Alleged Research On Judgment Versus Experience

Last Thursday's Wall Street Journal featured an editorial by two professors of management, Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis. Tichy used to be Jack Welch's HR guru, way back when he was in the middle of changing GE's once-vaunted management education systems.

I wrote a review of this article in my linked political blog, here, which includes more pointed partisan comments from which I attempt to refrain in this blog.

Rather, in this post, I'd like to reiterate and extend my comments about Tichy's and Bennis' suspect research. In the other post, I wrote, in part,

"Just how does one study 'leadership covering virtually all sectors of American life?'What was their sample size? Their research instrument? How did they test the instrument for content and predictive validity? How does one measure 'judgment,' or 'experience?' How does one measure outcomes of various levels of each quality?

How in the heck do you study qualities like 'judgment,' and believe you know good from bad, for the purposes of projecting the results to America, in its every aspect?Could there not be some interaction effects? Perhaps some level of judgment, mixed with some level of experience, might be better than either one alone? How would you measure those?

This piece was, on the whole, completely unconvincing to me. It suggests the sort of 'research' that emanates from the 'management' field in business schools that give the discipline such a bad name. It seems to me that 'management' degrees are to business schools what 'communications' degree is for liberal arts.

And that's not a compliment.

I found this piece to be an embarrassment in terms of calling Tichy's and Bennis' effort 'research.' It would take a far more detailed explanation of this sort of work for me to accept the methodology and conclusions. Qualitative areas such as these invite poor research to be performed and communicated, without readers of the results fully understanding how it was attempted."

In business, such research would likely require financial performance measures that the authors don't divulge in their editorial, yet they claim to have studied all sectors of American life. Presumably, this includes business. If not, of what value is this to readers of the Journal?

But, let's look at their work from a different angle. In terms of Schumpeterian dynamics, environments change quickly, requiring adaptation and response from businesses. Failure to do so usually means a more rapid decline in the business' fortunes. Thus, just from Schumpeter's work, which first appeared some eighty years ago, we would tend to value informed judgment over pure experience in a dynamic economic system.

That is to say, pure experience is probably not good at leading companies to consistent prosperity in a rapidly-changing competitive environment. Yet, pure judgment, without any experiential information, while perhaps better, is not necessarily superior. Change must be informed and purposeful to lead to good decisions.

Common sense would already suggest that a bias for good judgment, with the support of experience, perhaps among a business' staff, would probably result in the highest probability of long term organizational success for businesses in our modern competitive environment.

With that as my null hypothesis, I'd appreciate research that provided more detail as to what mix, at what organizational levels, of judgment and experience, led to better results.

Instead, Bennis and Tichy give us a rather simplistic finding that judgment 'always trumps.'

That's just not good enough. It adds little, if any value to what any decent board would already suspect. That is, hire a CEO for his/her ability to anticipate and take advantage of change, i.e., judgment. Experience needs to reside somewhere in the organization. But, surely, a board is not going to hire a CEO knowing the candidate has abysmal judgment, but plenty of experience in the business.

To me, the Tichy-Bennis piece reinforces my growing belief that the value of an MBA is lessening, and that 'management' teaching in those programs continues to have little relevance to real world applications.