No sooner had I posted my comments yesterday than an essay from Tom Peters appeared in the Financial Times. Peters spent part of his career at McKinsey and his remarks were generated in part by the McKinsey settlement regarding their work with pharmaceutical companies (and especially Purdue Pharma) for increasing sales of opioids. But he uses that example to focus on much larger issues plaguing the business world today.
He is especially critical of the current business school model that focuses on marketing, finance and quantitative analysis. But as he notes: “The “people stuff” and “culture stuff” gets short shrift in virtually all cases.” He further links this problem to the focus of too many corporations on only making profits as preached by Milton Friedman. An issue covered by me in an earlier post.
But perhaps the most important point I took away from Peters’ remarks relate to his early fame when he preached managing by walking around. For Peters this insight made in 1980 focused on the value managers receive from walking around their companies and finding out what is happening with their employees. But perhaps this insight should be extended to managing by walking around in society. Would the McKinsey consultants continued to press for more sales of opioids if they had seen the destruction in communities where overuse of opioids ruined families?
Perhaps a real issue to be addressed is getting our professional cohorts more in touch with the real world and not just the world in which they live. A world filled with other professionals isolated from how most people live. A world with schools that can teach remotely to children with their own laptops and mobile devices? With state of the art internet connections? With the ability to hire tutors as needed? With advantages that will only lead to further inequality?
