Reflections on management and music: Saku's blog

Should managers forget strategy?

2008-07-25T11:17:00.002+03:00

Picked up an interesting quote from Henry Mintzberg, published in Strategic Organization. Mintzberg says the most strange and wonderful things (interview by Pablo Martin de Holan, SO!, 2(2): 207-208):

"Managers should forget the word strategy. They should use their imagination
instead. I believe that strategy is simply putting things together in one’s head, making sense of things in a meaningful way. When we reify strategy it suddenly becomes this Big Thing, and strategy is a sense of where you are going, what direction you and your organization are taking. Strategy in a sense is to move an organization forward, it is not this mysterious thing removed from practice. Michael Porter, but he is not the only one, tends to reify the notion of strategy. But you can do all the analysis you want; life remains rich and complicated. That is what strategy has to be about – not the neat abstractions of the executive suite, but the messy patterns of daily life and how to make sense of them. So as long as managers stay up there disconnected from the reality of their organizations, they can shout down all the strategies they like; they will never work."

So, 'reifying' strategy is what makes it so dangerous, giving it existence beyond what people do. Sounds good to me.

... and the living is easy

2008-06-14T12:20:00.006+03:00

We took our holiday early this year and launched it with a dozen lazy days by the waterside. The first water was a lake in central Finland.

I usually have a "summer project", as I tend to get into something new each summer. This summer the new thing is recovery: trying to work out my injured elbow, trying to deal with social settings with a couple of my front teeth missing, and so on (trust me, it's a blast).

I have reinvigorated my interest in soccer by watching the European championship games, though. Can't resist the temptation to share the ultimate soccer video with you, with the grandmaster of all experts, Ron Manager analyzing a game.

Communicating strategy = communicating goals?

2008-06-13T12:25:00.006+03:00

I often talk to practitioners about strategy process and strategy implementation. There is a peculiar misconception that I have encountered time and time again: strategy is being confused with a set of goals, oftentimes numeric goals; "My strategy is to increase the market share of my product in Finland by 5 % during the next year", etc.

While this may sound a bit surprising, as a goal is only the intended outcome of a strategy, not the strategy itself, I find this misconception surprisingly common. In particular, when strategy is discussed at lower echelons of the organization, the communication of strategy often equals the setting of a particular set of numeric goals.

My guess would be that the overwhelming popularity of the Balanced Scorecard has something to do with this phenomenon. The image of an organization, associated with the Balanced Scorecard is that of an intricate machine, controlled by a strategic code or a program:

“Imagine entering the cockpit of a modern airplane and seeing only one instrument there. How would you feel about boarding the plane after the following discussion with the pilot? [A dialogue with the pilot discussing the merits of using other instruments as well just as the existing speed meter should be used].” - Kaplan & Norton (1996: 1).

While it would be unfair to argue that Kaplan and Norton do not acknowledge that figuring out the ways in which the desired measures are aqcuired is important, the whole metaphor seems to urge managers to forget that the "how" question is at the core of the notion of strategy; "My goal is to increase the market share of my product in Finland by 5 % during the next year, and my strategy for reaching that goal is the following...".

The balanced scorecard trend has taken the original Harvard notion of strategic management being the job of a general manager, who is not to be disturbed by operational issues, and moved the same lack of concern for operations to the level of the people in charge of operations, as absurd as it might sound. Mintzber (1991: 22-23) criticizes the "helicopter view" at all levels of the organization:

“I wonder if anyone can get the true “big picture” by just seeing above. The forest looks just like a rug from a helicopter, and anyone who has taken a walk in the forest […] knows that forests don’t look much like that from the inside. Strategists do not understand much about forests if they stay in helicopters, nor much about organizations if they stay in head offices. […] Thus, strategic thinking is also inductive thinking: seeing above must be supported by seeing below.”

At its best, strategy implementation can not only help organizational performance, but also create commitment and meaning for operational work. The strategy=goal -confusion is particularly disturbing when communicating strategy top-down. At worst, operational employees are given the objectives without the strategy to reach them - all in the name of strategy. The following clip, where a big man comes from headquarters to preach the gospel to a number of salesmen is particularly telling.

"AIDA" and "ABC" don't have much going for them as strategies, do they?

On close calls and Miles Davis

2008-06-10T07:32:00.004+03:00

Last Monday night, after wishing good night to a few colleagues who stayed at the office after I left, I headed home with my new high tech bicycle. After ascending a steep hill, I started a steep descent. I encountered an ad hoc construction site on the road, and flew head first into the asphalt. I recall being surprised by the bump which later turned out to be a water pipe crossing the road, a desperate effort to find balance, a bitter dissappointment of not doing very well, and then - well - pain.

My elbow was fractured, I broke three front teeth and got some nasty bruises in my face. My helmet was split halfway through - had I not worn it, I probably would have died. I sustained no head, neck or jaw injuries whatsoever (except for the teeth).

As I got out of surgery on Tuesday, there was a card waiting for me on the table. I read
it, my head filled with opiates, and got the message: "you get well soon, we will watch
the fort". My colleagues have been great and I have received a wealth of messages and words of encouragement from friends, relatives and students and colleagues, as has my family. Luckily, the accident turned out to be a nuisance but nothing more serious - who needs a few front teeth? Or at least they can be fixed. My elbow will heal. I think I need to tell my loved ones, friends and colleagues that "hey, it's great that you're alive" more often. At least I know that getting the kind of support that I have been given the last few days has been marvelous.

The incident has re-energized my already vibrant relationship with the music of Miles Davis. After surgery, I was placed in a room with three other men. After having slept through the day , I was waken at night by a choir of snoring males (I have no doubt that I had been a member of the same choir just minutes ago). I needed to get to sleep again and turned to my iPod and noise-reduction headphones for help. What I found was Miles Davis's Prestige quintet albums, Workin', Cookin', Relaxin' and Steamin'.
I listened to all four albums in a semi-conscious, semi-religious state.

The four albums are more or less an immortalization of the small jazz combo sound. After signing a record deal with Columbia, the most prestigious jazz label at the time, Miles had to fulfill his obligation to his old company, Prestige. He went to the studio with his quintet, and recorded four albums in two days.
The spontaneiety of the moment, the relaxed feel with standard material and medium tempos, a "slow burn" groove.

There's the cool and human logic of Miles, the fire and wail of Coltrane, the hip groove of Philly Joe Jones, the rock solid base of Paul Chambers and the light touch of Red Garland.

While the following clip comes from a later incarnation of the same band, with Wynton Kelly replacing Red Garland on piano, and Jimmy Cobb replacing Philly Joe Jones on drums, go ahead and treat yourself a few minutes of Miles on YouTube. The song is "So What", maybe Miles's signature composition.

2008-05-13T17:45:00.003+03:00

On how to write

Struggling with one of the N+1 revisions that I have on my desk at the moment, I came across a beautiful passage on how to give advice on how to write. The text is written by John Van Maanen, a giant in the field of organizational ethnography ("Ehtnography Then and Now. Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management: An International Journal; Volume: 1 Issue: 1; 2006; p. 14):

"I am, for example, frequently asked how I write and know how to respond perfectly well to such requests. To wit:

I usually get up around seven or so and get a quick breakfast then go before eight to that Cadillac of a computer that sits on my desk for an uninterrupted three solid hours of work, usually the most productive part of my day. I take a break around eleven or so to fetch the snail mail and read my email, then it’s back to work – resisting by shear strength of character the seductions of this mail. I quit around one or so, get lunch and read the morning paper. Then back to the desk for another couple of hours until my concentration inevitably fades and I sag away from the desk around five, go for a run, take a shower and begin, drink in hand, to read over whatever it is I was writing during the day.

Piece of cake. Right? The problem of course is that I get a day like this once every two or three months. I do have a family, classes to teach, a dog to walk, administrative duties to attend to, students to meet, social attractions that call and so on. But I do think my fictional day is rather typical of the help and advice we give when someone asks how to write."

I particularly enjoy the notion that Van Maanen has a day like that once every two or three months. Man, I wish I had a day like that, everyday.

2008-05-01T22:37:00.002+03:00

Happy Wappu!

In Finland, we celebrate Wappu at the turn of April into May. Today was Wappu day, whereas yesterday was - naturally - Wappu eve. Wappu is a joyous occasion, where we welcome the triumph of spring over winter, which is, truth be told, a rather sullen and laborious season at these latitudes.

Anyway, wanted to share this joyous occasion with you by sharing two film clips from my youth. They were funny then, and have not ceased to be funny until this very day.

No. 1. Three Amigoes and the Singing Bush

No 2. Eddie Murphy's discourse about a banana

2008-05-01T12:53:00.006+03:00

Strolling the spring with Iivari

My son Iivari has reached the age when it's cool to do stuff with dad. We went to the park on the beach (the one with the big pirate ship thing), and whilst strolling at the beach, I caught a few snapshots of spring advancing.

A ship with some muddled foreground interest...

Two specimens of Isokoskelo (lat. Mergus merganser, engl. Common Merganser) chasing each other. Teenagers, probably...

A flock of cranes...

A closeup...

2008-04-12T13:46:00.016+03:00

On family, varieties of fauna and treetops

Having returned from my travels, it was time to spend some time with the kids and let Outi have a bit of peace and quiet. So, off we went. It was a beautiful morning and I grabbed my Nikon with a telephoto lens to let off some steam.

Our first stop was the beach - pulla and pillimehu (cinnamon rolls and straw-lemonade) all around. Then off to the beach.

A seagull...

a pair of ducks, bathing in light...

... and two examples of the mammalian, two-legged persuasion...

For some reason, I don't like to publish many pictures of family members and friends on my blog. I guess I feel that in most cases, it may be best to let them decide what to publish and what not when the time comes. However, I was struck by the notion of how much this blog may meet the tone of old men's biographies, discussing all sorts of anecdotes about colleagues and celebrities, brushing off family members with a slight nod. The Finnish pop group Ultra Bra once made a remark about Marshall Mannerheim's (the most celebrated Finn in Finland) memoirs:

"Olen lukenut muistelmiasi
en ymmärrä sinua lainkaan
kerrot sodista ja hevosista
vaimostasi on kaksi riviä
lapsistasi ei mitään"

"I've read your memoir
I can't figure you out
you go on about wars and horses
there are two lines about your wife
and nothing about your kids."

