Management education
Where do you get your information?
Marshall McLuhan (Fall 1953, age 42). Books!
“Marshall, must you spread your books throughout the house?”
“No, Corinne, but it serves me to do so. It reminds me of what I have read. Also I like to pick a book up and dip into it every now and again to add to and refresh my memory. Having them about me this way is a great help.”
Me (July, 2010, age 57). Â Books!
While McLuhan enjoyed talking to people, Philip Marchand says he got most of his information from books. On average, says Marchand, McLuhan read 35 books a week, which seems like a lot, even for a university professor. I get most of my ideas for this blog from books, but not exclusively from books. On average, though, I cannot say I read more than two books a week. (May be – like McLuhan – I should skim more.)
Where do you get your information? How many books do you read in a week?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
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Reading for this post
Philip Marchand. Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger, 1989 p. 179.
Beware the specialist!
Marshall McLuhan (1967, age 65/66). What is a specialist?
As I was telling Howard Gossage just as a drama is a technology for delivering tragedy, a specialist is a technology for delivering his specialty. Architects solve problems with buildings, surgeons solve problems with surgery, and lawyers solve problems with law suits. Generalists have a great advantage over specialists because they are not committed by their training to particular solutions.
Me (June 2010, age 57). Howard Gossage explains …
Marshall McLuhan liked to assert ideas but he did not like to explain them. In McLuhan: Hot and Cool (pp. 28-29) Howard Gossage makes an attempt to provide an explanation for McLuhan’s idea that the specialists goal is to advance their specialty not to solve your problems.
“Once you take a problem to a specialist you are wired in to a specialist’s solution. However well executed it is, the odds are against its being a real answer. Let us say your company is having growing pains, and is uncomfortable in its present quarters. So you go to an architect. Let us also suppose that he is a very good architect …  So he inquires after your needs, your ambitions, your hopes, your fears, what manner of people you are, etc. Do you know what you are going to end up with? A building. Now, a building, however nice, may not be the answer to your problem at all. Perhaps the real answer is to stop expanding,  or fire the traffic manager, or [have] everyone stay home and do cottage work connected by closed circuit TV.” (pp. 28-29.)
Cordially, Marshall and Me
What do you think? Should we beware of specialists?
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Reading for this post
Howard Luck Gossage, “You can see why the mighty would be curious.” In McLuhan: Hot and Cool, edited by Gerald Emanuel Stearn.
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The problem with the Shannon-Weaver model of communication
Marshall McLuhan (February 1, 1979, age 67). Communication is not about transportation!
You are undoubtedly familiar with the Shannon-Weaver model of communication. I was just telling Pierre Trudeau about it. Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver were mathematicians who said that the chief difficulty of a sender in getting a message through to a receiver is “noise.” And their remedy for noise is to increase the electrical charge in the circuit.
This type of thinking is what’s wrong with most communications. They don’t hear you and your solution is to shout? That’s a transportation solution. What’s needed is a transformation solution.
Me (May 2010, age 57).  But how do you affect transformation?
One thing you can do is stop looking at communication as a transportation problem. Frame your task from the beginning as transformation.
Transportation is ridiculously easy with current technology, which perhaps accounts for its attractions. I’m curious to know, what do you think? Why are we spending too much time on transportation and too little on transformation?Â
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, pp. 524-25.
The reading public no longer exists.
Marshall McLuhan (January 12, 1973, age 61). Thousands of reading publics exist
When I was at Cambridge, in the 1930s, the library of the English School maintained displays of a small number of relevant books covering a variety of different fields. Looking over the shelves I came away with the distinct idea that this was what you needed to know to know what was happening in history, poetry, or any other field. Today however such an impression is an impossibility. So much is being published – in America alone 39,000 books are published every year - there cannot be a reading public only publics. We read what we will and except for very modest area of overlap our reading separates us from one another.
Me (May 2010, age 57).  Thousands have become millions.
Every book club is a reading public. Each blog has its reading public, some large, most small.
What are the implications? Are programs like “Canada Reads” necessary to maintain a sense of community?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, pp. 462.
Deborah Hinton‘s post @ Communication Matters
Store house or slaughter house?
Marshall McLuhan (March 7, 1969, age 57).  Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one
The college President was overheard saying that the reason universities are such great store houses of knowledge is that students enter them knowing so much and leave them knowing so little.  That one always cracks me up.
Me (April 2010, age 57). What is the role of the university?
At this time of year, when students at colleges across the country are busy studying for and writing final exams, it is worth thinking about the role of the university and what it is that students learn at them. The serious side of the joke Marshall McLuhan tells is that what students learn at university is that a good deal of what they thought was true actually isn’t. And as a result they leave the university knowing less, but knowing more.
What did you unlearn at college or university?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p. 362.
What’s wrong with competition?
Marshall McLuhan (October 8, 1966, age 55). What a day!
It’s amazing when a new idea hits home. Take today, I’m talking with George Leonard, who’s an editor with Look. We start at my house on Well’s Avenue at 10 am and finish up at 11 pm. I know we had lunch and dinner together but I only remember the conversation. The subject of competition and education came up. Everyone knows it has negative effects on students’ performance, but the races still keep on going. Why? Well I said what if your goal isn’t helping kids to think but to conform? The competition is great because it encourages kids to be alike to resemble one another more and more closely, albeit with some doing things faster and some better.
