The Blue Ocean Fills With Blood

I think I first posted my thoughts about the awful Blue Ocean Strategy concept here. That was back in February 2009, when a fairly prominent Atlantean educator decided to make it his reason for living (or something like that). In that post, I pointed out that the idea was an ancient one, with a cautionary tale attached to it.

A month later, I then made a prediction about the likely success of this strategy as applied in the education sector. That post can be found here. In this second post, I also coined the term 'lazy innovator strategy', which has since found its way into my research findings.

Scandalised further by more repetitions (parrot-like) of this philosophy, I then wrote a third post here. In this post, I pointed out that the whole idea was also a case of stating the obvious, overgeneralising, and then making a lot of money out of it.

Finally (or so I thought), I came to some conclusions about the viability of the Blue Ocean Strategy in a fourth post here. In that post, I pointed out that the evolving situation was more like that of a stagnant pond or a Sargasso Sea, than an ocean of any sort (let alone a blue one).

A year after the first post I mentioned, I felt a great need to indulge in mockery. This I duly carried out, but not without some stirrings of guilt. That guilt led me, the very next day, to post some soothing words for baby wyverns.

Where am I going with this?

Well, on Saturday night and the night just passing, I heard many things about the fate of the blue ocean of this particular iteration of the Blue Ocean Strategy. Apparently, the blue ocean has been filled with blood and fire. It is not the safe haven it used to be; indeed, the sulfurous stink of gunpowder now fills the air, and 'Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke' as Chesterton said.

I have another dangerous flaw in my character besides a habit of mocking people (the Good Book warns about sitting in the seat of mockers, so I try very hard not to): I also have a bad habit of saying, "I told you so."

We await further interesting changes at the Citadel. It is a mystery who will emerge with mastery. But some persons are too gross to serve.

Sailing To Byzantium

Events of the last few weeks have further hardened my convictions that the 'Blue Ocean Strategy' is indeed total rubbish. Handpicked studies etc — the so-called research is equivalent to saying that 'what works, works' or that 'what is new, is new'. ANY successful technology is successful because others did not achieve that particular success. The best part is the hypocrisy of it all; the 'Blue Ocean Strategy' is marketed by 'Red Ocean' means. That's because you need the entire Red Sea to sustain a blue pond, if you're being honest with yourself.

But away from this evil and ugly rubbish; let's look at a considerably more beautiful picture of a dying and decadent society upheld by freakish hierophants in nominal service to a besotted emperor. Let me present to you a vision from Yeats:

Sailing to Byzantium

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
— Those dying generations — at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

It was a long time ago, when I was a wee bairn, that I first copied out the words of this poem. I have never forgotten it, through the days of my life and the dark nights of the soul. It goes together with the dozen or so others which have enriched the barren wastelands of a long journeying.

Political

A short while ago, I told Adobe that I was not a political sort of person. He chuckled a bit, misspelled my name yet once more, and said, "The word is not 'political', the word is 'strategic'."

He was right. It's true to a very large extent that humans are political animals. Given any society at all, they will learn the social behaviours that are considered polite, they will build cohesive units that will eventually bloom into cities.

But 'strategic' is a whole different class of animal. To admit that I am not a strategic sort of person is a painful thing. On further examination, I think that this is true. I am not 'strategic' without a lot of effort. I can approximate the planning and leadership necessary for such a role, but it is not natural to me, and indeed, rather difficult.

It's not that I'm not a team player. Rather, I resent being made to be part of a team when it is obvious that it isn't really one. I've been in teams where the behaviour of some of the members has nothing to do with the explicit goals of the team, but has in fact been in a different direction altogether.

I've had to work with people whose main aim in life is to lead a comfortable existence, not the difficult one which their role demands. This inevitably made some of them toadies, flunkies, and other boot-licking types. The gratuitous rear-grooming kind of behaviour still appalls me, but at least I no longer have to walk past such people and pretend that they are esteemed partners in a high calling.

I'm sure some of my readers have experienced the company of such people too. I'm sure you have cringed whenever one of them tells the boss how great he is because of a dull (or garish) efflorescence of wit. It is akin to people clapping when a certain government minister told the public that a 'final solution' was on the way in the context of national healthcare. You might as well laud the opening of 'concentration camps' or the related improvement in 'mass transit'.