Now, there are two explanations: a) men take their families as granted; b) men leave their families out of memoirs out of respect.

Anyway, off we went to the playground. On the way, we saw some birds...

A robin, I think...

I have no idea what this yellow fellow is called, not to mention in English...

Another unidentified neighbor...

And another one...

This fellow I know - it's a badger!

Signs of spring...

I just realized that I have a thing about treetops. I seem to like photographing them. As a child, I created a bond with the tops of nearby trees, as they seemed to be faces. In a way, each treetop is unique, and defines the "personality" of the tree in question. This is retrospective sensemaking, looking at the endless number of treetops stored on our computer.

Of course I failed to take my camera when we talk a walk with Iivari at dusk. There were swans, Canadian geese and all sorts of weird aquatic birds abound, while the morning's variety had been more mundane. Well, I guess you just have to take my word for it.

2008-04-10T18:49:00.007+03:00

Back in Oxford

I closed my UK tour with a quick visit to Oxford. Arriving at around 10 PM, the Oxford I saw was a rather magical place. Walking to New College from the bus stop was like walking into a fairy tale.

During my last visit, I had forged a relationship with a magnolia tree, growing on the courtyard where the visitor's lodgings are. I was delighted to see it bathed in the warm glow of morning light.

Had a quick but productive meeting with Richard and a luxurious lunch at the college. Got a glimpse of Michael Dummett, one of the key figures in late 20th century analytical philosophy (an anti-realist) in the common room.
The New College gardens...

A quick snapshot of a spire, just for the sake of it...

And off to the bus stop I went.

2008-04-09T18:47:00.006+03:00

Glasgow, April 9th

Henri Schildt, the third of our team of researchers working on the paper revision flew to Glasgow from London on the previous day. Henri was one of the PhD students at TKK when I started there as a post doc. He used to be one of those irrirating characters who excelled at a wide variety of things: good at math, extremely intelligent, a likeable character, master programmer, inclined towards philosophical thinking, etc.

Henri and John...

We concluded after lunch and I took a stroll downtown Glasgow to pick up a few gifts for Outi and the kids. In one shop window, an oxymoron of a product was on display - a matchbox-sized Kerry King Marshall amplified with an allegedly massive sound. Well...

Here's a picture of Kerry King...

And here's the massive amplifier on display...

Oh well. I took an evening flight to London and a bus to Oxford for a short visit. On the plane, I devoured a delightful snack of a comic book that I had bought from Forbidden Planet, "Ministry of Space." Beautifully drawn, nice retro look and a smart, little story. Recommended.

2008-04-08T18:42:00.001+03:00

Glasgow, April 8th

The next day dawned much brighter and I was off to another day of serious scientific thinking with John. On the way to the business school, I captured some images of city life.

My take on the absurd, Campus Rocks Wednesdays, and a guy with a tree growing out of his head...

Church and crane...

Oh, well...

A bloke on a stick, with a seagull on his head...

British dumpsters are far classier than their Finnish kin...

Lounge lizard...

My take on the tourist photo genre...

I was thrilled to find Forbidden Planet in Glasgow. Helped myself to a healthy dose of comic books. There was also some stuff in their shop window which looked pretty essential to me.

Apparition...

Another tourist picture...

The crowd gathering for my presentation. A nice and smart audience with some very useful comments offered.

2008-04-07T18:38:00.002+03:00

Glasgow, April 7th

Glasgow greeted me with gray weather. Once again I was caught off guard by the friendliness and warmth of the people I interacted with, beginning with the hotel reception, continued by the waitress in a coffee shop, and a lady I asked for directions while trying to find Strathclyde Business School. On entering the building, I was greeted by a television screen, welcoming my humble presence.

The pleasure was all mine.

The town of Glasgow is a smörgåsbord of different architectural styles. After doing six hours of intense discussion about our paper's reviewer responses, John took me to a walk to the town's necropolis, which he tells me means "burial hill".

My previous encounter with the word 'necropolis' was from Neil Gaiman's comic book Sandman
where there was a town of the dead called Litharge, which housed a civilization of undead, who lived down the river on which other civilizations left their dead. They had a magnificient 'necropolis' where they conducted one of the "five approved methods of bodily disposal." The boy hero of the story dreams of a life beyond the necropolis and the mountains.

By the way, those interested in Gaiman's work might want to download "A study in emerald", the best Sherlock Holmes story I've ever heard, read by the author himself. You can get the story free here.

The Glasgow's necropolis turned out to be less sinister from Gaiman's vision. It was a very pleasant place to take a stroll and forget our troubles for a while.

2008-04-06T14:11:00.000+03:00

On jet planes, Foucault and all that

I was off to the U.K. for some heavy-duty scientific work with some heavy-duty colleagues. Leaving on Sunday on a business trip is a melancholic exercise. We live in an area where lots of businesspeople live nearby, and I always get this cold feeling when the taxis take the business men and women away from their families on Sunday evening.

Anyway, this was what I did this time. I was looking forward to a couple of days of uninterrupted thinking with some really smart people. John Sillince, Henri Schildt and I had a just received a revision request from a tough journal and we needed to devise a strategy on how to deal with it. John hosted the meeting in Glasgow. To top that off, I had a meeting at Oxford with Richard Whittington, to work on our paper on how managers become strategists, presented at EGOS 2007.

On the plane, I read a new paper on strategy as discourse by Ezzamel & Willmott, published in a recent issue of Organization Studies. As this is more or less my core field of interest, an article in a good journal is always an event.

I had tried to give this paper one of my usual "ten minute glances" at work and had failed miserably. As I got the sense that the text might reveal its secrets only under closer scrutiny, I had booked some "quality time" at the airplane for this purpose.

I was right. The paper had no discernible tables, figures or other summarizing instruments that you usually find reviewers insisting on at good management journals. The contribution was written in narrative form, in a sense not similar to Foucault, Ezzamel & Willmott's main theoretical inspiration. Many of my colleagues find Foucault difficult. I think the reason may be that you cannot glance at it and find neat definitions and summaries for concepts often attributed to him like "panoptic gaze" or "disciplinary power". You have to read the whole narrative to make sense of what he is saying. The whole narrative, on the other hand, is often very compelling, insightful and witty, i.e., great fun to read. I discovered this by accident when I took Discipline and Punish with me to a family holiday on the Azores and had a great time reading it. Later on, I have found many of the ideas useful in my work. After that, I don't approach Foucault as a "difficult author" but as a treat. It is just that you have to book enough time to read one of his works to be able to appreciate it.

Anyway, about Ezzamel & Willmott. I found their introduction to Foucault's contribution to Organization Studies in the paper's theory section quite compelling. For the reasons mentioned above, Foucault is not the easiest author to introduce. I made a mental note about wanting to explore further what Foucault meant by "systems", a concept used by social theorists across the board (and abhorred by others).

The results section also contains a number of compelling examples about power/knowledge nexus Foucault is widely known of promoting. I found myself quoting the paper in my presentation at Strathclyde, as one example about Stichco's new CEO promoting a way of working based on "fact, not anecdote".

On pp. 210-221, Ezzamel and Willmott note that:

"We have acknowledged the impossibility of providing any definitively or conclusively authoritative representation of the ‘reality’ of (our) narrative(’s) construction. Ultimately, a narrative’s plausibility and contribution depends upon the (power/knowledge) relation of its readers’ interpretive amenability to its discursive invitation. Does the narrative resonate with the reader’s socially organized concerns? Is it met with indifference? Or does it arouse their hostility? It is the power-invested sense of solidity or self-evidence of the discursive interpretation or translation of accounts that conditions their reception as compelling, confusing, contentious or contemptible."

Well, did the paper resonate with me? Yes and no. While I was certainly sympathetic to the approach taken in the paper, and the paper gave rise to a number of thought processes, I was not completely sure about the final argument that the paper was making about discourse and strategy work. For me, the paper was another example about how discursive practices give rise to particular social realities, if a compelling one. I was missing a particular, specific finding about strategy work that I could take with me. It was a good remainder about the value of alternative analyses on strategy work, as the authors note on pp.

"It is to be expected that Foucauldian analysis will be found wanting by researchers working in traditions where it is assumed or expected that analysis should self-evidently serve, or be positively consequential for, a research agenda which, not exceptionally, is presumed or compliantly conceded to be the only worthwhile agenda. It is perhaps only when the limits and precariousness of knowledge claims are appreciated — along with their political and ethical responsibilities— that the relevance and value of alternative forms of analysis becomes contemplatible. Indeed, it has been suggested that appreciating the contribution of alternative forms of analysis that are directly attentive and responsive to ‘the crisis of representation’ (Calas and Smircich 1999: 650) then becomes a necessity, not a pointless diversion."

This is a good point and well put. Strategic management is rich with all sorts of discourses, seeking hegemony. After all, it is the strategy scholars who stay in best hotels.

I also gave myself the pleasure of marveling at landscape photos, which is something that I often to while traveling. I had brought with me the landscape photography masterclass book Developing Vision and Style, brought to us by a Joe Cornish, Charlie Waite, David Ward and their students. The book, in addition to representing a collection of sublime photos, also contained an interesting debate on issues such as: "should I aim for an identifiable style in my work." The struggle for consistency in creating an identifiable style without becoming predictable is something that faces, not such artists, but also us organizational scientists in their work. We struggle for a "voice" but do not wish to get stuck, repeating the same message over and over again.

For instance, if one goes to website hosting the works of such master photographers as Joe Cornish, Charlie Waite or David Ward, one sees that after a while, there are identifiable aspects to the artists' images. But every new image contains something unpredictable, and is a new challenge to the beholder.

