THE INVISIBLE POWERS
The Language of Business
by John J. Clancy, Lexington Books, 1989

Crosby's five characteristics include quality ("people do things right routinely"), growth ("growth is profitable and steady"), customers ("customer needs are anticipated"), change ("change is planned and managed"), and employees ("people are proud to work here"). Each characteristic is measured against a success scale ranging from Comatose (the lowest rating) to Wellness (the highest). Combined into THE ETERNALLY SUCCESSFUL ORGANIZATION GRID, this model provides an informative report card for any organization, and one which can reasonably be used as a departmental tool to measure the success of the Information Systems organization in relative isolation.

Of the five characteristics, the most difficult to apply to an information systems organization specifically will be Growth. Crosby writes in terms of an entire company, and growth is generally related to products and their profitability. For I.S. in isolation, growth is probably best taken as a description of the application portfolio being managed, and the information asset being used. To the extent that I.S. projects contribute to an extension of the assets, growth can be said to be occurring. To the extent that projects replace or fix existing assets, growth would be described as minimal.

Lest any of us attempt to use Crosby's grid as a tool of self-delusion, he offers a metric for each characteristic to prevent our assessment from being less than objective. For quality he suggests Price of Nonconformance with a Wellness rating requiring a measure of 3% or better. Ratings of Healing, Progressive Care, and Intensive Care require measures of at worst 13%, 20%, and 28% respectively, with Comatose applying to any organization measuring in at 33% Price of Nonconformance. For the I.S. industry, with typical nonconformance costs hovering around 50%, Crosby's picture is indeed frightening.

Applying Crosby's grid to our industry as a whole, the sceptics and optimists among us might rate our success as follows:

CHARACTERISTIC | SCEPTICAL | OPTIMISTIC

QUALITY | COMATOSE | COMATOSE

Nonconformance | greater 33% | greater 33%

| |

GROWTH | INTENSIVE CARE | PROGRESSIVE CARE

Return / Profit | none | around 3%

| |

CUSTOMERS | INTENSIVE CARE | HEALING

Proj. Complaints | around 54% | around 9%

| |

CHANGE | INTENSIVE CARE | HEALING

Changes Controlled | around 2% | around 85%

| |

EMPLOYEES | PROGRESSIVE CARE | HEALING

Turnover | around 40% | around 7%

Each of us could undoubtedly offer slight variations in the ratings, but few can doubt that the information systems industry is hardly the icon for the eternally successful organization.

Likewise, these ratings argue against an assessment of the industry as terminally ill. Recent I.S. trends in the satisfaction of our customers, and the control of change itself, are already apparent in the broader differences in general assessments for those characteristics. Crosby's grid offers a useful tool for us to use in our continuing campaign to educate management in their role in quality. It is well worth reading. Once read, it would be a good investment to leave it on our boss' desk.

Crosby builds his case using a powerful metaphor to stress the value judgements inherent in the ratings. He labels a level of customer complaints on projects of 63% as Comatose, not a 1 on a scale of 5. Having 55% of changes controlled is labeled Progressive Care, not a 3. His use of the metaphors of health, with wellness the goal, evokes an emotional response and empathy quite different than he could have hoped to obtain with a more sterile numeric scale. These emotions in the reader are unseen, yet very powerful.

In The Invisible Powers, John Clancy attempts to bring these emotions to light for all to see. His work tries to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of the metaphors used in business language. The strengths are often obvious as evidenced in the power of the metaphor when used in speech. The weaknesses are often less obvious, centering around either the hidden biases of the metaphors themselves ("Metaphors can actually create reality for us."), or else the information that is missing due to the limited or unique perspective of any particular metaphor ("Metaphors can obscure phenomena from our experience.").

Clancy's observations are the result of an independent study project at Washington University in which he collected various writings of 43 historical and contemporary business writers dating from 1770 to the present. From his sample, Clancy generalizes to the six most common metaphors - journey, game, war, machine, organism, and society. Against a backdrop of four historical time periods Clancy offers a frequency distribution of the use of each metaphor in business writing and speech over time which highlights many trends in business thought. For instance, the war metaphor has consistently been a leader among the business metaphors, yet found virtually no use during the period 1905-1941 which saw a general societal disillusionment (e.g. World War I, the Great Depression, the dawn of World War II) as well as high business activity (e.g. the creation of Ford, General Motors, etc.).

Against an average 4.9 examples per writer in the sample, Clancy depends upon only 6 of 43 writers for over 50% of the 212 examples offered throughout the book. From his earliest time period (1770-1905) he uses Andrew Carnegie [11 examples] and Jay Gould [10]. The 1905-1941 period relies largely upon Henry Ford [33] and Frederick Taylor [17]. There are no dominant post-war writers (1941-1975) and Lee Iacocca [16] dominates the modern period (1975-present). Four of the 43 writers were never used as examples, and 6 are cited only once. In total, Clancy spends sufficient time sharing his approach and methodology that, even though variations in many of his parameters can be imagined, one is left comfortable with his generalizations, observations, and conclusions.

