34
alex talks to julie about his work and asks her opinion.
julie helps alex realise that jonah cutting him off led to lou coming with the idea of a new measurement system, likewise with the ideas invented by bob, stacey and ralph.
she sez he should ask his team about what techniques are needed for management while he is still at the plant.
alex asks his staff what he should do when he gets to his new job at division.
lou sez he should talk to his new staff for fact finding.
stacey sez he should ask them about their problems and where they stand wrt clients.
bob sez he should find out about local politics, tour production facilities, visit some clients and large suppliers.
alex draws a bunch of shapes on a board to represent the facts he would gather and it looks like a big mess.
alex asks if a committee was trying to work out what was going on how would they do it?
they say the committee would start fact finding.
then they’d try to arrange the facts, and the staff come up with various ways the shapes alex drew could be sorted, but they think it would be a waste of time.
alex sez this idea of arranging the facts does harm in addition to wasting time. companies switch back and forth between arranging things according to product lines or according to functional capabilities. they also switch back and forth between centralisation to reduce duplicated effort and decentralisation to encourage entrepreneurship.
alex sez that the idea of collecting data then arranging it is futile.
35
next morning the staff meet again to try to solve alex’s problem.
ralph sez he had an idea. chemists had discovered a lot of elements like oxygen and hydrogen that other chemicals were made of. mendeleev came up with an idea for arranging the elements. he didn’t use colour, or whether they are gases or whatever.
alex suggests that mendeleev needed a numerical measure, so he could arrange them without being sidetracked by his subjective preferences.
mendeleev used atomic weight. he then noticed that each seventh element had similar chemical behaviour so he arranged them in a table with seven columns. he then spotted holes in the table and used them to predict the properties of undiscovered elements. other scientists were skeptical but mendeleev was right and the relevant elements were discovered, although they found out there was an 8th column: the noble gases.
alex sez they need to look for an intrinsic order in the facts they gather. so they need a technique for doing that and that technique would be useful for management.
later alex tells julie about this and she explains that she went to the library and read some plato.
she heard about the socratic method from alex, who heard about it from jonah so she decided to read about socrates by reading plato’s socratic dialogues.
alex sez that sounds boring. she sez they’re interesting like stories and she’s still reading the first one: protagoras.