2008-04-02T10:32:00.002+03:00

On breaking down in front of class

Oh, how I long for those carefree days from my youth, when catching a flu meant a couple of days off school, watching videos and relishing the misery of one's existence. Nowadays a flu means that you end up working nights because your kids can't go to the kindergarten because they are sick too.

Oh, moan, moan.

Luckily, the kids are better now and I just have to work during the daytime while recovering from a flu. One of my favorite activities in a period like this is teaching class. Yesterday, I literary broke down in front of a class full of communications students as I had a huge coughing fit. You could say I "turned Bob Fleming" on them.

"Bob Fleming", you ask? Take a look at this. You'll see what I mean.

2008-03-28T21:25:00.003+02:00

On broken telephones

I had a good day today. Or at least in principle. The good thing was that I got my inbox all sorted out, and even managed to scrape off all the sediments at the bottom. The less good thing was that I got into miscommunications with three different people.

E-mail is not a good way of communicating, because the emotional underpinnings of what you mean can be interpreted in a lot of different ways. I am glad that you can sort things out with telephone (or with a bzillion new, "I did not mean what you just said I meant" -type e-mails). The following clip will demonstrate what I mean.

2008-03-20T10:06:00.000+02:00

On Rocket Science and Rocket Scientists

During my career, the phrase "this is not rocket science" has been used many times, by myself and others. I find this phrase comforting and it is something that I use to urge people to try out new stuff that looks theoretically thick or challenging. It's like saying: "this is not so difficult, you can make sense of this if you want to." This statement of course makes sense against the understanding that rocket science is, in fact, quite complicated, really.

I read a remarkable book review a while back in the New York Review of Books, titled "Rocket Man". The book is called "Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War" and it is about the German scientist and engineer Wernher von Braun. The man was a member of the SS, the creator of both V1 and V2 rockets, who later emigrated to the U.S. and participated in their space program. During his time in Nazi Germany, concentration camp prisoners were used as labor in his projects.

What was interesting about the review was that it was written by Freeman Dyson a physicist who played a part in the British rocket program during WWII. I was familiar with Dyson mostly because of the concept "Dyson Sphere", a speculative construct of an artificial sphere, constructed around a sun. This construct has been fueled quite a bit of good science fiction, such as Larry Niven's Ringworld and the Star Trek Next Generation episode Relics (the one where Scotty visits Enterprise D).

Anyway, Dyson makes an intriguing ethical statement at the end of the book review. The author of the biography has condemned Von Braun's past ,which Dyson finds hard to accept. He writes:

"The author of this book condemns von Braun for his collaboration with the SS, and condemns the United States government for covering up the evidence of his collaboration. Here I beg to differ with the author. War is an inherently immoral activity. Even the best of wars involves crimes and atrocities, and every citizen who takes part in war is to some extent collaborating with criminals. I should here declare my own interest in this debate. In my work for the RAF Bomber Command, I was collaborating with people who planned the destruction of Dresden in February 1945, a notorious calamity in which many thousands of innocent civilians were burned to death. If we had lost the war, those responsible might have been condemned as war criminals, and I might have been found guilty of collaborating with them.

After this declaration of personal involvement, let me state my conclusion. In my opinion, the moral imperative at the end of every war is reconciliation. Without reconciliation there can be no real peace. Reconciliation means amnesty. It is allowable to execute the worst war criminals, with or without a legal trial, provided that this is done quickly, while the passions of war are still raging. After the executions are done, there should be no more hunting for criminals and collaborators. In order to make a lasting peace, we must learn to live with our enemies and forgive their crimes. Amnesty means that we are all equal before the law. Amnesty is not easy and not fair, but it is a moral necessity, because the alternative is an unending cycle of hatred and revenge. South Africa has set us a good example, showing how it can be done.

In the end, I admire von Braun for using his God-given talents to achieve his visions, even when this required him to make a pact with the devil. He bent Hitler and Himmler to his purposes more than they bent him to theirs. And I admire the United States Army for giving him a second chance to pursue his dreams. In the end, the amnesty given to him by the United States did far more than a strict accounting of his misdeeds could have done to redeem his soul and to fulfill his destiny."

This is a powerful statement and one that rings true and brave to me at many levels. Although we might disagree with the sentiment that war criminals should not be hunted after the war, for instance, I find that there are far too few compelling texts calling for reconciliation and forgiveness. I find Dyson's sentiment uplifting.

2008-03-17T11:18:00.002+02:00

At home in music

John McLaughlin's guitar playing has always been a delight. In a recent interview in Downbeat (read it here) he makes a statement which captures something important:

"we all find ourselves at home in music. It reminds us from where we come, and where we all belong - whatever the kind of music it may be." [my emphasis]

This notion of being "at home in music" in particular rings true, although I find that such experiences are rare and precious. It is an event when some piece of music resonates in this way. One such event took place recently when I got acquainted with Maria Schneider's new album Sky Blue. The Grammy-awarded piece "Cerulean Skies" in particular hit home. It is difficult to write uplifting music in this day and age and Maria Schneider is an undisputed master in this. Go hear for yourself at www.mariaschneider.com.

2007-12-28T15:38:00.000+02:00

I'm back!

Well, sort of. I had a wonderful blogging visit at Orgtheory.net. Those interested in the management aspect of this blog are invited to behold and share the fruits of this labor at http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/author/smantere/.

Then I went to the Canary Islands with the family, and the kids had a joyous meeting with Bamse. Then it was Christmas. Now my desk is flooded with work, and I will not be able to create a decent entry in a couple of days.

I do wish to share a link with music lovers, as well as those of us who find lists of all sorts inviting. There is a site called, Acclaimed music, moderated by a statistician, which collects top N lists by music critics into a huge Top 3000 list of songs and albums. Is this a list to end all lists (thus destroying itself). Go see for yourself at http://www.acclaimedmusic.net/

2007-11-09T14:10:00.000+02:00

Off visiting some colleagues...

I'll be guest-blogging at Orgtheory.net, a wonderful and active arena for discussing and theorizing about Organizations. The stint will be for November, so things may be a bit quiet here meanwhile. See you there.

2007-11-07T08:41:00.000+02:00

Fear of Knowledge

Have been reading Paul Boghossian's Fear of Knowledge, a compelling and intelligent refutation of Social Constructivism. I regard myself as a social constructivist within my own domain of work, as many of the micro-organizational phenomena which I am interested in would seem to be epistemologically relative. Who would have the guts to argue that he/she knows what the culture of Organization X is, for instance. Joanna Martin, in her classic text Cultures in Organizations, shows how you can give multiple readings of the culture of a single firm, none of which is non-contestable.

Boghossian, originally physics major, who used to sit in Rorty's seminar, makes a powerful argument which is a pleasure to read.
Looking forward to making a counter argument. By the way, Boghossian has also written an illuminative essay on the Sokal controversy in the Times Literary Supplement, which can be accessed here.

2007-11-04T16:32:00.000+02:00

On strategy dialogues

I was reading M.M. Bakhtin for a paper I am writing with Richard Whittington on how individuals become strategists (see here). I was interested in his work on speech genres, seeking to understand, how everyday utterances are structured by stylistic considerations.

What I was most struck by the essay "Speech Genres", however, was Bakhtin's reminder that communication is dialogical.

It appears that strategy implementation gurus, seem to be smitten with Claude Shannon's notion of communication, where communication is characterized by the transmission of a message between a sender and a receiver (figure adopted by Shannon's 1948 Mathemathical Theory of Communication, which can be read here).

In such a scheme, if the meaning of the message changes in transmission, it is either the result of noise or misinterpretation. In strategy implementation, it is easy to be lured into thinking that this indeed is how one communicates strategy. After the top management team has come up with a brilliant strategy, the role of communication is to ensure interpretation of that strategy across the organization. The resulting view of a strategy process looks a little bit like this:
The educated reader might suspect that I have drawn the figure to set up a straw man. That reader is only urged to go to the local library and borrow a few books on "strategy implementation". Consider, for instance, Hrebiniak and Joyce, who in their 1984 book Implemeting Strategy, after presenting a model of implementation, not much different from the one above argued that:

Our view of motivation and the employment contract enables us to develop a straightforward stimulus-response-reinforcement model of the application and use of incentives and controls in the organization. (ibid. 189)

Hrebiniak and Joyce have a chapter on strategy implementation ("Implementing strategy" in Hitt et al's (2001) Blackwell Handbook of Strategic Management), where strategy implementation is still built on structure, reinforced by "incentives and controls". It does not pay to be openly behaviorist in many other fields of science, but in strategic management people seem to appreciate behaviorism. After all, the top management is the one who is supposed to know about strategy and the role of implementers is to conform.

Bakhtin provided a fresh and valuable reminder of just how feeble such behaviorism is. For strategy to be implemented, strategy must be communicated. And all human communication is dialogical. Have you ever experienced a communication situation, where somebody is telling you something and your sole intent has been to make sense of every word as the communicator intends them to be interpreted? Bakhtin's (1986/1952-1953: 68) answer is no:

Still current in linguistics are such functions as the "listener" and "understander" (partners of the "speaker") , the "unified speech flow," and so on. These pictures produce a completely distorted idea of the complex and multifaceted process of active speech communication. [...] diagrams of the active speech processes of the speaker and the corresponding passive processes of the listener's perception and understanding of the speech. One cannot say that these processes are false or that they do not correspond to certain aspects of reality. But when they are put forth as the actual whole of speech communication, they become science fiction. The fact is that when the listener perceives and understands the meaning (the language meaning) of speech, he simultaneously takes an active, responsive attitude toward it [...] Any understanding is imbued with response and necessarily elicits it in one form or the other: the listener becomes the speaker.

In terms of strategy implementation, the dialogical view takes the notion "Any understanding is imbued with response and necessarily elicits it in one form or the other: the listener becomes the speaker" seriously. The corresponding schema might look something like the following:
The dialogical view is in line with the views of lots of the dissidents in strategy literature such as Mintzberg, Gioia & Chittipeddi and Barry & Elmes. However, it appears as if the literature focused on "implementation" seems to have built a behaviorist fortress around itself.

