Use virtue ethics to argue for childishly fanatical deontology as a solution to every business problem, disregard any evidence except hand-selected anecdotes, build your arguments on top of all sorts of cognitive distortions and logical fallacies, and do it all with a whole lot of hubris. What you'll get is Dov Seidman's How. It really is that bad.
How has received a lot of praise, probably because most people agree with its two main points: 1) Be ethical and 2) Take care of your customers. Like pretty much everyone else, I agree with both of these points. I think they are good advice. But supporting two good points that pretty much everyone already believes doesn't necessarily make a book a good book. How gets everything else wrong, including all of its arguments, all of its methods for making arguments, and all of its supporting points. It is one long indulgence in thinking poorly.
How is an Uncanny Valley story. Dov Seidman actually chooses the idea of the uncanny value (the idea in robotics and horror films that you make something creepy by making it seem almost human, and the closer to human it gets the creepier it becomes until finally it crosses some threshold after which becoming increasingly human also becomes increasingly empathetic) as his metaphor for "how" with respect to business. With this remark, I have already told you three problems with the book each of which on its own would suffice to make the book not worthy of recommendation, but the combination of which is something awful. First of all, the whole book is about proof by metaphor. It's not the only book that it written like this. Proof by metaphor a popular strategy, but it's always wrong. Secondly, Seidman deliberately avoids talking about how to accomplish anything. The book really is about a naked "how" which is not a "how to." The resulting thesis is as ill-defined as this usage of the word how is unsemantic. Thirdly, the whole concept of an uncanny valley, as Seidman uses it, is a leap of faith concept. There is a valid way to go about making a similar argument, but that is not the way Seidman approaches his argument. (The valid approach would call for much more rigorous evidence than Seidman presents; whether the valid approach could support his particularly argument is undecidable given the amount of information the book presents, but I would predict that it cannot, because most of the evidence I am familiar with strongly contradicts Seidman's subpoints.) The way Seidman writes the book, he really is telling a Just So story that is no more compelling than any other Just So stories if you approach the book with any semblance of skepticism. But like most Just So stories, it is easy to believe if you start off already wanting to believe what the story tells you. Seidman picks points that guarantee him a sympathetic audience.
I won't cover what's wrong with proof by metaphor in any greater detail. I will, however, discuss the other two problems I just identified a little bit more, because both of them elucidate ways that human thinking can go terribly wrong.
First of all the unsemantic how: Dov Seidman's basic argument is that as the world becomes more open and progress accelerates, "outbehaving" the competition matters more than outperforming the competition. He believes performance can be copied, but behavior can't be. (He makes no attempt to explain why behavior would be harder to copy than performance, but one can hardly expect him to do so given the insipid quality of thought displayed throughout all of How.) He doesn't tell you how to improve anything in particular or anything measurable because if he did that would be performance. Instead he goes for a zen concept of how... claiming that focusing on behavior will ultimately produce better results, but only if you focus on behavior because you really care about behavior, trying to get the right behavior in order to optimize results doesn't work because how requires passion and passion requires caring about the right things and the right thing to care about is behavior not results. He gives examples of people doing How correctly and of people doing it wrong. He contrasts a factory which he tells us has the right behaviors for safety with two factories that he tells us have the wrong behavior. Is the better factory more productive? He doesn't tell us, because that's asking the wrong question. Okay. So is the better factory safer? Does it actually have fewer injuries? He doesn't tell us because that's still the wrong question. That's still the wrong-headed way of thinking about business. It's still about results. The point is that this processes follows the right behavior with respect to following the rules the right way because they care about following the rules because they care about believing in the rules. You don't get that when you focus on the results. The correct thing to do is to Become More Virtuous! When you do that you will follow the rules because virtuous people follow the rules, and then good things will happen because Virtue! You can't measure your results to see if switching over to the virtue method of doing business is better because the virtue method of doing business involves doing things the virtuous way because doing things the virtuous way is virtuous. If you do things the way that seems like the virtuous way for any other reason, it's not actually doing things the virtuous way. So don't measure. Just be virtuous. Oh you of little faith.
Oh and by the way. Uncanny Valley! When you get most of the way to virtue but don't quite reach it, you enter the shadow of death where things go terribly wrong. If you start attempting to do the right things for the wrong reasons, Bad Things Will Happen. While you still persist in measuring results but start doing the same things that you would do if you actually, truly do Become More Virtuous, then you will get bad results, because that isn't really virtue. It's virtues creepy zombie cousin that lives in the uncanny valley.
