A tribute to and a lament for Marshall McLuhan. Five days a week, Tuesday through Saturday, I present one of McLuhan’s observations and talk about its relevance today. 300 ideas. 300 days. 300 posts.
Management education
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.
Tags: American mind, Communications, Education, Exam, Learning, Management education, Reading, Technology
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). 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.
Tags: Business, Communications, Deborah Hinton, Management education
Marshall McLuhan (May 1959, age 47). Consumers are now producers
As I was saying yesterday my efforts to enlighten the Winnipeg Ad and Sales Club about the new business rules in our electronic age were not entirely successful. If the only constant today is change, I told them, you will remember, it’s obvious that at the high speeds we are living at everyone is switching roles to keep up. This is not a prediction it is an observation. Just as producers are becoming consumers, the corollary is that consumers are becoming producers. They gave me a puzzled look. So I gave them something else to be puzzled about. What I asked do Alexander the Great and Winnie the Pooh have in common? Give up? They both have the same middle name.
Me (December 2009, age 57). What about in education?
“A lot of education,” says the writer of a letter to the editor of the Montreal Gazette, “takes place outside of school, and much it is self directed.” (Wednesday, December 16, 2009.) Marshall McLuhan would have agreed that most education takes place outside school, but I believe he would have disagreed with the idea that it is self-directed. In fact it is media-directed. The difference is profound and if true disturbing. (We continue the examination of education tomorrow. Hang on to your mortar boards.)
If most education today takes place outside the classroom, what is the content of the current curriculum? Who or what sets the curriculum? What do you think is the greatest difference between the education that goes on today inside and outside the class room?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, pp. 252-255.
Tags: American mind, Education, Management education, Predict, Speed
Marshall McLuhan (November 19, 1952, age 41). Writing in books
I have more fun writing in books than I do writing books. The End of the Gutenberg Era book is taking longer than I thought. Not surprising, as Corinne tells me I seem to be reading all literature for it. Here’s how I attack a book. First I dip into it and grab the big message then I go back and talk with the writer, that is I write to him in the margins. Take this new book that just came out, by William H. Whyte, Jr., and the editors of Fortune magazine, Is Anybody listening? Here’s the heart: PR types at G.M., G.E. and I.B.M. are spending a fortune selling capitalism and democracy to the world. And Whyte delivers the shocking news that despite the all expenses paid field trips to New York, London, Paris, and L.A. nobody’s listening!
Here’s one of the conversations I had with Whyte in the margins of his book. “Of course they aren’t. Nobody expects people are going to read advertizing copy before they actually buy it. You should talk with David Ogilvie he’ll give you the low down. It’s a well understood fact on Madison Avenue that people only read ad copy after they buy the product.” That’s what Corinne did when I went out and bought her that new vacuum cleaner she’s been asking for. Spent a whole lunch hour pouring over the glossy pamphlets provided by the good folks at Hoover. And that’s why Canadian teenagers don’t like Canadian history; they haven’t bought the product yet.
Me (November 2009, age 57). The problem with highlighting
Marshall McLuhan wrote in his books. If you go to the national archives you can see his writing in his copies of Saussure, Joyce, and the rest. I do much the same myself with McLuhan’s books. Except that I often write orders to myself. Things like “compare this 1952 outline for The End of the Gutenberg Era to the final table of contents of 1962 The Gutenberg Galaxy.” Or “See Postman.”
There are different ways of marking in books. Many students I see studying at McGill and Concordia University seem to prefer highlighting. That is you work your way through a photocopied article or textbook assiduously highlighting in pink, yellow, or blue everything you think is worth keeping and ignoring the rest. This approach is a method of summarization. In the olden days, before highlighters, students would underline using coloured pencils or ball point pens to obtain a similar result. The idea being, I think, that the highlighted or underlined material was what you should pay attention to when you re-read the article or text when it was time to study for your final exams.
The problem is highlighting or underlining does not make you the equal of the article or text, it makes you subservient to it. May be that’s what you need to do to get an undergraduate degree at university; talking, conversing, writing in the margins is what you need to do to be the equal or the better of the writers of the books you read.
Do you write in your books? Do you underline? Do you highlight? Do use post it notes? Is it possible to read an electronic book or an article or book on your computer’s screen with understanding if you cannot mark it or make notes on it in some way?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
William H. Whyte, Jr. Is Anybody Listening? New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952.
Tags: Advertising, American mind, Books, Communications, Education, History, Hot and cool media, Learning, Management education, Reading, Technology, Visual medium, Visual thinking
Marshall McLuhan (1967, age 55). Read to learn (continued)
Today my students did their oral exam on books I asked them to select from my reading list. (Here are a reminder of the books on that list: Jacques Ellul, Propaganda, 1965; E.T. Hall, The Silent Language, 1959, and A.P. Usher. The History of Mechanical Inventions, 1929; 1954.)