You could argue that, adding a feedback loop to the linear model would make it look a bit like the dialogical model. Maybe, if you drew lots of loops. Indeed, many practitioners have accepted the need for "strategy dialogue", yet the strategy processes in these very organizations may look strikingly linear. The key, uncomfortable question regarding whether a strategy process is dialogical or not is, I think:

"are you willing to let the strategy change in implementation".

If you want the organization to implement your strategy, dialogue is just sugar frosting. When I was working in the STRADA program, my previous employer, we often had phone calls from strategists saying: "You are a strategy implementation program. We have our strategy together now. How could you help us implement it?" Indeed, we were a strategy implementation research program. Petri Aaltonen, a colleague of mine, had drawn a nifty figure to denote our key problem.

After a while, I begun to realize that maybe the chasm was something that one creates oneself. It is not a fact of nature, but something created by behaviorist views on how to build a strategy process.

November at its best

We saw first snow today. My family took some friends on a picnic in a national park nearby to experience the first snow, as well as to barbecue some sausages on an open fire (a favorite of the dids, and in particular, the parents).

2007-10-06T13:15:00.000+03:00

Strategy as a language game. The prize for the most interesting strategy read this week...

Goes to David Seidl, whose paper "General Strategy Concepts and the Ecology of Strategy Discourses: A Systemic-Discursive Perspective", published in a recent Organization Studies (28/2) breaks new ground on the path opened by authors who have explored strategic management as a discourse (e.g., Knights & Morgan, 1991; as well as Whittington et al's paper "Taking strategy seriously" in the Journal of Management Inquiry).

In the paper, David explores how strategy concepts are transformed in their adoption across organizations. Marrying the notion of language games from Wittgenstein's late period with Luhmann's notion of organizations as systems, David argues that "no transferof strategy concepts across different discoursesis possible. Instead, every single strategy discourse can merely construct its own discourse-specific concepts. Different discourses, however, draw on the samestrategy labels, which leads to ‘productivemisunderstandings’".

I am reminded by Peirce's distinction between types and tokens in semiotics. The complex sign "dynamic capability" is a token, which the theoreticians of have taken to mean a specific set of characteristics, to be encountered across a set of organizations: a type. David has managed to convince me that indeed, we often mistakenly equate type with token, as we take it for granted that academics and practitioners mean the same thing when they use concept tokens like "strategy", "implementation", "industry" and so on. Instead of being "transferred", conceptual content is recreated in each instance where it is adopted in a new language game.

I also think the notion of "productive misunderstanding" is highly valuable. As we note contradictions in the rules of using different concepts across language games, new meaning is constructed, which enriches the language games.

However, where I have more difficulty is accepting that organizations can be viewed as single language games, or indeed, that we have a non-problematic way of drawing the border where one language game ends and another begins. This is a point made by Michael Mauws and Nelson Phillips in the paper "Understanding language games" (Organization Science, 6/3). They criticize the notion that practitioners and academics play according to different language games. Instead, we should see both discourses embedded in a network of interconnected language games.

There is a practical example, which illustrates the notion that organizations are not singular language games with respect to their strategy concepts. In his well-known paper "Strategy Creation in the Periphery: Inductive Versus Deductive Strategy Making" (Journal of Management Studies, 40/1), Patrick Regnér shows that strategy work is radically different between organizational centers and peripheries. He writes:

"The findings show a twofold character of strategy creation, including fundamental different strategy activities in the periphery and centre, reflecting their diverse location and social embeddedness. Strategy making in the periphery was inductive, including externally oriented and exploratory strategy activities like trial and error, informal noticing, experiments and the use of heuristics. In contrast, strategy making in the centre was more deductive involving an industry and exploitation focus, and activities like planning, analysis, formal intelligence and the use of standard routines."

Indeed, according to my experience, strategy is composed of radical different discourses within organizations. It would appear that the most natural way to approach the concept of language game is a heuristic instrument, where we abstract a certain social context, to make sense of the rules of its language game and the "form of life" that this language game belongs to. However, the way we conduct this abstraction, e. g., "organization X's strategy language game", "the strategy language game within organization X's periphery", "the language game within organization X's top management team" is essentially contestable. Language games are intertwined and interconnected, and language games where strategy tokens are used are no exception.

2007-10-05T15:53:00.000+03:00

Images of summer past

As it appears I will probably never manage to write a full reconstruction of the summer past, I will share some pictures. These pictures were taken during a family holiday at a rented cottage in Savitaipale, by the lakeside.

It was a time well spent with the family. I was also reading scifi and searching for the perfect mechanical watch in various books and catalogues.

2007-09-26T13:43:00.000+03:00

I gave an opening speech today at a breakfast meeting for communication professionals at the Helsinki School of Economics. It was a pleasant invitation as I had not had interactions with many of the companies who were represented and have had too few dealings with the HSE, which is a well-reputed school just across the street.

I was confronted with a group of experienced and inquisitive senior communication officials and researcher colleagues. Answering their challenging questions proved to be a highly pleasurable ordeal. I had prepared a speech on the development and historical debates within the strategic management discipline. I chose to focus on particular dissident thinkers who have caused revolutions within the strategic management discipline.

Key dissidents within strategic management

Strategic management was born as a business discipline in the 1960s. Management teachers in the U.S. had become more and more aware of the role the changing business environment has in the practice of management. Many attribute the birth of the discipline of strategic management to Harvard, and more specifically its course on general managers.

Indeed, it is striking how the early texts from the discipline such as Business Policy: Texts and Cases by Learned, Cristensen, Andrews and Guth, and Concept of Corporate Strategy by Andrews are focused on teaching strategy. These early authors, who are often labeled as the Business Policy authors were indeed concerned with the holistic development of their students as strategists. Andrews (1971: 238) indeed wrote that

"Corporate purposes are by definition a projection in part of the leader’s own personal goals and a reflection of his character […] a corporation is essentially the lengthened shadow of a man.”

The Business Policy authors were also leaning towards what is known as the planning school (apparently Mintzberg's term) in strategic management. Strategy was regarded as a future-oriented business, where strategic choices lead to objectives, to be implemented with the use of various plans. While this view is often associated closest with Igor Ansoff, Learned et al. (1969: 15) also defined strategy as :

"the pattern of objectives, purposes, or goals and major policies and plans for achieving these goals, stated in such a way as to define what business the company is in or is to be in and the kind of company it is to be."

Dissident 1. Michael Porter - Strategy as an instrument

The first revolution in strategic management was caused by Michael Porter, a graduate from Harvard Business School who gained a PhD from Harvard in Economics, was successful in applying rigorous techniques from the field of microeconomics to the study and teaching of strategic management. In the a new introduction to his first milestone Competitive Strategy (Porter, 1980: x), he reflects upon the success of the book:

“This book filled a void in management thinking. After several decades of development, the role of general managers versus specialists was becoming better defined. Strategic planning had become widely accepted as the important task of charting a long-term direction for an enterprise. Early thinkers such as Kenneth Andrews and C. Roland Christensen had raised some important questions in developing a strategy [...] Yet, there were no systematic, rigorous tools for answering these questions – assessing a company’s industry, understanding competitors, and choosing a competitive position.”

Andrews and Christensen had become "early thinkers" in their approach to strategy, and Porter's powerful view started to atttract followers. Eventually, the focus started to shift away from understanding the strategists to understanding and employing strategy instruments.

Dissident 2. Henry Mintzberg - Strategy as a process

It is open to debate whether Henry Mintzberg is the founder of the strategy process school, but he probably is the most widely known. Where Michael Porter managed to switch focus away from the strategists, Mintzberg attacked the early authors', most notably Igor Ansoffs view of strategy as a premeditated plan. In a famous figure (below) in his 1977 article, Mintzberg reminded us that we understand little of strategy if we focus merely on what companies intend in their strategies, without understanding what they do.

Mintzberg's work on strategy-as-process, as well as Porter's, has fundamentally affected organizational practice as well as management studies.

Dissident(s) 3. David Knights and Glenn Morgan - Strategy as a discourse

In 1991, David Knights and Glenn Morgan published a paper in Organization Studies, where they studied strategy in a funny way. Instead of looking at strategy content or process as organizational phenomena, they took the whole discipline of strategic management under the looking glass. They conducted a foucauldian geneology on the discipline, and focused on the way strategic management constructs top managers.

Knights and Morgan's paper was revolutionary in at least two respects:

1. Through its research setting it critically examined the dogma that strategy work in some form is necessary for companies. That is, it showed the boundaries of the strategy concept in management, which had become almost overwhelming.

2. It questioned the power of top managers as craftsmen of strategy, the key premise in the Business Policy tradition. Instead, they demonstrated in an uncomfortably convicing way how the opposite is true: the strategy discipline constructs the managers.

Dissident(s) 4. David Barry and Michael Elmes - Strategy as fiction

In a way, Barry & Elmes's paper "Strategy Retold" in the Academy of Management Review in 1997 about strategy as a narrative returns the focus to a core aspect of the early planning school: viewing strategy as a text. When we look at strategy as a plan, our focus is on formulations of that plan in various documents.

There is a twist, however. Barry and Elmes treat strategy as a form of fiction and use a number of methods from literary studies to make sense of strategy as a fictional narrative.

Another key point of departure from the planning school is that Barry and Elmes also treat an organizational narrative as a polytonal form of fiction, social and shared, as well as written text. The notion of polytonality is a powerful notion in organizational strategy practice, as well as it is novel in strategy literature.

Dissident 5. Richard Whittington - Strategy as work

In 1996 Richard Whittington published a short paper in Long Range Planning, where he promoted a novel view on strategy, which he called strategy as practice.. The paper was intended for opening a discussion on a new approach for studying strategy: "The focus of this approach is on strategy as a social 'practice', on how the practitioners of strategy really act and interact." (Whittington, 1996: 731).