The power of any particular metaphor is in its entailments, the relationships and concepts that it brings to mind. Clancy's approach is to highlight the entailments of each of the six major metaphors in order to illustrate the overlap among the various types, an overlap which can be used to advantage when one or more metaphors fails to evoke the appropriate response when used. With the knowledge of why a particular metaphor is powerful, one can treat all six as tools, the selection of which can be left to a case by case determination.

The organism metaphor currently ranks with the journey as the most popular. Clancy identifies two strains: the anthropomorphic, on which Crosby's wellness ratings are based, and in which the business is treated as humanlike "with purposes that transcend all other considerations," and domestication where the business is a domesticated animal - "an organism to be exploited." The draw of this metaphor is rooted in the ancient idea of animism, the idea of the world as

an organism. It brings to mind the innate complexity and ambiguity of life as close parallels to the real business world. "The notions of competition, a struggle for survival, innovation, and change as the keys to success, all stem from Darwinian thought." Clancy highlights the bias toward the organic metaphor in the writings of Michael Porter, and Peters and Waterman.

"The metaphor's weakness is principally in its assumption of rigid determinism." Organisms within nature have limited response patterns in the face of changing environments and competition. Too dramatic a change in requirements leads to extinction. The organism metaphor is limiting if it leads to the a priori presumption that business entities face the same limitations for change. In fact, the metaphor becomes self defeating if it "helps perpetuate outmoded practices by supporting the view that these practices have evolved over time for a good reason."

Clancy is particularly interested in the leadership roles evoked by each metaphor. In the case of the organism, the leader takes on the role of parent or mentor, directing activities and guarding the being. However, the parent can easily become the domesticating shepherd, "who cares for his sheep but, in the final analysis, exploits them."

Clancy takes each of the other five metaphors to similar depth, highlighting the entailments, pointing out the weaknesses, and assessing the potential impact on leaders. In the case of the journey metaphor, the dominant metaphor during the 1905-1941 period and the second dominant metaphor in the present period, Clancy illustrates the key entailments which include a goal, difficulty, unpredictability, and adventure. The danger is that the journey will become a journey without a purpose, in the tradition of the nineteenth century Romantic movement. The metaphor can draw to mind the leader's awareness of risk and the call for leadership, particularly to those leaders who must 'take the helm' in a crisis. A weakness of the journey metaphor is its apparent use of a single-focused goal, the destination, which tends to ignore the real-world multifaceted demands placed on a business.

Our tastes for metaphor change. During Clancy's earliest period, 1770-1905, the height of the Industrial Revolution, the machine metaphor dominated business thought only to fall into complete disuse during the post-war period. The view of business as a society which dominated the post-war years has also fallen into relative disuse. During the twentieth century it has been the journey and the organism, with the former declining slightly over time and the latter increasing. In third place, and gaining fast as major events recede in memory, is the war metaphor with its focus on the "need for strong, skilled, and courageous leadership; risk; and probably most important, the notion of strategy." The weakness of the war metaphor is in its apparent all's fair prescription for action at any cost.

In the second half of The Invisible Powers, Clancy deals with the purpose of business and how our notion of a business' purpose influences the selection of the appropriateness of the various metaphors available to us. Clancy offers three paradigms for understanding the role of business: production, wealth, and the institution.

Clancy is very much influenced by Thomas Kuhn's exposition on paradigms in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn claims that the history of science should be viewed as a discontinuous series of theories or conceptions, earlier versions of which do not necessarily play a part in the later versions. When a theory has gained nearly universal acceptance, it becomes a paradigm. It is in this sense that Clancy applies the term - "a way of looking at the world that has gained wide acceptance and that structures the way the leader looks at his business."

In the paradigm of production, business exists in order to produce a "supply of goods and services to better mankind's lot." Currently dominant among Clancy's sample, the production paradigm was at its height early in this century when it was used by 78% of Clancy's sample. A problem with the paradigm is that no distinction is drawn between useful and frivolous goods, nor are environmental factors considered. Prior to Ford's introduction of mass production techniques and the associated fall in prices illustrated by the downward-sloping demand curve all resources were taken up producing useful items, with potential demand far exceeding supply. But in modern times, the paradigm creates the problem of production for production's sake well beyond the point where useful purpose is served. The supporting metaphors - journey, game, machine, and organism - place the leader on the voyage to nowhere, cause the machine designer to build machines which don't turn off, and suggest organisms which never stop growing.