Yesterday, recall, when they asked me what to expect I told them: (1) we’d start at A and go from there; and (2) Don’t tell me what’s in the book, I’ve read it. Tell me what you think now that you’ve read it. Then we can talk about new things instead of old things. Most of them succeeded in telling me something that they learned. As a result, joy springs eternal, we spent most of the class talking about new things rather than old things. And they found out what I meant by we’ll start at A and go from there. The first student who volunteered to be examined was given a grade of A. Enthusiasm and courage deserve to be rewarded.
Michael Hinton (2009, age 57). Learn to read (continued)
Here is another example of reading by Marshall’s Rules. The book I will have a go at here is Abbot Payson Usher’s A History of Mechanical Inventions. Step 1 summarize the idea. Step 2 talk about what you’ve learned from it.
Step 1. In Chapter IV, The Emergence of Novelty in Thought and Action, Usher asks the question “Where do new ideas come from? He argues that what needs to be explained is not the final eureka of the long chain of thinking in the creation of a new idea (gold displaces a volume of water precisely equal to its mass), but the first weak groping for the new (gold is very heavy). What accounts for this initial weak groping is explained by previous writers as a result of (1) some external event that stimulates the thought (Newton’s apple), or (2) the mysteries of the sub-conscious. This, he says, is not a good explanation. But as yet he doesn’t have a better idea. Except he does underline this idea: If the world was a closed system says eventually all the new ideas possible to create by playing around with things – that is by experimentation, would eventually get created. And then invention would cease.
Step 2. New ideas appear every day. Therefore either the closed system we live in (city, nation, culture) is very large, rich in variety, and complex, or we do not live in a closed system. Every new idea has the potential to break open a closed system.
Where do you get new ideas? Where in your view are new ideas needed most? Who are the greatest new idea creators today?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Abbot Payson Usher. A History of Mechanical Inventions. New York: Dover, [1929; 1954] 1988.
Tags: American mind, Books, Communications, Conversation, Education, Exam, Learning, Listening, Management education, Medium is the message, Reading, Relationship, Thinking
Marshall McLuhan (1967, age 55). Read to learn
Tomorrow I will give my students their oral exam on books I asked them to select from my reading list. Here are a few of the books on that list: Jacques Ellul, Propaganda, 1965; E.T. Hall, The Silent Language, 1959, and A.P. Usher. The History of Mechanical Inventions, 1929; 1954.
Today they asked me what to expect I told them: (1) we’d start at A and go from there; and (2) Don’t tell me what’s in the book, I’ve read it. Tell me what you think now that you’ve read it. Then we can talk about new things instead of old things.
Michael Hinton (2009, age 57). Learn to read
Marshall McLuhan was a master reader. He knew how to get to the heart of anything he read quickly and learn from it. And this power he tried to teach his students.
Can you and I learn to read like Marshall McLuhan? McLuhan, of course was a genius, so this may seem like a difficult thing to do. However, I do not think it is impossible. Here is my take on a book McLuhan refers to indirectly on his reading list: The Meaning of Meaning, by C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards.
The trick is to follow the spirit of McLuhan’s advice. Don’t only summarize the book or piece of the book: “The relationship between words and ideas and ideas and things in the world is direct. But the relationship between words and things in the world is indirect. That is you can always find words to express your ideas and ideas to match the things we see in the world, but you cannot reach for words to describe things. This is impossible. The only thing you can do is reach for words to express your ideas about the description of things.”
The summary is necessary but it is not thinking, it is repeating. It is step 1. Go to step 2: Ask yourself what new thing you’ve learned from it. For example, I’ve learned that to reduce misunderstanding I need to take the shortest possible indirect route between my words and the real world I’m trying to talk about. The shortest possible indirect routes are through pictures (look at this), pointing at something (there it is), putting my finger on the thing (see) or describing the picture or thing in plain English (it’s a house).
The next time someone starts telling you word for word, image for image, about a book, movie, or magazine article do you think you could ask them not to repeat it to you but rather to tell you what they learned from it?
Having read this blog post will you ask yourself what you learned from it? If so, what did you learn from it?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Barrington Nevitt with Maurice McLuhan, Who Was Marshall McLuhan? Toronto: Stoddart, 1994, pp. 13 and Appendix A.
C.K. Ogden and I.A Richards, The Meaning of Meaning. Sixth edition. New York: Harcourt, Brace and co. 1943.
Tags: American mind, Books, Communications, Conversation, Education, Exam, Learning, Listening, Management education, Medium is the message, Movies, Reading, Relationship, Thinking
Marshall McLuhan (March 14, 1951, age 39). Literature is dead
I wrote today to Innis. He has written a dazzling book, Empire and Communications. I shared with him some of the ideas that flowed from our meeting of minds, both in writing and in conversation. For example, literature today is in decline. (Innis shows in his book how few the ages of literature have been and how short.) The end of the present epoch of the book is evident in so many symptoms exhibited in our world today – for example the shortness of the attention span of young people.
