; of transdisciplinarity (Vilar, 1997) and of cultural factor and holistics (Constantin von Barloewen, 2003).

In 2005 Sumantra Ghoshal, professor in the London Business School said “in the desire to create and protect the pretence of knowledge-in our venture to make business studies a science-we may have gone too far in ignoring the consequences not only for our students but also for society” (...) “this all resulting in unrealistic assumptions and invalid prescriptions”.

But it would be Rakesh Khurana (2007), professor in Harvard Business School, who in a book with a long title published by Princeton University and selected by The Economist (8th-14th December, 2007) as one of the year’s best books: “From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession”, blames Management head-on for having lost its way. He criticises the current education system developed by business schools and, above all, the product that leaves them. According to Khurana for some time business schools do not represent the idea with which these schools came into being: making business management a profession comparable in prestige and academic rigour as those of law or medicine. These centres have moved from trying to train students “with certain formal or informal codes of conduct, and, even more fundamental, to an ideal of service” to creating managers whose exclusive concern is to gain benefits for shareholders. According to Khurana himself:
“In the course of this history, the logic of professionalism that underlay the university-based business school in its formative phase was replaced first by a managerialist logic that emphasized professional knowledge rather than professional ideals, and ultimately by a market logic that, taken to its conclusion, subverts the logic of professionalism altogether.(…) “From this historical perspective, business schools have evolved over the century and a quarter of their existence into their own intellectual and institutional antithesis”

In this context, postgraduate executive education has become, according to Khurana, in a business in which the schools sell a product, MBAs, and students are only consumers. And like in any market, there are “brands” that are liked and succeed more than others, many companies have already shown their disillusion with the students that graduate from these business schools due to the scarce development of their interpersonal capacities. The most generalised complaint among the recruiters is that they receive well-trained candidates in everything regarding numbers (accounting, finance, auditing, balance sheets...) but with scarce relational capacities of communication and leadership. In other words, they do not have sufficient executive skills. This has led Leadership Development Programmes to proliferate, in addition to the introduction of other elements such as coaching and boosting personal mentorship in MBAs. Khurana ends by suggesting that Business Schools attempt rebalance their relationships with students, faculty, business and society. In the end, it is about returning to the past, as professor Khurana points out, to recover the essence of what a good manager should be: not only a great expert, but also a person with the capacity to lead a company and at the same time contribute to improving its environment.

These are not empty critiques: the recent business scandals of WorldCom, Enron, Parmalat, toxic assets, etc. are demanding a recovery of business ethics as part of a long term business efficiency model. In this context, authors such as the abovementioned Sumantra Ghosal (2005) blame the current and dehumanised Strategic Management theories for portraying an amoral view of business and a clear lack of responsibility: “Business schools do not need to do a great deal more to prevent future Enron; they need only to stop doing a lot they currently do. They do not need to create new courses; they need to stop teaching some old ones.”

Meanwhile, most Management devotees justify the current state of things and defend themselves like lions pinned to the ground. The critical voices which used to be a minority have grown and rearmed themselves. They are no longer timid proposals on a possible change of paradigm; they are real cries pressing for a deep change. In this new context the most important fact is Gary Hamel´s return to his critiques positions of 1994 asking himself: “The End of Management?” in the title of the first chapter of his new book “The Future of Management” (2007)

So we reach to 2008 and the ground is already prepared for the surprising proposals of the Half Moon Bay group (next post).

Hay mucho despilfarro inútil de nuestras administraciones donde meter mano, sobran muchos altos cargos, muchas dietas y coches oficiales, pero es más fácil sacárselo a los jubilados, funcionarios, etc.

Si participas de esta idea, corre bola, y pon este manifiesto en tu blog, en tu despacho, en tu universidad…

The failure of a high percentage of business strategies is an uncomfortable topic that worry high executives.

While some experts look for an explanation on the theoretical side (the use of wrong models of the strategic process, the weekness of the strategy theory, and so on) the men of action, the real strategic operators prefers put the blame, or the excuse, on the difficulties of the new changing contexts. They are practical men and do not want to hear about new strategy theories or approaches. And they will not do so until a critical level of failures convinced then that the current array of ideas that the Business Schools have sacralised regarding management and strategy have serious vices in their origins, and that they are no longer useful for the new action contexts.

It is for this reason that I would go so far as to say that the most important news in the last few years in the strategy field is the extraordinary coincidence between two critic movements: the proposals that a series of prestigious North American experts grouped under the name “Half Moon Bay Renegades” have just brought forward (2009) and the New Strategy Theory (NST) that the Ibero-American Forum on Communication Strategies (FISEC) has been laying out since 2001.

The fact that two movements so far apart and without communication between them have come to similar conclusions should make us think. These is the story I would like to tell in this pages.
Those who wish to go back to the original source can do so by reading, for the proposals of Half Moon Bay, February 2009’s issue of the Harvard Business Review, and Raul Morales’ comment on the 13th February 2009 in www.tendencias21.net

And for the NST’s proposals you may read the articles published on www.fisec-estrategias.com.ar, FISEC’s academic magazine, indexed in Latindex, and on “Toward a General Theory of Strategy” (Rafael Alberto Pérez and Sandra Massoni, Ariel, 2001).

>1994: the year than Padora´s box was open

If we had to look for a date for the beginning of this story, we could say that it started in 1989 but really emerges in 1994. I will make myself clear:

One of the first critiques to strategic management and at the same time one of the strongest is that of Philip Mirowski. Professor in the University of Notre Dame (Indiana), historian, philosopher of economic thinking, and one of the fathers of neoinstitutionalism. In his book “More Heat Than Light: Economics as Social Physics” (1989) he underlines that the mainstream (inheritor of neoclassic economics) remained trapped under the influence of the paradigm of 19th century physics and unable to contemporise. A line of research which he continued in his book “Machine Dreams” (2001).

But it is in 1994 that three of the most significant critical works are published:
- “Strategy as a field of Study: Why Search for a New Paradigm” (Prahalad y Hamel)
- “The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning” (Minztberg)
- "The Death of Economics" (Paul Ormerod)
Pandora’s box had been opened and critiques appeared endlessly.

These critics, although stemming from the same shared concern, spark off two different reflections without communication between them but quite close in their conclusions, one movement regarding the future of Management and the other the future of strategy

The reflection on the future of management led by anglosaxon experts passed by without making noise during the 1994-2008 period to broke out in 2009 in the proposals of Half Moon Bay (Gary Hamel, “Moon Shots for management”, Harvard Business Review, February 2009) and the other on the future of Strategy stars in 2001 in Rafael Alberto Perez ´s book “Communication Strategy” (Ariel 2001) follows through the- Ibero-American Forum on Communication Strategies- FISEC’s debates, to climaxes on the proposals of the book “Toward a General Theory of Strategy” (Ariel, 2009). We would have to reach the present day for them to meet

(It will continue)

Tomado de Timothy Steffen