The discussion grew in conferences and workshops. Many well-established senior scholars joined in, followed by a number of junior scholars. Strategy-as-practice has established itself as an open discipline, with a variety of theoretical and methodological viewpoints. Although the discussion is rather diverse, the shared focus remains on understanding strategy as something that real people do in real organizations. I like to think of it as a rain dance of a sort, and us scholars as anthropologists, seeking to understand the ways and local reasons why it is performed.

Concluding reflections

I think this story has a practical dimension. The views, promomoted by the dissidents are part of the implicit, often conflicting cognitive background of strategy practice in organizations. Becoming aware of the tensions that exist in he background assumptions regarding strategy is helpful, as it enables one to be more reflexive in one's practice.

I have used a number of important scholars to plot out one possible interpretation of what has happened within the discourse of strategic management. Why these scholars were chosen over others is determined by my personal interpretation and does not represent a particularly authoritative view. Indeed, within the strategy-as-practice community there exist a number of theoretical and methodological leaders who have made the community what it is today. Furthermore, all seven of my "dissidents" are white males. I have sought to include voices which some may regard controversial or even "marginal" (I doubt Knights and Morgan, 1991 is a part of the staregy readings at Harvard Business School - correct me if I'm wrong), yet the men themselves do not seem to represent particularly marginal groups. I can only claim that this is the characteristic of the discipline itself, not a failure in my perception.

2007-09-22T22:49:00.000+03:00

Lure of the mechanical watch

During each summer, I tend to find a new hobby or an interest. These hobbies are often things I've never done before. Around ten years ago, when Outi had just graduated and got a job as a doctor at a clinic near our summer cottage in Ilomantsi, I spent quite a few weeks learning the basics of jazz theory. I literally spent six hours a day, working through the basic modes, linking them to chords and coming up with exercises on guitar. A few summers later, I got my head around amateur astronomy and tried to learn all the constellations in the northern sky (I had much less success there; I still remember the scales and modes on guitar). Then marathons. A couple of summers later it was landscape photography, inspired by a trip to Scotland with my friend Mikko who happened to have an issue of Photography Monthly with him. The next summer I was learning about chess. Last summer it was soccer - small wonder since it was the world championship year.

I realized such a pattern exists during summer holiday only recently. It appears that even if I often don't get very far with any particular topic, the whole process is extremely relaxing. It is as if building a completely new cognitive domain helps me to forget all the problems at work and "wipe the slate clean", so to speak.

The reason I realized this only now is that my interests have always made sense somehow before (well, excluding soccer of course). This summer, however, I have been fanatically finding my way around mechanical watches. The whole thing started as I had grown increasingly irritated about having to check the time on my cell phone, which has an irritating screen saver. Anyway, I started thinking that maybe it would be cool to have a cool watch and there I was. I've bought 4 books and a number of magazine issues (yes, indeed such magazines exist) thus far. I've ordered a mass of catalogues from a number of key brands.

It's not that surprising that I would find watches compelling, really. After all, watches represent pretty much what mankind has learned about mechanics to date. They are mechanical masterpieces and small works of art at the same time. What I find particularly compelling, however are the firms that make them.

Mechanical watch brands are precious things. The products cost a whole lot of money (there is no reasonable limit, really), and their consumers mostly do not understand the intricacies involved in their making. Yet the credibility of the brands is hard earned. We want to see in a quality watch brand a consummate passion for the practice of the art of watchmaking. To use MacIntyre's term, we want to see a brand watch as a product of internal practice (a practice practiced for its own sake) and not an external one (a practice practiced for accomplishing some other good extrinsic to the practice itself, money, for instance).

In the seventies, a plague, known as the "quartz revolution" rocked the fabled halls of mechanical watchmaking. Many quality brands got into financial troubles as quartz watches took their markets. Most of the companies changed owners. Some of them survived without major upheavals, some did less well.

Nowadays, the mechanical watch is yet again the pinnacle of creation. Companies seek to build their brands by trying to show an uninterrupted path of consummate practice lasting at least a hundred years. However, unlike the wine business, the families who founded the companies rarely own them any more. Some of the most respected companies had to rebuild their production after the seventies with the help of external investments.

The key to brand credibility here appears to be identity. Are the companies really the same as when they started out. Identity means sameness, and in the case of personal or organizational identity, this sameness means continuity over time. My identity involves a 10-year old me being the same person than me now, even if I am radically different person both physically and psychologically. The key question with watch companies is: are they the same, even if they had to rebuild their production, or if they had to change personnel altogether?

One interesting example is Breguet, a classical brand if any. The company invented the first wristwatch (yes, it appears that the watch in Pulp Fiction was indeed a Breguet). Its founder is regarded as maybe the greatest genius among watchmakers. Yet, in the seventies they were purchased by a non-interested investor and they fell into oblivion, until a heavy investment from the Swatch Group got them to their feet again. One arrogant jeweler noted that Breguet is "a brand in a ventilator".

This same jeweler also noted that a true aficionado could never buy a watch from a brand that did not manufacture its own movements. Actually, relatively few do nowadays - even Rolex only started doing this in the 2000's. This is another aspect of a precious brand: authenticity. It does not suffice to design great faces and cases, use reliable subcontractors and build a brand, as this would be external, not internal practice.

Another key aspect is exclusiveness. Among watchlovers and experts, Patek Philippe appears to be widely respected as the top brand in terms of technical finesse and style. However, as this reputation has spread outside the watchlover-discourse, for some this appears to take something away from the brand. Indeed, some people buy Pateks just because they are rich and want a good watch without really appreciating what they get (or so one might suspect). This has indeed happened with Rolex, which somebody said "is much better than its reputation".

In any case, I have enjoyed this most recent excursion. Below are pictures of watches I find cool at this moment.

Jaeger-Lecoultre: Reverso Grande

IWC: Da Vinci

Audemars Piguet: Royal Oak

Breguet: Marine

2007-09-16T11:55:00.000+03:00

Autumn in the Air

My friend and co-composer Krisse is leaving for England and we were in a bar yesterday evening. The night was a success, because the morning after was characterized - not by a sense of gloom and desperation - but by quiet, aesthetic appreciation for my immediate surroundings (Outi let me sleep until 0930). As I was pushing Iivari's cart around to help him sleep, I was struck by the color of the leaves.

There was a break in the cloud barrier and I rushed inside for my Nikon. I managed to get a few snapshots in the warm autumn light.

The contrast between the mood at work and in the surrounding nature is striking: how we buzz about in our work activities while the nature around portrays such solemn grace.

The pictures have been piling up during summer. I plan to complete a retrospective account soon. I hope that I remember some of the reflections as well.

2007-06-26T16:25:00.000+03:00

Midsummer musings: Taking command of one's voice

We spent midsummer in the traditional way at my parents' summer cottage at the seaside, on the island of Kemiö. Four generations were represented, from the children of mine and my brother's to my grandmother. A hectic and satisfying holiday, with my family learning to manage with the more relaxed time resource, which has been available since the completion of Outi's thesis.

As the picture intends to show, summertime in Finland is a fragile and lyrical time; time to spend time with the family and friends and connect with "the national identity" by observing time-honored traditions (drinking beer, barbecuing sausages and jumping into the lake fresh from the sauna).

I tested a recipe of barbecued lamb chops which worked well: soak the meat in red wine, fresh rosemary and thyme overnight, season with salt and pepper and barbecue it. Works wonders with good red wine, salad and new potations. The dish found relative favor with the audience and I decided to use the recipe at a gentlemen's reception to be held at our place next week (I also had 3 liters of cognac).

After spending the night, we relocated to a friend's midsummer reception in Hanko, the southern tip of Finland. It is a windswept, ruggedly pittoresque small town, and the guests included a few of my old friends from my days as a student union president. The host, Kristian, is maybe the best amateur jazz sax player I know. Indeed, he is the spitting image of the sax player Zoot from the Muppet Show, an incarnation of sax player cool (Kristian has better hair, though).

As I was pushing Iivari in his carriage on the windswept Hanko coastline to put him to sleep, the landscape covered with sand, rock, small, windswept pines, and the sea, I listened to a couple of Steely Dan songs from my iPod: the epic Aja, and a live version of Reeling in the Years. Both songs are characterized by a guitar solo, followed by a sax solo, with both guitarists being totally humiliated by the sax player. In Aja, Wayne Shorter's majestic tone and phrasing just make everybody else stop and gape. He just glides through the abstract rhythm and difficult chords, in my view totally embarrassing the previous guitar solo. In Reeling in the Years, Chris Potter takes an idea from Walter Becker's hesitant solo, playing with them like a killer whale would play with a clumsy seal pup (prior to digesting it), and moving on like a monster.

Kristian also has this sax player confident in his phrasing, which I have always admired. We were able to play a couple of jazz standards (Coltrane's Mr. Pc and Rollins's St. Thomas) at our shared friends' wedding and I can just hope that my solos did not sound as ackward in comparison to Kristians as those poor guitarists.

A final picture of the midsummer mood on the seaside...

2007-06-21T08:46:00.000+03:00

Vampire love songs

I was browsing through the iPod again this morning on the bus. After a strange chain of leaps from Rainbow's "Stargazer" to Kenny Wheeler's "Nicolette", I ended up repeating the song "Forsaken" from Dream Theater's new album three times. It is unashamedly traditional prog metal, with a Tubular Bells -type 7/8 piano riff followed by some Rainbowish guitar riffing.

The best of all, the song is about vampires.