In the paradigm of wealth, the purpose of a business is to produce wealth. The only variation within the application of the paradigm is in the "quibbles about the distribution wealth." Among Clancy's sample, wealth was the only paradigm in use during the nineteenth century. "The wealth paradigm is difficult to refute in pure economic terms. The uneasiness with the paradigm stems from its cultural impact - the embodiment of greed as a necessity for our material civilization." The game and organism (domesticated version) metaphors support the paradigm, with the leader's role becoming the gambler or the bad shepherd "neither of which is helpful to business management."

Finally Clancy presents the paradigm of the institution; Crosby's eternally successful organization. The source of the institution lies outside of economics making it quite different from the production and wealth paradigms. Clancy draws on Ernest Becker's work, The Denial of Death, to show that "men recognize their physical mortality and seek an indefinite imprint of themselves on timeless institutions." Reginald Jones defined his role at General Electric, not as leader, but as steward. The institution completely dominated business thought among Clancy's sample during the post-war period, and has only declined more recently.

The institution serves society through the long-term stable management of technology, assets, and people. The central tendency is stability. A stable institution can serve its employees by instilling a sense of purpose or meaning in their lives. The principle metaphors for the institution are the journey, the game, and society. These metaphors share an emphasis on goals, unpredictability, cooperation, leadership, meaning, and adventure.

A problem with the institution as paradigm is that managers within the institutions do not necessarily share the interests of other organizational stakeholders. The risk is that the company will be run to the benefit of the managers, not the institution. The paradigm's metaphors support these agency costs in the choice of leader roles: "the captain of the ship of fools, the team leader playing for the sake of play, the politician grinding his own ax, the charismatic leader bent on self-glorification."

Once a particular paradigm becomes accepted, it produces puzzles to be solved by its adherents. Theoretical work can stop, and practical experimentation can begin. For Henry Ford, the production paradigm implied the manufacturing of more and more automobiles. The puzzle was to figure out how to create a demand for the increasing production. The downward-sloping demand curve, lower prices through standardized mass production, provided the answer. For Alfred Sloan at General Motors, the wealth paradigm necessitated making more and more money in competition with Ford. His solution, higher prices through product differentiation; and the model year was born. For the institution paradigm, the problem is one of indefinite maintenance of the organization. In discussing customers, Crosby points out that "companies find themselves with many 'customers' who affect the state of the organization in many ways: the financial community ... the staffers of the company ... the dealers, distributors, agents ... (and) the real customers." The solution appears to lie with seeking accommodation and partnership with all of these stakeholders.

There comes a time when paradigms begin to shift. "These periods are characterized by frequent and deep debates over legitimate methods, problems, and standards." However, the paradigm one has adopted essentially controls the way one views the world, and will alter the meaning of alternative viewpoints, often making them utterly meaningless.

To an adherent of the paradigm of wealth, arguments against the recent trends in corporate takeovers and leveraged buy outs simply make no sense. It's not simply a misunderstanding of the argument, it's a conceptual denial of the premises. If companies exist to create wealth, then ownership should reside with the party willing to offer the greatest resources for their control.

To an adherent of the paradigm of the institution, arguments against plant closings which have appeared in recent years appear perfectly logical. For the paradigm of wealth, plant closings make perfect sense as means to maximizing profit. For the paradigm of production, offshore production may offer greater production opportunities. But to those who hold that the institution is paramount, plants must remain open to serve their intended purpose, which is not to maximize production or wealth.

The viewpoints created by differing paradigms are generally incompatible. The debates become irrational. "A paradigm will blind one to certain facts and problems because their acceptance would not be compatible with the paradigm." Kuhn takes an increase in the irrationality of the discussions as a sign that paradigms are shifting. Indeed, the close of the twentieth century may see a shift in the belief systems held by business. Clancy feels that "the wealth paradigm has been exposed as essentially nihilistic," the production paradigm has failed through "its fall into the output of useless goods and its harm to the environment," and the institution paradigm "has foundered on the issue of agency costs."

In his closing chapter, Clancy points to an anticipated paradigm shift in the next century. His observation that "we fail to see great changes when we are in the midst of them" offers guidance for the future. The publication of Albert Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity took the world by storm, and yet by 1905 most physicists already possessed all the relevant empirical data needed for its formulation. As early as 1890 the prerequisites were being put in place by Maxwell, Hertz, Lorentz, Poincaré, Kaufmann, Abraham, and others. No one in that period knew where their work was going. Each was attempting to solve puzzles within the existing paradigm. Einstein came along and shifted the paradigm.

The seeds of our worldview in the twenty-first century are already planted around us, we simply fail to see them. If we see them at all it is as conflict and debate among the current paradigms. For this reason, we will be surprised when the new paradigm arrives. In his book, Clancy has given us some useful tools in order to be better prepared.