But that's all political stuff, and even if I can't help but being humanly political, I never was able to be strategic about showing my distaste. And that can get a person into trouble, as I've found out several times. What a world we live in!

A Blue Ocean Strategy (Again)

It's interesting to see how some people have seized on Kim and Mauborgne's Blue Ocean Strategy to disguise their strategic flimsiness, enhance their fading looks, or baffle the outside world. Kim and Mauborgne are respectable researchers from INSEAD, and they have spent a lot of time looking at 150 case studies in retrospect.

As with any historical or psychohistorical research, it's possible to frame the past in a paradigm of our own choosing. That's why the Dark Ages never quite lost that sense of desolate misadventure even though they were never really dark. Of course, modern scholars try not to use that abused term.

The same thing seems to apply to Kim and Mauborgne. It is of course clear that a competitive approach accrues to the company (or state, or institution) which markets a product (or uses a process, or makes a tool) that nobody else does. It is equally clear that a 'blue ocean' — the conceptual zone (or area of knowledge, or way of knowing) in which one has no competitors — will one day turn red as multiple competitors appear.

So what is new? Well, the answer seems to be that you can publish old stories in 41 languages if you're from INSEAD and sell hundreds of millions of copies.

The problem, as I've said before (I think in two other posts), is that in this age of globalism, blue oceans are more like blue puddles. They turn muddy and then red in no time at all. But the heinous and subtle criminality of likening an educational institution to a company using a blue ocean strategy has serious consequences.

Why? Because if you run a school and say you are using a 'blue ocean strategy', it means that you are deliberately seeking to avoid competition and make profits from your monopoly. Anyone who has read the Kim & Mauborgne book would see that straight away. In some cases, we've come to accept that some institutions (like Harvard, for example) may indeed seem to want to become supreme players and thus suck even more capital out of their global 'neighbourhood'.

But only a vastly cynical person would run a high school with this kind of idea in mind, especially when one has already a superior brand. Rather, such an institution should go for self-sustaining excellence which doesn't come from doing the educational equivalent of manipulating dubious derivatives. Dressing up somebody else's wine in new bottles is not quite the same as a blue ocean strategy.

A Blue Ocean Strategy (Redux)

The other day, I was asked, "So what do you think of so-and-so's 'blue ocean strategy' thing? He seems quite hot on it and he's wasted many hours telling us about it so that we can tell the Imperial Assessors about it too!"

Well, as a former eunuch of the Forbidden City (haha, the process is reversible, you know) I can say what I think. I am 99% sure that there are a few of my former colleagues who think it is a silly idea for that kind of institution, but who don't dare to comment on it simply because the axeman might come for them. I am 99% sure that there are also a few who don't know what is implied by a 'blue ocean' strategy. The reason I have used a 99% confidence level is that I am 100% certain that there is a 1% chance that you would be unable to prove either point definitively for 'a few' people.

I remember that I once asked, "Do we have any strategy that is based on our own principles exclusively and rationally?"

The reply was, "Why spend so much time to reinvent the wheel? We can adapt any strategy to our situation."

It is a 'lazy innovator' strategy. This isn't to say that 'lazy innovation' is a bad thing; it saves energy and effort when you stand on the shoulders of giants. However, if you don't rise above that level, then it actually wastes energy and effort. Think about it: you spend a lot of time and energy climbing up there on someone else's account but go no higher than you would have gone on your own... how sad!

This is what I predict for the fabled and fabulous 'blue ocean strategy': I predict that it will sink like a stone once the Imperial Assessors have walked away. A Grand Canal is not a blue ocean; and in this day and age, as I've said before, it is very hard indeed to find blue oceans anywhere.

Note (1): The 'lazy innovator' strategy is not a very well-known concept. However, you can think of it as a strategy in which an innovator deliberately and with forethought attempts to make the smallest possible innovation that will give the greatest possible useful strategic development (as opposed to tactical development or instrumental change) in the existing situation. This is unlike most 'continuous innovation' strategies in which the object is to maximize yield or improve things without looking at the 'doing almost nothing, zen-master style' possibility or the 'climb up on shoulders of giants' possibility and such. The problem in this case was that the old fellow was not deliberately applying the strategy; he was using it without thinking!