Vampire songs are an extremely valuable sub-genre in music, I think. The first song that comes to mind is "Moon over Bourbon Street" by Sting with phrases such as:

"It was many years ago that I became what I am
I was trapped in this life like an innocent lamb
Now I can only show my face at noon
And you'll only see me walking by the light of the moon
The brim of my hat hides the eye of a beast
I've the face of a sinner but the hands of a priest
Oh you'll never see my shade or hear the sound of my feet
While there's a moon over Bourbon Street"

Forsaken follows the same proud tradition. For some reason, I guess because people have the tendency to associate love with death, vampire songs are often love songs. John Petrucci, the guitarist from Dream Theater does not use Shakespeare language to make his point but assumes a more direct route:

"I waited faithfully
For night to fall again
Trying to silence the fear within me

Out of the night and mist
I felt a stinging kiss
And saw a crimson sting on her lips

I have to know your name
Where have I seen your face before
My dear why don't you be afraid

Forsaken
I have come for you tonight
Awaken
Look in my eyes and take my hand
Give yourself up to me"

With these rather trivial musings I would like to wish all friends and strangers a good midsummer.

2007-06-09T08:49:00.000+03:00

Celebration

Outi's PhD examination was yesterday. I was proud of my beautiful wife who defended her work confidently.

At the PhD dinner in the evening, we were celebrating in a restaurant with a panorama view. Evening sun was shining from a cloudless sky. As a lucky accident, there was a regatta on the bay below. This is the only picture I will post as evidence from that wonderful evening. 'nuff said.

2007-06-06T08:38:00.001+03:00

EGOS frenzy

In a frenzied state again, hammering out the final details of a paper I'm co-writing with Richard Whittington, for the European Group of Organization Studies conference, due on Sunday. The paper is about how managers become strategists and how this revolutionizes or adapts their fundamental views on strategy. I find this topic utterly fascinating, and am impressed by the data which we are using (produced by Richard). This is also a very important time for the family as my wife is defending her PhD the day after tomorrow. So, no time for an extended entry.

Music has a remarkable capability of granting strength in stressful times. Right now I am listening to Bach's Musical Offering. The piece has a nice story, which illustrates the mastery of the composer. The Prussian king Fredrick II had "composed" a short theme which he wanted Bach to develop and that he did. The theme itself sounds rather clumsy but Bach turns it into something wonderful.

Incidentally, the Musical Offering plays a part in a detective story called The Flanders Panel by Arturo Perez-Reverte, probably best known for his novel The Club Dumas, which Polansky transfomed into movie The Ninth Gate. The Flanders Panel was a kind gift from a PhD student and was a part of my last holiday experience.

Two other great pieces of music I need to sneak in before I get back to work:

- Timeline by Ralph Towner. A sublime offering of solo guitar, bordering between jazz and classical, played on nylon string and 12-string acoustics. Towner does his thing, and that's it.

- The Ultra Zone by Steve Vai. I have never been one to appreciate guitar pyrotechnics over song content, and there is no fear of that on this album. The playing is fiery and inventive but it's the songs that capture your attention. A wonderful mix of influences ranging from Indian to metal.

Ps. Those intrigued by the previous post might want to check out the comments. Fuze himself commented on the problem I posed! I am looking forward of using that example to explore the text/context issue in organizational aesthetics as soon as I have the time and placid state of mind.

2007-05-29T11:26:00.000+03:00

Musical excercise on the bus

[WARNING! There is a danger that you might not find this reflection worthwhile]

This morning, while riding the bus on my way to work I pleased myself by solving a little puzzle I had created for myself. One of my all time favorite CD is the first album from Screaming Headless Torsos, a masterpiece of jazz funk-rock. When I discovered the CD about ten years ago, I noticed the guitarist Dave "Fuze" Fiuczynski (try spelling that name!) use a very strange and interesting chord. On a guitar tabulature, it looks something like this (don't remember the key, here it is in Ab):

E - - - - - - - - X
B - - - - - - - - 12
G - - - - - - - - 12
D - - - - - - - - 12
A - - - - - - - 11 -
E - - - - - - - - X

It's kind of a basic G major barre chord, with Ab on bass. On the piano, you can get the same sound by playing Ab on bass with the left hand and substituting the Ab major triad on the right with a G major triad. The chord is a minor maj7th diminished, a weird one at that.

This morning on the bus, I started wondering the tonality of that chord. What kind of scale does it correspond to? After a lot of agonizing, I realized that indeed, there is a scale that fits. The sixth mode of the harmonic minor scale works, as it is indeed is a minor scale with both a major 7th and a diminished 5th.

I don't know the name of the scale, but you can try it by first playing a C harmonic minor on the piano: C D Eb F G Ab B (H in Europe) C, then starting the scale on the sixth, that is,

Ab, B, C, D, Eb, F, G, Ab

Anybody who has ideas on the context in which to use that chord, feel free to comment. A strange II in a minor II-V-I? A VI in an even more strange harmonic minor I-VI-II-V?

2007-05-27T14:44:00.000+03:00

Tonalities

I was giving a guest lecture on reputation management in Uusikaupunki last Friday. The director of commerce from this pittoresque town gave a lecture on managing the brand of a town. She used an interesting term "brand tonality" to denote the impressions, invoked by a particular brand.

When I heard the word tonality, attributed to a particular brand, I was reminded by what Antonio Strati, perhaps the first authority on organizational aesthetics, has called "invoked knowledge", a type of knowledge which is lived by a person when being involved in a particular context. For organizational scholars, the notion of "invocation" is valuable, as it makes the researcher recognize the texture of organizing. I recall my first experience, entering the electronics laboratory of the Helsinki University of Technology, in my very first semester. The emotions, invoked by the smell of burning tin, in a cement bunker in a basement, turned into immediate soul-searching: is this engineering thing really something I want to do with my life? The textures, smells, sounds and images in the electronics lab environment had reminded me of my high school woodwork classroom, a subject which I hated in a profound way.

Brand tonality is a nice metaphor, I think, because music affects us in the same, immediate, personal manner. The tonality of a piece, which I would summarize as the harmonic background context in which melodies are presented, affects the hearer in a profound, yet often implicit manner. If a town has a pleasant tonality to its brand, it manages to grab the potential inhabitant in a very personal way.

Tonality is characterized in the Wikipedia in the following way:

"Tonality allows for a great range of musical materials, structures, meanings, and understandings. It does this through establishing a tonic, or central chord based on a pitch which is the lowest degree of a scale, and a somewhat flexible network of relations between any pitch or chord and the tonic similar to perspective in painting. This is what is meant by tonality having a hierarchical relationship, one triad, the tonic triad, is the "center of gravity" to which other chords are supposed to lead. Changing which chord is felt to be the tonic triad is referred to as "modulation". As within a musical phrase, interest and tension may be created through the move from consonance to dissonance and back, a larger piece will also create interest by moving away from and back to the tonic and tension by destabilizing and re-establishing the key. Distantly related pitches and chords may be considered dissonant in and of themselves since their resolution to the tonic is implied. Further, temporary secondary tonal centers may be established by cadences or simply passed through in a process called modulation, or simultaneous tonal centers may be established through polytonality. Additionally, the structure of these features and processes may be linear, cyclical, or both. This allows for a huge variety of relations to be expressed through dissonance and consonance, distance or proximity to the tonic, the establishment of temporary or secondary tonal centers, and/or ambiguity as to tonal center. Music notation was created to accommodate tonality and facilitates interpretation."

In a paper (read it here), forthcoming in the Journal of Organizational Change Management, John Sillince, Virpi Hämäläinen and I explore organizational change through the notion of this tension and resolution in music. The paper is motivated through a willingness to find an alternative to the popular belief that organizational change is painful, best achieved through fear, violence and manipulation.

Yesterday's tonalities

Yesterday was a day of pleasant tonalities. My friend and comrade in arms had his 40th birthday. A close circle of friends was invited to their summer cottage, where a tent had been raised in the garden overlooking the lake, a gourmet chef preparing a four-course meal. Talk about tonality.

As my own family was still recovering from the flu, I had to contend with a very brief visit, driving back in time to put the kids to bed. The pleasant, welcoming company, beautiful surroundings, gourmet food, and several bottles of Jallu made me really sorry I had to leave.

Yet, when I arrived home, put the kids to bed and took some time to relax on our balcony, I was awarded by another kind of pleasant tonality. A mist was slowly descending, bringing with it a pleasant spring scent and a magical low light. The birds were singing, and I had a nice Chimay on the balcony. I did not bother to take a picture, but the mood was a little bit like the one in this picture taken in our holiday at the Azores a couple of years ago.

Little tonality, lots of volume

As the time elapsed from by last blog entry communicates, the last few weeks have been characterized by moments blurring into a chaotic discord, with little discernible tonality. May is always like this, but add to this a family member defending her PhD, two small children and the flu season, lots of variables have to be managed.

I had also managed to catch the flu, and was fearing how I would be able to deal with the three long guest lectures that had condensed themselves into last week. I had been traumatized by one particular guest lecture where a group of middle aged men from the construction business wiped the floor with me in a discussion about participation in the strategy process. I felt I lost control of the situation because I could not use my voice to control the dynamics in the room. I was pleasantly surprised as things did not turn violent in any of the three engagements last week. Indeed, I think it may even be easier to appreciate the dialogical aspects in a lecture when one can not rely one's ability to control the discussion.

And finally: Some de facto tonalities

Some great music has been published during the last few weeks. My favorite band Rush has published Snakes & Arrows which is their best album in a decade. There is joy in the their playing. The lyrics are sincere and smart at the same time. There are even a number of catchy choruses, which you don't typically expect from a prog rock band. Cynics may frown upon phrases like

"We can only grow the way the wind blows
On a bare and weathered shore
We can only bow to the here and now
In our elemental war

We can only go the way the wind blows
We can only bow to the here and now
Or be broken down blow by blow"

or

"In the sweetest child there's a vicious streak In the strongest man there's a child so weak In the whole wide world there's no magic place So you might as well rise, put on your bravest face" I hate the tendency that rock lyrics are labeled naive or un-cool if they try to convey anything beyond the micro.

Another great recently published album: Fear of a Blank Planet by Porcupine Tree. It's a textural masterpiece, which confidently guides its listeners from mellow psychedelia to the borders of trash metal and back.