Me (April 2010, age 57)Â Have a look at Look
The heartland of competition is sports. Everyone knows what they want to do and goes about doing it – which turns out to be what everyone else is doing – as quickly as possible. But is this the model that is wanted for the workplace and education? To all have the same goal, to run on the same track, to go quicker, faster? The conventional wisdom says yes, the only down side being the stress. But is the best of all world’s one where everyone winds up resembling everyone else?
How well does competition serve your ends?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Marshall McLuhan and George Leonard. “The Future of Education.” Look, February 21, 1967.
What went wrong?
Marshall McLuhan (September 17, 1964, age 52). Not the Hawthorne experiment!
Why do people insist on seeing the Hawthorne experiment as a failure?   Is it really a case of the observer getting his finger stuck in the experiment and screwing up the results? Or was it actually a great success. If you think about it, what the Hawthorne experiment actually teaches is that the testing finger is a marvelous way to establish conditions to ensure learning and productivity. Which reminds me, I’ve got to run, I’ve a stack of exams to grade.
Me (March 2010, age 57). Testing can be good for you.
In 1927 a group of Harvard business school professors were invited by Western Electric to study ways of increasing productivity at their Hawthorne, Illinois plant. The company believed that by improving lighting in the plant they could increase productivity in the making of telephone equipment. But they were getting odd results. No clear relationship could be found between improved lighting and productivity. The Harvard professors increased the sophistication of the tests. A group of woman workers were isolated from the rest and one-by-one changes were introduced: lighting, rest periods, hours, pay. As a result with careful measurement the professors could isolate the effect of each variable by holding the others constant. For example they could compare the output of the group working x hours a day with lighting level y and pay level z to the output of same group working x hours a day with lighting level y and pay level 2z – the difference in output being the effect of increased pay. Unfortunately the results didn’t seem to make sense. They found that output shot up when controlled changes were made. They also found it shot up when no changes were made. What was going on? The professors concluded that the women’s productivity went up because of the fact of testing. The testing, it was thought, rather than the conditions under which groups worked, had shaped them into cohesive highly productive teams that wanted to perform better and had an audience (the professors) to perform for.
Should managers be doing Hawthorne-type testing today? Why don’t our schools spend more time on testing and less on the content of the curriculum? How can you and I put the lessons of Hawthorne to work in our organizations and our lives?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p.310
Things change but we do not know it (continued)
Marshall McLuhan (November 18, 1961, age 50). The medium is invisible.
As I was saying no one sees the medium at work. It is invisible. It does its work on us and we go on differently, but do not see that everything has changed.
Me (January 2010, age 57). Another example?
PowerPoint has not only changed the world of work it has also dramatically changed the world of education. Consider this. Most lectures at universities – even in graduate school – are given using PowerPoint. Lecturers (or should I say PowerPointers) like it because they feel more in control of the lecture process. It gives them more confidence to have the slides at their command when they stand up to speak, say, for 1 to 2 hours in a large lecture hall. Students (the PowerPointed), however, also like it because it gives them more control over what they have to learn. How? PowerPoint typically reduces what students have to know for “the exam.” More and more, by tacit agreement between professor and student, what students are required to know is what is on the slides. And the slides reduce what students need to know. Conservatively, the maximum information you can reasonably get on a slide is 125 words. (Half the number of words you can fit on a single type-written, double-spaced 8½-by-11 inch page. But this is far in excess of the ideal of educational PowerPoint. The ideal is 5 to 7 bullet points each with no more than 5 to 7 words (The 5X5 rule or the 7X7 rule). The ideal reduces 125 words to 25 to 49 words a saving to students of 60.8 to 80 percent.
The medium of PowerPoint may be one of the more powerful and unseen forces that has driven the much-discussed decline in university education over the last generation. In education, unlike architecture or design, less may not be more.
Do you agree? Is PowerPoint enabling students to get by knowing less?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, pp. 280-281.
What do managers do?
Marshall McLuhan (December 14, 1960 age 49). They get someone else to do it and they make sure no one else gets in the way
I just sent off a letter to Claude Bissell, the President of Toronto University, to give him the benefit of my most recent thinking. Hope he finds it useful. I know I do. For example, what do top executives do? Most people say executives make decisions. But that’s not the job. Decision making is impossible in a world that’s changing at high-speed. That’s why so many executives settle for non-decision-making. That’s the easy but ultimately ineffective way out. What’s hard and more effective is to organize or rather coordinate people to make their own decisions when and where they have to and work with one another to achieve results. That is what a symphony conductor does. As information levels and the speed of change keep rising the coordinating or conducting job of the manager-conductor will get greater and greater.
Me (January 2010, age 57). Â McLuhan versus Mintzberg
Recently Henry Mintzberg wrote a book, Managing, that is a rewrite and update of his 1973 book, The Nature of Managerial Work. Among Mintzberg’s more controversial views is his claim that the job of the manager hasn’t changed in thousands of years. Marshall McLuhan, it’s safe to say would have disagreed with Mintzberg. McLuhan’s fundamental point (see above) is that in the high information flows of the electronic age things are moving too fast for executives to make the decisions. They need to be conductors or organizers, of the other people in their organizations who need to be the ones who decide and act.
What do you think?  Has the job of the manager changed? Is Mintzberg right that the President of SNC Lavalin, say,  and Cheops’ contractor could switch positions and the great pyramid of Giza and a rail system in Algeria would still get built without a hitch?
(Announcement: The winner of the classify Marshall McLuhan contest is Deborah Hinton,  for her entry, “I’d say McLuhan is the third person in our marriage.” )
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Henry Mintzberg. Managing. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2009.
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, pp. 274-276.