Note (2): Actually, it was instructive to listen to the old fellow tonight at the Parliament of Wyverns. It was amazing how much he was not telling. There is obviously a strategic brain in there, but it is almost totally engaged in self-preservation and not institutional progress. (Updated at 20:00.)

Grand Mastery

Just this morning I was reading the second part of a fascinating interview with Viswanathan Anand, the current World Chess Champion and one of the most pleasant human beings you might find at such an exalted level. What really intrigued me was his very historically-minded response to this question: "After 20 years of dedicating your life to the sport, a piece of code on a PC is your equal. After all your years of effort, a “mindless” program can match you. Do you feel that way sometimes?". Here's an extract:

"There must have been a point when the information in the libraries was more than that was contained in your head. There are lots of things that humans used to do, which we no longer do better than machines. It would be interesting to compare it with those moments.

"In 1997-98 we felt this very strongly. Now there is hardly any interest. Because it is over, you know it is like running against a car. There are some things we do much better than computers but since most of chess is tactically based they do many things better than humans. And this imbalance remains. I no longer have any issues. It is a bit like asking an astronomer does he mind that a telescope does all the work. He takes an image, does image processing. He uses a computer which counts the pixels. Does he feel bad? He is used to it. It is just an incredible tool that you can use.

"Once you are past the initial tussle with your ego, then it just feels natural. Right now it is not an issue. I know my PC is stronger than me at any given time, and to have a chance against it I would spend a couple of weeks thinking about computer chess. How to play against machines. You stop doing anything imaginative, and you become very disciplined tactically. I can probably still compete against it, but what's the point?"

The World Chess Champion's answer is a manifestation of his mastery. The point, to him, is that to compete with a specialised instrument is pointless. In fact, you would have to degrade your imaginative human complexity in order to do so. Yes, it breeds discipline; but what he implicitly says is that the strategic imagination is compromised by the extreme tactical discipline.

To put it in another way, learning to react excellently in the short term leads to a kind of blindness in your strategic horizon. You lose long-term vision if you don't use your assets and skills properly.

I've seen this in real life. I've seen very bright people come to the end of the 20th century thinking that we were about to leave the 20th century behind. What happened subsequently was that the 21st century left them behind, trapped in some sort of conceptual limbo where you listened to gurus whose research was five years out of date and you never surfed the Internet for yourself but got some lackey to do it for you.

That is where the strategic vision died, for those people. Maybe they should play more chess.

A Blue Ocean Strategy

In the last few weeks, by some sort of synchronicity, I've met with many senior and junior members (associate, naturalised, affiliated, and many other kinds) of the College of Wyverns. The news coming out from there is about what seems to be called a 'blue ocean strategy'.

I haven't heard this ancient term for years. In Homer's Odyssey, he sings of the 'wine-dark sea', that complex melange of trading and naval relationships and rivalries that was the Aegean Sea of his time. (There's a great summary article about it here.)

The point about a blue ocean, as opposed to a wine-dark (or 'incarnadine', as Shakespeare puts it) one, is that a blue ocean has no rivalries or contentions and often no complex history. The perspective is that of a navigator and explorer who for the first time chances upon what seems to be a virgin sea.

In a blue ocean strategy, one actively seeks out areas in which one has uncontested supremacy (a famous school song has the line 'to reign supreme in every sphere', and that's a similar idea, but not quite). It is not really like de Bono's idea of surpetition, surpassing and bypassing the opposition by qualitative difference. It's more like a fantasy that doesn't work in a globalised world.

The problem of course is that of the Aegean; if you have many geographical neighbours (or conceptual neighbours), then the ocean is unlikely to be uncontested. You will waste endless resources until you get to something like the Pacific Ocean — only to discover that as you get further away from your civilised roots, you encounter other rivalries, problems and difficulties. You might even be killed and eaten by cannibals on friendly-looking islands.

Meanwhile, your lines of supply run short, and as you head westward (or eastward) for the fabled treasures of the Orient, you find yourself back at your starting place after much hardship. Then people who have learnt from your difficulties come along and do the same thing without the mistakes, thus ensuring larger profits for themselves.

Blue ocean strategising is a fairy-tale. Ask the Portuguese about the Treaty of Tordesillas, and who got a better deal. That treaty has had great relevance to the history of Asia, Africa and South America. But consider the long-term fate of Portuguese and Spanish sea-power. Heh.