While the joy of Rush's playing as a band on their new album has been something of an affirmation of life for me lately, a particular joy in the PT album is the work of the drummer Gavin Harrison. While the dystopic mood of the album is characterized well by lyrical passages such as

X-box is a god to me A finger on the switch My mother is a bitch My father gave up ever trying to talk to me

Don't try engaging me The vaguest of shrugs The prescription drugs You'll never find A person inside

Harrison plays with such ferocious joy and inventiveness that I felt like jumping up and down in exhilaration. Go listen yourself at http://www.porcupinetree.com/

2007-05-05T13:15:00.000+03:00

One happy squirrel

While putting Iivari to sleep in his carriage in the yard, I notice a busy squirrel carrying something. Luckily Iivari was content to wait while daddy rushed to get his camera and telephoto to capture what was going on.

As it turned out, the happy little fellow had discovered a roll which he was munching away.

I too have been one happy little squirrel as, career-wise, I too seem to be "on a roll", as they say. The paper with Eero Vaara I mentioned earlier was accepted to be published in Organization Science. When you top this with another acceptance for a solo paper from the Journal of Management Studies, it would appear I have had a rather fortunate spring. A couple of years worth of hard work is starting to pay off.

Rather than bore you with the details of what the papers are about, I am going to share a few other images I captured with my telephoto just a few minutes ago.

Our neighborhood has echoed with the sounds of industrious woodpeckers for quite some time now. These little powerhouses want to lure mates by making as much noise as they can. The urbane environent has allowed them to up the ante by switching from tree barks into various metallic objects. One fellow was banging away on a street light when I caught him. Does he not get a headache doing that?

On top of that, a wagtail ("västäräkki" in Finnish; I admit it, I had to look that word up) was minding his/her own business on the lawn.

And finally, a rare and dangerous Amazon-leapfrog who had gotten caught in our fence!

2007-04-22T10:27:00.000+03:00

Sunday state of mind

A sunday of the good variety. After a couple of days of rain and moodiness, the sun is emerging. Outi and Tekla went to church, leaving me - the atheist -, and Iivari - the infant -, to maintain the fort. There is a pleasant scent in the air as the "Mantere sunday turkey" is cooking in the oven.

The Mantere Sunday Turkey (the recipe was probably stolen somewhere)

- Take a kilogram of turkey fillet and put it in an oven pot ("uunivuoka")
- chop a few unions, a green apple and carrots, as well as a few cloves of garlic into chunks and add into the pot
- add some rosemary and green pepper
- mix some buillion ("lihaliemi", not sure I have spelled it right) and calvados and pour atop of the filled and vegetables
- put into an oven, cook in 150 celsius until the turkey is heated up to 77 celsius

Coconut rice

- boil yasmin rice following the instructions in the pack, except that replace a half of the amount of water with coconut milk
- offer a separate plate of minced red chili for those family members not breastfeeding

Sauce

- fry a few tablespoons of crushed hazelnuts in a saucepan
- add 2 dl of low fat cream
- add 2 dl of the broth from the finished turkey
- boil until you are satisfied with the viscosity
- serve immediately

2007-04-14T18:46:00.000+03:00

On discovering one's voice

Have been chewing my fingernails quite a bit since last night. A paper, which I have been writing with Eero Vaara, my most important teacher after finishing my PhD, is what we hope to be the final stage in its process of being published in one of the leading scientific journals of our field. The process has taken, depending on how you count, either three years (we started writing the paper in 2004), or six-seven years (the data the paper is based on was produced in 2000-2001). The amount of work that goes into these things is incredible.

One of the intriguing features of submitting papers to scientific journals these days are the online submission systems. You can see the status of your paper online, as it moves from “assigning editor”, to “assigning reviewers”, to “under review” (this stage takes the longest time as this is the real double-blind reviewing stage where the reviewers get the paper, read it and comment on it), to “awaiting editorial decision”, and finally to “awaiting decision confirmation”, and of course the actual decision the journal makes about the paper (e.g., reject/major revision/minor revision/conditional acceptance/acceptance).

Our paper, after two rounds of major revisions and one minor one is in a stage, where it could really get accepted. Anyway, after experiencing this process and a few other ones during my post-doc days, that is, being in the stage where I am starting to see my research finally getting published in respectable outlets, I find my viewpoint regarding my work changing. While being incredibly stressful, the first struggles with the journal review processes is also kind of a sheltered one – your focus is really pretty much on how to meet with the criteria set by your much wiser colleagues who review the paper, as well as of course the editor who makes the ultimate decisions. Too much time is not spent worrying about what you want to express.

Journal revision processes, while designed to root our and develop knowledge fit to be called ‘scientific’, are also incredible educational processes. They transform the way one thinks and writes. I have been particularly impressed at how many A-level journal editors take the time to sit down and think about ways the junior colleague could develop his or her work, even if they are going to reject the submission. I wonder how these very busy people find the motivation and drive to put in the work involved.

After I have come to the concluding stages of a few long revision processes, I notice that an additional layer to my work is starting to emerge. In a negative voice, I am starting to wonder if I am ever going to get to the level of some of my heroes in their writing. When I read the research published by really experienced and profound writers in organization studies, like Karl Weick, Henry Mintzberg and Richard Whittington, and the kind of impact they make to the way I think about our phenomenon of study, I find myself doubting if the research I am starting to see published can even be discussed on the same day with theirs.

If I force myself into a more positive mode, I think I am starting to reach the stage in my career where the need to find my own voice is starting to emerge. I think the realms of art and science are rather similar in this respect. In music, there is an incredibly long stage where a student learns the craft of managing his or her instrument as well as the breadth of musical tools and genres. The teacher’s challenge is to maintain the nucleus of individuality, the “personal voice” within the developing musician, while he or she jumps through the various hoops. To crush this voice is to fail as a teacher, as the student becomes a clerk or looses interest, to fail to guide the student to develop the discipline of a musician is to rob him or her of the possibility of using his or her voice. In a recent entry in his blog, (guitar master) Robert Fripp defended the discipline aspect:

“We only have a certain amount of time available in which to achieve an aim. A completed aim is a process and, as with any process, comprises several stages. Each stage is allotted a period of time, within which that stage must necessarily be reached. If we fail to reach the required stage within the allotted period, the process goes off-course; it will not complete. If the aim is our life aim, the result is a tragedy.”

Charles Mingus, on the other hand, reminds us of not losing ourselves to the siren song of facility (a Downbeat T shirt I got in a mail, quotes Downbeat, August 21, 1960):

“Once you achieve technical facility, you’re either a musician or you’re not. You’re either a creative person or a stenographer.”

I observe this duality in the way Outi teaches her students, pushing them towards new boundaries, still trying to maintain their personality. She is teaching one of her professional Kantele students in the next room as I’m writing this, and I can observe the duality in her teaching practice in this very moment.

It’s funny how the topic of individual voice has been popping up lately. I have been seeking solace and tranquillity during evenings by looking at landscape photography books. Getting into this new art form during my adult days is has been an enriching experience, in particular because I am something of an interested outsider: while I do not have the time and probably the temperament to develop my personal craft as a photographer even beyond the basics, I enjoy learning to appreciate the pictures of others. While browsing a book that just arrived in the mail, Working the Light, which showcases the work of three British masters of landscape photography, I noticed a piece of reflection about how to become a photographer by one of these three masters, Charlie Waite:

“Skill and invention

A question I am often asked is whether the artist is possessed with a gift that is only available to the few. I believe that through practice and great familiarity with the entire process of image making and all its ramifications, one can improve; but to improve in what respect? After a while, there emerges a ‘signature’ of sorts, a ‘way’ of proceeding. This can be based on a series of shapes within the landscape that continue to attract us. Each time we recognize these shapes and forms, we decide to make another image. Many will regard such an approach as a formulaic one which leads to a repetitive style. This may be so, but it does not diminish the pleasure that the artist receives. I believe that continuing along familiar lines in some way reaffirms things for the artist and that it is a significant and important process for those who create images, or indeed for anyone who work in any field of artistic [Saku’s note: or, indeed, scientific] endeavor. Perhaps the voice you have is the only voice you need?” – Charlie Waite, page 81 in Working the Light (Cornish, Waite, Ward and Ephraums).

I think Waite’s reflection is a profound contribution to any discourse on learning. What strikes me the most is the profound sympathy Waite has for the learning subject and the hardships one must endure to learn, and the kind of salvation offered through the last suggestion: Perhaps the voice you have is the only voice you need?

Some people seem to be able to maintain their unique voice throughout the process where they are learning the ropes. One example is my friend and colleague Arne Carlsen, who had a unique talent for writing even when we were both rookie PhD students. His work is published in top outlets nowadays and the impressive voice they are written is essentially the same voice he had back then.

2007-03-20T09:48:00.000+02:00

New music

I was browsing through the video library this morning and discovered a clip from my son's christening. I wrote him a song for solo guitar, as I had done for Tekla two years before. You can watch a clip of the song at

http://www.sakumantere.fi/iivari.avi

Not a great sound or a great performance, but it is still an affectionate one.

A version of Eveningstar (production reports here in this blog) is also available at

http://www.manteretoyra.fi/EveningStar.mp3

Let me know what you think.

2007-03-19T23:03:00.000+02:00

I want to share a couple of quotations which I have encountered during the last few days.

On how to write about music

Richard Cook is probably one of the best writers about jazz. He has co-written the magnum opus of jazz on CD, The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD. I have been reading his book Miles Davis: On and off Record. I find the book enthralling in its level of detail concerning Miles's classic (as well as many not so classic) records. One particular passage caught my attention in the bus this morning. Cook writes about the track "Surrey with the fringe on top", on the album Steamin' with the Miles Davis Quintet:

"Davis's exposition is gorgeously down. Coltrane charges in, again sounding as if he had been loitering at the back of the studio, and twists and cargoyles his way through a meaty solo. Red is all felicitous bounce in his turn. Chambers and Jones pursue their paces without faltering. One could almost say it is a routine the five men have already settled into, and that they would indeed take more obvious creative progressions on the later session: but what a routine!"