So you can't test these ideas. You can't measure their improvements. (But if you just have faith they really are truly better... trust me.) Measuring them will cause them to malfunction because they imply that you're doing it for the results, not because they are more virtuous... for traditional forms of measurement at least. Since Seidman published this book, LRN (his consulting firm) has produced a report which collects data from 36,280 employees from an unspecified number of companies in 18 countries that supposedly supports Seidman's claims. The study shows that there is a correlation between how likely employees are to describe their company with terms that Seidman uses in How (most of which would be viewed positively by most people), and how well they evaluate other qualities about their company. In particular, the study demonstrates that the things Seidman advocates in How produce better results because, when surveyed, employees how said certain positive things about their company were also more likely to say that they believed their company had better costumer service than the competition and were also more likely to say that their company had better financial results than the competition! I'm not making this up! Seidman measured the financial performance of his ideas by asking employees "How would you gauge your company’s financial performance relative to its competitors?" and showing that employees who say management promotes strong values were more likely to call their company's performance "above average" than employees who do not say that corporate management at their company promotes strong values! You can get the report for free here.
It really is that bad, and I haven't even got to the worst of How, yet.
The cognitive distortion that How relies on most heavily is, unsurprisingly, the halo effect, and How takes the halo effect to ludicrous extremes. (One section is actually called "You can judge a book by its cover," which advocates trusting the first impressions you form about other people.) It gets worse. Seidman actually claims that Japanese persuading their pilots to be kamikazes during WWII were bad at persuasion! Not, mind you, that they were using their persuasive powers for evil, but that the techniques of persuasion they used are ineffective. One could never use radical, almost religious devotion to a cause to motivate people in the modern connected world where we have things like Facebook and Google. No, that kind of devotion, is a thing of the past that is doomed to fail today. Modern connectedness has made suicide bombing and everything else that relied on old-fashioned methods of persuasion a thing of the past. Persuasion can't really exist anymore. Carrot and stick motivation is likewise doomed to fail, as are all methods of persuasion. Persuasion doesn't work. To lead in the modern world, someone must inspire others through passion that comes from living out virtue by following all of the rules because you really, truly believe in them.
The particular example of the kamikazes is the worst example of the halo effect being taken way too far that I noticed in How, but that's not saying anything. It's the worst example that I've ever noticed of the halo effect being taken way too far in anything I've ever read. There are many bad things that you can say about the Japanese in WWII and have them be true, and many ways in which you can accurately criticize the kamikaze program. But one of them is not to say that they failed at persuasion, and another is certainly not to say that the methods of persuasion used by the Japanese to produce suicide bombers have become less effective in the modern world. Medieval heretics who proclaimed heretical beliefs knowing full way that such proclamations would likely lead to them being burned at the stake might have been fools, but they certainly weren't cowards. Similarly, the Japanese during WWII may have been cruel, murderous war criminals well on the way to loosing a war at far higher than reasonable cost to both themselves and their enemies, but the ones using Japanese culture to persuade their subordinates to deliberately die for their country weren't bad at persuasion.
Finally, I promised you hubris. So I'll give you some hubris. This is what Dov Seidman has to say about his own work and its relationship to Collins Porras' Good to Great, one of the most insightful and influential business books ever written:
While Built to Last remains a visionary work and its approach fundamentally sound, we can now see more deeply into what lives at the true core of successful enterprises. The new lens of HOW shows us that what Collins and Porras saw as "core ideologies" are not core enough for the road ahead. I don't think you can do, be guided by, or most importantly, be inspired by any of these things. They are results, things you get when you innovate in HOW... The problem with Collins and Porras' core ideologies is that they are about going at the benefit directly, aiming at just the "IP" (innovation and progress) in TRIP and neglecting what it takes to get there.Indeed. The problem with one of the most influential and best-supported books in the history of business is that it disagrees with Dov Seidman's ideas. Again, I'm picking a particularly glaring example, but the theme of smugness and making self-aggrandizing remarks that this comment illustrates occurs consistently throughout the book.
This wouldn't be so horrible if How had any merits. Unfortunately, it doesn't.
Let me be clear. When I call How an example of human thinking gone utterly wrong in myriad unfortunate ways that lacks any redeeming qualities that could possibly make it worth reading, I'm not saying that I necessarily disagree with Seidman's values. I'm in favor of businesses behaving ethically (to the extent that I think "behaving ethically" is a well-defined phrase). I'm in favor of openness and transparency. I'm in favor of businesses being fanatically interested in serving their customers. I'm in favor of businesses deliberately building corporate cultures on shared values. I'm in favor of businesses empowering their employees and creating an environment where workers are trusted and expected to largely manage themselves. The probably with How is not Seidman's values. The problem is his complete incompetence at thinking and dealing with information. I'm not in favor of platitudes, shoddy research, fallacious reasoning, ignoring data, imprecise claims, and all of the other hand-wavy, heel-clapping naivety that makes How the intellectual-bankrupt pile of garbage that it is.
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