Strategic Stabilisation

The worst thing a person can do is to enter an environment without any form of stability and no plan for managing the situation. I mean 'manage' in the literal etymological sense — that is, 'take in hand'. If the situation is not brought to some sort of temporal and temporary equilbrium (whether static or dynamic), then the whole idea of leadership is called into question: you cannot lead where management is impossible because a true leader takes things in hand.

The problem is that in any situation, the new leader (or the impulsive or choleric one) will find internal psychological and external not-so-psychological pressure to do something, anything. Most of the time, this is silly if the thing to be done is not an attempt to create a stable basis for future doings. Some leaders lurch from crisis to crisis, blaming the crises for their own incapability and inability to manage. Some leaders try to make everything look good with whitewash, much as the white lead on an Elizabethan lady's face would have made her look good until the flesh was finally eaten away.

I remember my first major appointment and the silly set of advice I was given: eat with the right people, say the right things, appease the parents, don't be too adventurous, be more adventurous, don't offend people, don't give in to the wrong people. The set taken as a whole, without a stable and rational basis, was silly; the individual pieces of advice may have been of use if a context or framework had been supplied.

In my first year, I took standardised test results in my department to a place above the national average for the first time in a few years. It was not very far above the national average, but it was a good place to seek temporary (and temporal) stability. Subsequently, I found that the person ostensibly directing me did not know that we had been below the national average in the first place, and was goading me into aiming even higher.

Of course, higher was plausibly a better place to be. But what irked me was that this person didn't know anything about the statistical situation at a national level, and seemed not to care for whether a good education was being provided except in the most general and platitudinous terms.

In fact, there was no strategy of in-house stabilisation, and apart from standardised test results, there was not much analysis. I was astounded to realise that there were committees and officers which submitted no reports at all, except the occasional verbal report without hard data (or even soft data). Because of this lack of information, a deliberate process of strategic stabilisation was an impossibility, since nobody knew whether we were anywhere near a state of stability or not.

I realised quickly that what was in effect was either a bicycle or a helicopter paradigm; that is, as long as we were moving, we were all right. The metaphor also meant that if we suddenly found ourselves moving in a disastrous direction, the likelihood of correcting our trajectory would begin slim and head towards tenuous before hitting non-existent. Fortunately, the density of the medium helped to correct by providing a modicum of inertia, and we survived quite a long while by general flailing.

Strategic Direction

You can be a policeman at a busy street junction where the traffic lights are down. This means you direct traffic, but this is only tactical direction. It is a coping strategy. You just try to make sure the intersection doesn't get totally blocked, that gridlock is not an option under your watch. This is what most people are doing in today's knowledge economy (and yes, the 'real' economy too).

But quite often, a strategic vision is needed: not just a list of fancy-sounding bullet points cobbled together after lunch in your office, but a genuine plan for making sure traffic is always smooth (and indeed, even better) when you're the officer in charge. This is true for every part of life. Otherwise, your resource expenditure, since it is based on short-term goals, becomes wasteful. It becomes drudgery, slavery to the mundane and quotidian.

Good strategic direction is normally resented by about 20% of the people. This is because that's the fraction who understand that a) you're doing something they're not, b) you're doing something they can't, c) you're doing something they don't understand, and d) it's something they don't know about but know they won't like it.

A lot of management books say you have to bring people on board, enthuse them, and so on. Yes, you can do all of that. There will always be that 20%. Just neutralise them and get on with it, or get on with it and ignore them. And in the end, if that 20% causes you problems, you just have to remember that good strategic direction sometimes won't win either. Heh.

Statistical Problem

It is amazing how much data you can tease out of the Internet without spearing yourself on the Official Secrets Act. Right now, I am contemplating putting up full data sets (all publicly available data) on the usual page. Then people with better statistical know-how can have some fun (especially those of you who have nothing better to do with your wonderful but now totally wasted minds). What do you think?

On a more directed note, let's consider this situation.

An institution generates data for about 1500-4000 individual humans working in it over a period of about 20 years, with the mean being somewhere around 2200 humans. These data take the form of appraisals of each of these individuals, with at least 80% of it being made available to members of the public. Of particular interest are the data on the longitudinal development of the appraised individuals.