A young man came to see me in my office today. He asked me what was the use of reading Edgar Poe. I decided to do a Euclid on him. I said, “Have you read ‘A Descent into The Maelstrom’?” “Yes,” he said. “Good,” I said, “here’s a dollar.”
Michael Hinton (2009, age 57). With friends like Peter Drucker who needs enemies
Marshall McLuhan’s claim that literature is dead was one of many statements McLuhan would make over his career that drove his enemies and quite a number of his friends crazy. Consider for example what Peter Drucker, “the father of management,” said about McLuhan in 1994 when he was asked to reflect on what he had learned from Marshall McLuhan. “Not one of McLuhan’s specific predictions has come true and not one of them is likely to come true.” If Drucker meant this statement seriously, either it reveals his ignorance of McLuhan’s thinking or his willingness to engage in the slander of the reputation of a man who thought of him as a friend and colleague.
To give but one example of a McLuhan prediction that came true, consider this anecdote recounted by Professor Abraham Rotstein, Professor emeritus, economics, at the University of Toronto, and a member of McLuhan’s circle in the 1960s, in a conversation I had with him in August about McLuhan. “Mcluhan comes into class sometime in the 1960s and waves a plastic card at the students. ‘This, ladies and gentlemen is a new kind of credit card, it lets you pay in cash.”
Is Drucker right? Are McLuhan’s predictions all bogus? Is Drucker simply being a cranky old man?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Marshall McLuhan, edited by Corrine McLuhan, Matie Molinaro, and William Toye. Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, pp. 223.
Barrington with Maurice McLuhan Nevitt, Who was Marshall McLuhan? 1995, pp.122-126.
Tags: American mind, Communications, Conversation, Culture, Education, Learning, Literature, Management education, Medium is the message, Predict, Relationship, Technology
Marshall McLuhan (The 1960s, age 48-58). Cheap educations are costly
I went to the University of Manitoba and obtained a B.A. in 1933 and an M.A. in 1934. I then decided the best thing to do next was start all over again. In 1934 I went to Cambridge, England to study for my second B.A.. I then went on to win my union card as a teacher by studying for the Ph.D. at Cambridge, which they granted me in 1943. You might think this is a lot to pay in time and money for an education. It isn’t. As I like to say the problem with a cheap education is that you never stop paying for it.
Michael Hinton (October, 2009, age 57). Students are paying dearly today for cheap educations
Here is an advertisement that appeared in the October 13 issue of The Link a Concordia University student newspaper.
PROFESSIONAL ESSAY HELP. Research, writing and editing. Writers with post-graduate degrees available to help! All subjects, all levels. Plus: resumes, job applications and entrance letters! 1-888-345-8295 www.customessays.com
I e-mailed a request to custom essays for a 1000 word essay on the subject “Marshall McLuhan on the cost of a cheap education,” stipulating that I wanted it to be worth at least 80 percent. I got 6 bids from writers for an essay that would get me 70 percent. I don’t know at what price, but it seems likely the price would be between $100 and $200. Tony Keller a student investigative journalist at York University obtained bids of between $100 and $400 for a 1,750 word essay he ordered on “America’s war on Moustaches.”
Is this good value for money? What is the real cost of buying an essay?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Keller, Tony. “Need to Cheat? On a Budget? Visit Essay Bay,” Macleans.ca On Campus, March, 2008.
Marchand, Philip. Marshall McLuhan: the medium and the messenger, 1989, pp. 19-47.
Tags: Advertising, Books, Business, Communications, Education, Global village, Management education, Medium is the message, Writing
After the stroke, for the remaining 15 months of his life, the expert on communications who startled the world in the 1960s with “the medium is the message” could not read, write or speak except for words like yes, no, oh boy.
Marshall (May 1946, age 35). Literature can’t be taught
“One can only train sensibility [in it. ...] That [anyone can say that it can or] … should be taught … is the first fact to be exploded with the maximum amount of noise.”
Me (September 2009, age 57). Management can’t be taught
Management is another subject that can’t be taught. It cannot be accurately talked about or described in words or pictures. It can only be done or not done. Like literature we can train sensibility in it, and coach people to do it better, but the idea that it can and should be taught like multiplication, map reading, and morse code needs exploding.
What other subjects can’t be taught? How much time and money are we wasting trying to teach the unteachable?
If you find this blog interesting send it to someone you know or talk about it, or talk to me about it.
Cordially, Marshall and Me
P.S. See you here on Tuesday, September 29
Reading for this post
The Letters of Marshall McLuhan. Selected and edited by Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 187.
Tags: Global village, Management education, Medium is the message