The Soft Stuff of Management

A couple of days ago, I was lucky enough to have lunch with a friend of mine currently working towards his MBA. His schedule has been rather full, as you can imagine, at though we lived in rather close proximity, I had only seen him once every 6-8 weeks or so. After catching up, the conversation turned to his classmates with whom he sent roughly 70 hours a week. We were talking about the different social interactions between various groups of people when he used the term "mainland haole." For those of you unfamiliar with the Hawaiian language, "haole" technically means foreigner but has come to only be applied to those of Caucasian decent. My friend is from an affluent suburb of San Francisco but has spent many years overseas and served as a police officer as well before his poor driving skills earned him a medical discharge. A shrewd judge of character, if not motion and distance, he had pretty much separated the class into mainland haoles, locals and Pac Rim (Pacific Rim) students. Of the three, he generally categorized the local people as having the best people skills. This makes sense as relationships are a far better gauge of success in Hawaii than actual competence. He went on to say that the mainland haoles were mostly nice but when the pressure was on, they could become very rude and selfish. They also had a habit of talking down to their classmates. This wasn't news to me either. Growing up in Hawaii and watching the way the mainland tourist spoke to locals, I was quite aware of this style of communication.

But most interesting to me was the behavior of the Pac Rim students. As far as the hard stuff went, they were very competent but their people skills were generally below par. Though they brought prodigious skills to the table, they were often problematic teammates, creating difficulties for themselves and everybody around them. To me this is the greatest failing of the Asian style of education- a focus on the hard stuff at the exclusion and denegration of everything else. That's why there is simply no star management talent coming out of Asia. Kishore Mahbubani- current Dean of the Lee Kew Yuan School of Public Policy and former Singaporean ambassador to the UN, wrote a very controversial book called Can Asian Think? He asks why Asians, when thaken out of their native culture, generally excel in every new environment but yet, most of the Asian countries short of Japan and nominally Korea and Taiwan, are considered developing nations? What it is about the culture that limits their development? The answer clearly is in the educational system. Tacitus once wrote, "In order to know the character of any people, you have only to observe what they love." Asian culture is hamstrung by tradition. In a rapidly accelerating global economy, this creates a great deal of difficulty. Asians love education, but the education they love is symbolic of their character-based language. Memorization matters above all. If you have mental energy left, you simply need to memorize more, not ponder why or how.

I see this that my old high school, Iolani. Generally considered the most academically demanding prep school in Hawaii, my experience with its current student body has been uniformly poor. Out of a group of 15 kids I had close contact with over an extended period of time, only one exhibited the beginnings of any critical thinking skills. I remember my days back at that institution. Critical thinking simply wasn't tolerated. You were expected to memorize and regurgitate. Instead of evolving the method, the school insists it is preparing its students for life by asking them to memorize more thereby understanding less. Iolani is doing nothing but traing a superlative group of middle managers for Citigroup, none of whom will be able to afford the tuition to send their children to Iolani.

So where's the tipping point? When does China and the rest of Pac Rim countries start realizing that the soft stuff is the very lifeblood of management? When will they learn that intellectual property rights are the sine qua non of a truly developed nation? I think it's a long way away. Until the Pac Rim students start taking the "people" part of management seriously, their own countries will always be rife with rampart corruption and developmental woes. Do they ignore it because they lack proficiency or do they lack proficiency because they ignore it? I don't know, and I question if their social fabric can withstand such a change.