The longitudinal development process is called 'education', and etymologically consistent with that term, it is a long drawn-out process. During this process, various interventions are applied. This is sometimes called 'teaching', but a lot of it is also 'coaching', 'mentoring' and 'having fun locally or overseas'; there are in all something like 120 definitively different interventions. The outcomes are reported in public documents in a reified statement to the effect of: "Success has been achieved. Holistic upgrading for the win."

[digression] Actually, this is pretty true in a literal sense. Success has been achieved, as defined in some ways; remember that etymologically speaking, 'success' means 'the chronological outcomes of a process' — hence the phrase 'a succession of events'. which means each event succeeds (is the successor to) a predecessor event. And of course, holistic upgrading is always for the win, or it would pretty pointless. [/digression]

What do you think a conscientious researcher would do in an attempt to improve future outcomes in such an institution?

Vision And Mission

I've been speculating on the nature of organisational progress. The hardcore stuff will of course be work, but here is what I think: I think that you need at least two kinds of people, in a roughly 1:5 ratio — the vision types and the mission types. It is tempting to suggest that the former are primarily divergent thinkers and the latter are convergent thinkers; I shall fall into that temptation because it is convenient.

We can review organisational effectiveness in terms of a) expanding the core competency or b) expanding the legitimate reach of the organisation. This is predicated on the assumption that organisational effectiveness means that the organisation becomes more effective with time at spreading whatever it is that it is supposed to be spreading. Of course, some people do not think an organisation should spread, but external pressures must at the very least be resisted or the organisation will shrink.

This is not to say that the organisation necessarily has to expand in terms of expenditure, physical size, or number of staff. The focus here is on the size of the organisation's self-image. Does it think of becoming more influential? Does it think of using data to inform its processes, thus making them more effective (or efficient, if the two coincide)? Does it think of new ways of doing these things? This is about vision.

Neither is this to say that an organisation necessarily have to think of new things to do or new things to mess around in. The focus here is on the shape of the organisation's self image. Does it retain its fundamentals — its reason for existence, its orientation towards the world, its approach to doing things, its ideas on what ought to be done? This is about mission.

Three kinds of organisational problems can arise in this model.

Firstly, if there is low vision, then there is low real growth. The organisation will not become a benchmark for its industry, or if it does, it is based not on quality, but on quantity. Conversely, an organisation with vision may not be #1 in size (in staff or physical plant) but may be #1 in qualitatively substantial ways (brand name, style etc). The staff will stay on because they are enthused by this vision (and not merely attracted by being able to tout the brand on their CVs). They will stay on because the organisation is developing them as people. Another common problem is some people don't know what a vision is, or that vision can be refocussed.

Secondly, if there is random departure from the mission, then there may be bloat and overdiversification. The sense of direction towards the visionary horizon is thwarted. But because most people are used to convergent thinking (consider the phrases 'staying on task', 'toeing the line', 'keeping the faith' and other defensive options), this is seldom a problem. The more serious problem may be deliberate departure from the mission, in which case the organisation may succeed, but not in terms of its original intent. This can be considered to be mission failure; it is as if a 30-day lunar probe were to end up sending data back from Venus for 30 seconds. Some people might consider this a great success though.

Thirdly, if the 1:5 ratio is significantly off (e.g. too few visionaries or too many missionaries), then the organisation may become a provincial circus, in which the same acts with minor variations are repeated everyday to the easily-impressed. The organisation may also become a marching band, in which impressive acts of trained synchronic movement are carried out. There is then the semblance of creativity, where the term 'choreography' is more apt. The organisation may also become a kaleidoscope. This produces pretty pictures all the time, but the pictures are unrelated except by the fact that the production process automatically imposes visual symmetry on what is essentially a chaotic process with chaotic outcomes.

All these problems can be seen as small states with large budgets gear up to take advantage of large states with no common sense. This is an artifact of globalisation. What I'm waiting for is when standards become truly global, with inspection teams walking into all kinds of organisations at random and information control becomes near-impossible. Then the nimblest and most focussed tight-rope walkers and lion-tamers will survive; the rest may have to become human cannonballs or clowns.

Incrementalism

It's long been held in social and political life that getting things done requires a hard-headed approach. Although the literature shows that a 'nice first, then tit-for-tat' approach is a winning game rule in most cases, this is sometimes spun to show that the last person to act in a heavy-handed way should win.

