THINKING ABOUT

MANAGEMENT
LECTURE #2
PART 2 OF 2
ADMN 4101H – Winter 2022
Tom Phillips
Week of January 16, 2022.
 Managing: For and By Power,
Rationally, and Empirically
Niccolo Machiavelli – Managing For and by Power
• b. 1469; d. 1527 – Italian (Florence) during the Renaissance – Advisor, especially to the
Medici family
• Often quoted. Often, disliked (for good reason), however, he offers lessons on
approaches to management practiced today
• People are “grateful liars and deceivers,” “they shun danger and are greedy for profits,”
“while you treat them well, they are yours… when you are in danger, they turn against
you.”
• An ideal society is where people are safe and prosperous and governed by a State that is
feared at home and abroad (this is like a criticism in the Indigenous Critique – Lecture 2a)
• Managing Heroically and Truthfully is associated with wisdom, justice, and moderation –
this is not. Machiavelli was contrary to previous ideas of management and the dominant
religion in the region at the time – Christianity.
 Niccolo Machiavelli
Managing For and by Power

• to manage a State or an organization well cannot be done by being virtuous

• Success comes from “… the ability to seize the moment, to act opportunistically as
necessity comments, to understand the situation and have the ability as well as the
willingness to take risks and make the most of one’s circumstance.” (Sounds like
Heroism, except for taking risks.) “Men must be won over or they must be destroyed.”
“Peaceful negotiations are bound to fail.”(Jouille and Spillane (J&S), pp. 51-4)
• This approach is often thought of as being self-centered – individual self-interested.
Machiavelli, in fact, put community before individuals.
• Machiavelli in current business life: “…management cannot be disassociated from the
generation and exercise of power. No manager can do without understanding how
power can be secured and how it can be maintained.” (J&S, p 57)
 Niccolo Machiavelli
Managing For and by Power
• “… the true protection of one’s employees is not a display of Christian empathy [like
that of Adam Smith’s concept in his Theory of Moral Sentiments] but the rigid
demand of organizational discipline and performance [like Drucker’s, management
by objectives].” (J&S, p. 57)
• Machiavelli made important contribution to what is now called political science. He
separated politics from knowledge (e.g., Plato) and religion (e.g., Christian values).
And uses perceptions of reality and power to act to preserve the organization.
• For Machiavelli, if an organization is floundering, managers must act decisively
(even ruthlessly), without appealing to tradition or religion to set it on a path of
future success.
• Observed today in politics and business? Yes, perhaps too often.
 Managing Rationally
The Separation of Science from Religion
• In this, knowledge comes from experience and investigation – e.g., the shift from
the religious notion that the Earth was the center of the Universe, versus the truth,
through investigation (by Galileo) that the Earth is one of several planets circling
the Sun.
• There was an underlying notion that the world acts like a machine (i.e.,
mechanism) and that it is made up of many, small particles (i.e., atomism).
• A central figure in these advances (that can be seen in many aspects of life today)
is the French scholar, Rene Descartes (1596 to 1650).
• Descartes followed four principles: 1. Analysis (deduction – from the general to the
specific); 2. Intuition (recognizing self-evident truths); 3. Synthesis (investigating
each part, then incorporating them), and 4. Review (to be sure nothing is missed)
 Managing Rationally
• Today, the highly regarded and necessary, professional field of Project Management is
based on Descartes’ principles: breaking down the project into interconnected parts,
developing a work plan, a timeline, budgets, assessments/reviews, etc. Any project, big
or small, can be done this way.
• In the management of mass production, Taylorism (from Frederick Taylor – early
twentieth century engineer) relies on breaking up complex production processes into
small tasks that can be accomplished by often unskilled workers. Through this,
management uses systems to implement, monitor, and review (as Descartes described)
production
• In Economics, microeconomics breaks down the units of a market economy into utility
maximizing consumers and profit maximizing businesses.
• Michael Porter’s five forces and the value chain system reflects Descartes approach.
 Managing Rationally
Taking Descartes’ approach. Management:
• is a science built on self-evident insights
• when facing new problems, does not collect more data; they rely on proven insights to
deduce what had happened by coming to understand situations that had previously
been overlooked or ignored
• by breaking down problems into simple components, investigating them according to
the accepted insights, then by synthesizing the results of the investigation, solutions will
emerge
• new insights are then reviewed, and if proven correct, are incorporated into the
accepted insights
• can use Descartes’ principles to solve any problem, big or small.
 Managing Empirically
• Empiricism: Knowledge comes from Experience – not from Descartes’ self-evident
insights
• The most significant advances in early-empiricism came from David Hume (1711 to 1776), a
Scottish intellectual.
• “Self-consciousness is in his view the succession of perceptions that people experience.”
(J&S, p.p. 96-7)
• By collecting experiences, people can move from specific perceptions to general/universal
conclusions. This is induction versus deduction that we saw in Descartes’ work.
• However, there is a problem with induction. Induction goes from particulars to universals,
of one kind or another. Induction does not necessarily lead to one conclusion. Whether a
conclusion is correct or not is not known. You cannot, therefore, say that the collection of
particulars causes a specific outcome.
 Managing Empirically
• Managers prefer facts over opinions are drawn to Hume’s approach, however, the
problem of inductive inference must be kept in mind
• “Induction does not – cannot – lead to certainties but only to possibilities, which
are at best probable.” (J&S, p. 107) That is, when collecting information for, say, a
strategic plan, “…different and seemingly equally valid strategies can be arrived at
from the same facts…” (J&S, p.107)
• Also, “…Evidence-Based Management has been offered as a remedy to poor
management practices and decisions; that may be so, but only as long as one
remembers that recommendations that are inductively inferred from facts are
little more than informed guesses that can be disproved at any time. (J&S, p. 107)