This is very close to deficit thinking, by which I mean a philosophy of life in which avoiding losses is better than achieving gains, and in which risk avoidance trumps risk-taking. It is also somewhat related to the idea of achieving incremental gains (sums of very small increments, like an integration problem in calculus) as opposed to higher-risk quantum gains (large jumps, but be careful that you land safely).

But the long-term payoffs are interesting to see. Because human faith and sight are limited, we tend to look at the near horizons, like bacteria in petri dishes. Contrary to this, the fact is that if we leap out of the petri dish, we will find it hard to ever go back. This is the key point about long-term payoffs in optimistic strategies: that if you succeed, there will not be sufficient losses to bring you back to square one. On the other hand, short-term payoffs with pessimistic strategies tend to keep you mired in the petri dish.

One last caveat though: great leaps forward can often be traumatic. There is often an 'implementation dip' and this may be followed by a short-sighted purge of the leading strategists. Some years later, as abundant gains develop, these gains are then consolidated incrementally, with the incrementalists taking the credit for the abundance.

The Plan: Part I – Criterion 3 Situational Appraisal (Reprise)

Criterion 3 has long been the domain of staff welfare and other staff-related enablers of action. Just recently, I had the opportunity to work with and review and international standard for staff-related matters. This standard is applied far more widely than the anaemic stuff we work with in educational circles.

Briefly, and reworded to retain confidentiality, the three subcriteria in the standard are: a plan designed to ensure rational staff recruitment procedures and follow-up; a plan designed to ensure a high level of staff retention that acknowledges the value of the staff knowledge base and loyalty; and a plan designed to provide individual coaching, staff development, and the meeting of staff aspirations (not the aspiration of staff meetings, ha ha). A close examination of this international standard reveals that international standards for fair staff appraisal, transparency and compensation are higher than local ones.

That is not to say that the actual application of those standards results in better staff-related policies. In fact, it is not common that this is so. However, the fact that such standards exist (as, for example, the human rights standards promulgated by the UN) can act as an inspiration towards better things.

Here, for example, are four maxims from the New York Academy of Sciences, regarding the making of legendary research teams (Burke, 2008). It's probably applicable to many knowledge-based enterprises.

• Hire well
• Be more guide than boss
• Do your best to foster an open, congenial, collaborative culture
• Put teaching and career development first, research second

This year the Chinese celebrate the Year of the Rat, associated with wealth, intelligence, charm, cunning and double-edged weapons. I wonder how these attributes will play out when applied to the world of human resource management. It would be very short-sighted for any institution to continue to operate with a 15-20% staff turnover rate without significant overhaul of its internal procedures.

=====

Reference: Burke, A.; NYAS Mag., Winter 2008, p.21.

The Plan: Part I – Criterion 3 Situational Appraisal

The staffing of a school is always important. If the human resource department is doing its job, staff are recruited in an open and transparent process which is effective at bringing in quality at rates which are competitive both for the employer and employee. Once recruited, staff develop high morale, perform well in open appraisal, are acknowledged by their colleagues for their successes and contributions, and have access to all necessary training.

This state is maintained by careful needs analysis, interviews which are constructive and open-ended, and developmental sessions which are helpful and non-threatening. This state is improved by fulfillment of training needs in a convenient and effective way, genuine team-building, proper acculturation and mentoring processes that are directed and helpful.

A negative state is often indicated, created or maintained by several obvious things. These include low but persistent unhappiness, lack of financial support, dysfunctional teams, uninspiring management or leadership, closed or opaque processes for evaluation and appraisal, and excessive effort for minimal returns in terms of acknowledgement and bonuses. A high staff turnover rate, say in excess of 5%, is also a pretty obvious indicator.

A simple question can be asked, which if answered truthfully, will reveal the perceived staff quality at all levels: "Would you recommend your immediate superior/subordinate/cubicle neighbour for a promotion in grade?" The fewer positive answers are received, the worse the situation; conversely, if everyone says yes, either they all have no clue or they are all happy with the existing quality. In any case, positive returns should mean that the school has reached steady state in morale.

Negative answers are more useful because they reveal what can be done to improve the school as a whole. In general, any problems with staff morale, welfare, competence and ability should be examined carefully to see if related school processes are inadequate or lacking. Staff should be happy, healthy, effective and clever. Sometimes, a relative lack in one of these traits as compared to the rest is enough to cause problems. The HR department must be perceptive and handle this as best as they can. At the same time, it is probably the principal or CEO of the institution who has the greatest part to play.

The Plan: Part I – Criterion 2 Situational Appraisal

It strikes me that quite often, success is a matter of throwing time, effort and resources at a problem until the mission objectives are achieved. The question of sustainable success or elegance in success requires a different solution.

For example, having bottomless pockets may allow a football club to have the best pick of available players, but having managerial intelligence allows another football club to grow the best players. In the predominant worldview, the first club is the grand success; the second is a qualified success, and that most often described in faint praise.

This idea can be somewhat generalised to schools; some schools will always have a large hinterland and the luxury of advantages in time, space, men, money and machines. With the pick of the available population, it would be a surprise if they achieved less than they do.

But let's just suppose that some of these schools are Catholic or Protestant mission schools. Surely their success should be measured in terms of the quality produced with the most effective, most efficient, most human policies and stratagems. There is something pretty unethical, perhaps immoral, about such an institution solving its problems by continually expending vast amounts of filthy lucre. It smacks of the golden calf, the den of thieves, the love of money and the prestige which that money buys.

The counterargument might sound like this: Our mission is to produce students with properties X, Y and Z; in order to do this, we must use methods which produce better results than secular agencies A, B and C. We are therefore being good stewards of the blessings of God when we spend His money copiously, because it is a trade of Caesar's gold for God's kingdom.

It sounds pretty reasonable. But I don't think that the kingdom of God can be bought with silver and gold (although of course treachery can be paid for in silver). Perhaps it is better to focus on the careful examination of means and methodology through the spiritual lens, counting the cost in human kindness, justice and mercy. The gross exertion of effort without serious thought, coupled with the gross expenditure of money without spiritual guidance, leads to the gross capitulation of an organisation to the subtle charms of the world.

Even in the secular world, it is unusual to find ethical and successful organisations which lack transparency, resort to case-by-case analysis with unclear guidelines, and are bereft opf detailed after-action reporting. The overall picture of an ethical and successful organisation is normally one which takes pains to analyse its successes and failures with full and transparent internal auditing, research, and both quantitative and qualitative evaluation.

The Plan: Part I – Criterion 1 Situational Appraisal

Every organisation needs a plan, as Nodachi and I were talking about over the last few weeks. Coincidentally, as I was visiting the Great Powers at their little base far away from the White Tower, I bumped into a little book by John C Maxwell. Yes, there are many books by John C Maxwell, and I've read many of them in my career, but this one struck a chord.

As a leader, what kind of people are in your inner circle? That was one of the questions Maxwell posed in that book. He said a few interesting things:

1. If the organisation is to grow, the leader has to develop his inner circle.


2. If the leader doesn't develop his inner circle, the organisation will stop growing effectively and efficiently – although it may continue to grow in size and in terms of accretions.


3. If this happens, the leader is not being a leader.


4. Hence, true leadership involves the correct development of the inner circle.


5. And therefore, you can predict the future direction of an institution by looking at this inner circle.

So, what kinds of people should be in a leader's inner circle?

• People who are always improving themselves in terms of effectiveness and ability – self-starters


• People who are always improving the organisation in the same way – change managers


• People who are able to improve others likewise – mentors


• People who are able to improve the leader himself, by giving honest feedback – mirrors


• People who are going to develop all the other kinds of people – leaders

It is interesting to use this list as a rating guide for any institution that you might be in. If all five are not present, the inner circle is incomplete.

Too many leaders surround themselves with people they are comfortable with, reasoning that people who are comfortable with each other make a better team, and therefore all are 'team players'. But the 'comfortable' part is probably the least important part of being a team; the most important part is that the team carries out the functions required while ensuring that they can be replaced at short notice. This is one principle of highly effective teams.

A team that cannot be replaced with a functional unit in a short time might be an elite team, but it is certainly not good for the organisation in one specific way: it cannot ensure a smooth transition to an equal or higher level of performance in event of disruption to itself.

A team that is too comfortable internally has probably become a clique. Like any good mechanism, it functions smoothly but will be disrupted when the environment changes. But the environment changes all the time; therefore, such a team needs to be disrupted by honest and uncompromising feedback, perhaps from unlikely sources who come from one of the five 'inner circle' categories listed above.

A team that is comfortable is likely to be incomplete, because a complete inner circle is full of people who cannot accept the existing level of performance. If they did, they would not be improvers; they would be comfortable. "Iron sharpens iron, as one man sharpens another," as the Good Book says. (This is not to say that uncomfortable teams are complete – discomfort can come from dysfunction as well.)

Kipling used to say that part of growing up includes the ability to "meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same." It is particularly instructive to see how leadership copes with triumph, since 'disaster management' is the normal order of the day but 'triumph management' is not. Good triumph management fuels better performance, and not a falling-off into 'same old same old' or other mediocrity. It fuels learning and a renaissance at every corner and every step.

Lastly, leadership communicates in a way that inspires. Without at least the inspiration at human level that leads to better change management and improvement, the organisation starts to stiffen up as the leadership tries to codify previous triumphs and avoid disaster. This is not to say that reckless inspiration wins, but that inspiration should be available which does not draw upon past triumphs or the fear of future failure.

These were some random thoughts as I sat in front of the 50000-word overview of situation that came my way. I wonder if any of them will be of use. And for now, I will append Kipling's admonitory and inspirational words, as my father gave them to me.

IF

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream — and not make dreams your master,
If you can think — and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings — nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And — which is more — you'll be a Man, my son!

Things To Do

The tumult and the shouting dies,
The captains and the kings depart;
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice:
An humble and a contrite heart.

Kipling wrote these line a very long time ago, it seems, in his masterly poem Recessional. But as I walked out of the venerable hallways (a mere one-sixth the age of the Old Home itself) I realised that this is one of the foundation stones of the whole edifice. We as an institution have done well, but there are still areas for improvement.

Here are a few notes buzzing inside my head.

1. Surely we need not be so wasteful and inefficient in terms of time management. The effectiveness is there, but the pontificating should not take a week. (Etymological note: Latin pontifex, modern 'pontiff', means 'bridge-builder'.) In fact, the more we approach the 'just in time' paradigm, the more we will become like Toyota and other successful and intelligent corporations, where there is little unnecessary make-work.

2. The skills need to be taught more effectively. It cannot be true that extremely close and detailed supervision is something that is a sign of the self-directed learner. And it isn't always successful either. Sometimes, you need to have more experience as a supervisor and the student needs to require less supervision. Idle bums.

3. Knowledge can be over-compartmentalised. And also spammed. It is ridiculous for humans to chew up food, digest it, make it into neat lumps, and then feed it to others to eat. But this is what happens in most academic classes worldwide. Need it be that way here as well? I hope not.

4. Knowledge is a vast net, a great tapestry. But what happens is that people are making snapshots and passing them off as the real thing. The idea of weaving a large tapestry appears too daunting simply because the likely instructors are limited to hand-waving and knitting of small baby items, it can appear. Thank goodness this is not always true.

5. I am very optimistic about the future. I have great respect for the past. What presents itself as the truth tends to require both these perspectives in order for people to understand it and to feel secure about it. Only insecure people seek to control information without spending the necessary time to teach people about information in the first place. If anything, that is the one thing I am not so optimistic about.

Towards the end of Kipling's poem, he writes:

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe –
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law –

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget!

Amen.

Understanding

It's a bit like being outstanding. When you're out standing, you're over-exposed and vulnerable. When you're under standing, you must check to see what you're standing under. And as my father always says, when someone uses 'therefore', you should ask yourself what it is there for. Simple bits of wisdom.

And this is why strategic planning doesn't work so well at times. It's probably because people aren't thinking about what a strategic plan is. A year isn't long enough for a strategy to work out. A simple exercise to think about: What are the possible reasons why not having mid-year exams in Year 3 translates to better grades at the end of Year 4? A tough exercise to think about: What are the possible reasons why mid-year exams return despite the aforementioned good consequences? Further reading for the second question can be found here.

Now you know why I get to do history, economics, literature and natural sciences. I'm crazy. Haha.

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Edit: my students of political science, business and other sociological disciplines could take a look at this blog for some interesting and useful posts.