I had to listen to the track on my iPod the very minute I read that passage. Man, why can't I write about music like that?

On the language and power

Philip K. Dick, one of the masters of science fiction shared this snippet of wisdom about language (in Westfahl, G. (ed.) Science Fiction Quotations):

"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."

Well put, if not that surprising to a researcher of discourse. The phrase 'must use the words' is particularly illustrative. How many words do we come up with ourselves and how many of them are imposed upon us? Nietsche, Foucault, Wittgenstein, Orwell and a few others might have some further insight into this.

On the disposition of dwarves (and Viriconium again)

M. John Harrison in his book Viriconium, has a wonderful psychological description of a character called "Tomb the Dwarf". This short, laconic phrase manages to convey so much meaning in such few words:

"He was, as he had put it more than once, a dwarf and not a philosopher. Events involved him utterly; he encountered them with optimism and countered them with instinct; in their wake he had few opinions, only memories. He asked for no explanation."

Now, that is the proper way to use semi-colons.

A couple of hours in the sun with my new wide angle zoom

Yesterday we were lazing on a sunday afternoon at a beach nearby. The sun was shining and spring was in the air. They had even opened the beach terrace café! I had the chance to play around with my new 10-20 mm wide angle zoom.

A stone as foreground interest...

Somebody else's kids making footprints...

More footprints...

On top of the world...

A golden moment...

2007-03-14T08:15:00.000+02:00

Making faces

I have a secret. When I come to work in the morning, I like making faces at the mirror in the elevator. If there are secret surveillance cameras in the elevators, the university security people are having a field day every morning.

2007-03-11T14:16:00.000+02:00

Here comes the sun

The sun has emerged and the world is starting to melt. Spent some time standing in the slush with my daughter, who was savoring a dip into every puddle. Picked a nice quote from Virinocum by M. John Harrison, which I was reading while monitoring my daughter's activities (I do not own a pair of rubber boots).

The quote is an angry retort, offered by a warrior in a world nearing its end, to a mechanical vulture, capable of speech (!). The bird had foretold the ending of time.

"Bird, you will end up as rust, with nothing to your credit but unproven hypotheses. If we are at the end of Time, what have you to show for it? Are you, perhaps, jealous that you cannot experience the misery of flesh, which is this: to know intimately the doom you merely parrot, and yet die in hope?"

Somehow, that quote had quiet resonance to a lazy sunday morning, standing in a puddle.

Swing low, sweet chariot...

A dash of green...

Winter receding...

Rubber boots...

Leaving on a jet plane?

2007-03-08T10:15:00.000+02:00

Dreaming Spires and all that

I visited at Oxford for a few days last week. I had the opportunity to work with Richard Whittington, one of the key figures in Strategy-as-practice, a viewpoint on strategy which I strongly relate to. It was exciting to wittness some of the personal and social context from which all the ideas you read in scientific texts actually emerge.

Took some pictures, too.

They certainly treat their guest well...

New College spires...
Public Enemy #1 has been jailed at last, it would appear...
A white tower of some sort...
Spires, spires, spires, and what is called the "Radcliff Camera"...
A tree with stuff hanging from it (plus your average brick wall as foreground interest)...
I think Oxford put the "Ivy" in "Ivy League"...
The way they design their litter boxes...
The business school has a more modern appearance.

2007-03-08T09:50:00.000+02:00

Power, Politics and Organizational Change

Recently, while visiting at Oxford for a few days, a senior colleague presented me with a challenge. While updating a textbook on Strategy, he found himself looking for an up to date view on the state of the literature on power, politics and organizational change. After a few sleepless nights, this was my response:

"I find it easiest to start interrelating the three concepts power,
politics and org change from the concepts of change. The recent change
perspectives sensitive to politics and power, I think, could be grouped
as follows:

1. The dialectic view on organizational change (Van de Ven & Poole in AMR 1995), which seems to treat organizational change as a result of conflict between political coalitions. The way I read Van de Ven & Poole, I would argue that they treat power in terms of a behavioral/decision making perspective, in which power is measured as the capability to promote one's interests in decisions of public or non-public domains (Lukes's first or second face of power).

The limitations with the dialectical view of change, as presented by these authors are 1) that they quote very few organizational studie (being content to stick with Marx, Hegel and the like), which makes it kind of hard to validate that there really exists a relevant stream of literature on dialectical change withing org studies. And 2) while they quote Marx, they don't seem to to address the ideological nature of power, summarized in Lukes's third face of power.

2. Critical management studies focusing on change. CMS authors often present power as their main focus area and change is one of their topics of interest. In their recent book Power in Organizations, Clegg, Courpasson and Phillips discuss organizational forms as political forms
(Chapter 11). They create a four-cell matrix where the axes are

- high/low level of contestation (level of internal debate) and
- high/low fragmentation (level of individualization).

The resulting political forms are

- collectivist-democratic (low, low),
- bureaucratic (high fragmentation, low contestation),
- collegial (high contestation, low fragmentation)
- and what they present as characteristic of today political change in organizations, polyarchy (high, high).

Anyway, I doubt that there is a one center piece for the CMS view on change, yet browsing through recent volumes of Organization would no doubt reveal a number of studies on change.

3. The recent focus on continuous change (or 'becoming'), as opposed to episodic change. I take Weick & Quinn, 1999 in Annual Review of Psychology and Tsoukas & Chia, 2002 in Org Science to be the main milestones in this movement. It is open to question whether the continuous change view really accounts for power or conflict. I certainly think that this view would be hospitable to political processes such as negotiation. Another interesting concept is dialogue,
which has been developed among others by Arne Carlsen in a recent Org Sci piece.

4. Literature on discourse and insitututionalization. Researchers on organizational discourse often deal with organizational change such as the building of new institutions. A recent theoretical piece on discourse and institutionalization is by Hardy and Phillips in AMR.
Discourse analysts such as Eero Vaara have studied major organizational changes from a discursive perspective (see, for instance the Vaara solo paper on merger discourses in Org Studies in 2002, or Vaara et al. 2003 in JMS on airline alliances). "

2007-03-06T14:18:00.000+02:00

Strategic Human Resource Management: A monkey, a boat or a celestial object?

I just concluded the lectures and seminars at a course on Strategic International Human Resource Management (the most complicated course title ever) with a another group of smart and motivated Hanken students. At the final lecture, the students were asked to build a metaphoric presentation out of what I saw as the main concepts of strategic HRM.

Three competing interpretations emerged:

1. Strategic HRM as a monkey (representing fit between strategy and HRM), climbing a tree that has strategy at its roots, multiple sets of branches and business performance at the top

2. Strategic HRM as a ship, with
- organizational culture as sails,
- ethics as a flag, and
- power as the helm.

3. Strategic HRM as a celestial system, with
- strategy as the sun;
- competition, market and value chains as stars;
- subjectivity, local responsiveness and corporate social responsibility as the moon;
- nationality, globality, integration and power as the earth; and
- expatriates in a rocket to the moon

Sometimes, I tell you, my job can be kind of cool. :-)

Saw a picture recently which drew my attention. It was taken by photopgrapher Richard Childs in Inverpolly, Scotland. Striking foreground interest and impressive mountains.

2007-02-25T21:58:00.000+02:00

Photo which made me smile

Chilling on a Sunday evening, after the kids had gone to bed, I browsed through a ploto magazine. Chris Pethick's depiction of a Donkey, which won a big photo competition brought a smile to my face.

2007-02-21T22:03:00.000+02:00

My family was attacked by a ferocious stomach flu bug and we have pretty much been out of it for some time now. As we are recovering, I finally have the possibility of sharing some random thoughts.

Music
Anoushka Shankar is a pleasant, recent find. A daughter of Ravi Shankar (and therefore, half-sister to Norah Jones), she plays the sitar like her father. Her album Rise contains a number of Indian instruments and ragas in a modern setting. What I find striking is that she seems to be focused on composition and arrangement instead of showing off her skills in the instrument. I find this a rare quality in young musicians - especially if they are virtuosos. Her album also reminds me of the brilliance in Indian rhythm language.

In particular, I was struck by two male singers performing Tarana, the traditional improvised, spoken, rhythmic vocals in fast 7/8 time. There was enough brilliance in the portrayal of narrative in these improvised, call-response structures to save the day of one poor researcher, laboring with revising a theoretical paper (I tend to listen to music while I write).

Quote

"Over the years, a huge number of theological man-hours have been spent debating the famous question:

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

In order to arrive at an answer, the following facts must be taken into consideration:

Firstly, angels simply don't dance. It's one of the distinguishing characteristics that marks an angel. They may listen appreciatively to the Music of the Spheres, but they don't feel the urge to get down and boogie to it. So, none."

From the book Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. The book is a lighthearted romp the best characteristics of which do not emerge out of its plotline but such side remarks as the one above. There is also a hilarious sequence where an arch angel and the snake of paradise get drunk together and discuss about life. Not a profound work of art but good monday-morning reading in the bus on one's way to work.

Dialogue in teaching

David Ing, a colleague from my days at the Helsinki University of Technology presented some good reflections about my previous post regarding dialogue. I find his remarks about the linkage between the history of the case method and practical philosophy to be enlightening.

I was reading Kenny Andrews's classic from 1971, The Concept of Corporate Strategy, I was struck by how much wisdom there was in the case-based approach of the early business policy types when they were teaching strategic management to top managers. There is a deep appreciation of context, doubt regarding universal solutions and a focus on building the character of the student instead of on teaching a set of analytical techniques.

Such a case-based approach can only progress through good dialogue. I would argue that the teacher, involved in dialogical teaching has to balance between at least three tensions:

1. Building a plotline for the discussion. Being surprised by, and open to, new insights provided by the students, vs. being in control of the discussion, ensuring that the dialogue touches on key theoretical contents
2. Pacing the discussion and deciding on the speed of progress. Balancing between student frustration as the discussion moves into uncharted territory, and their willingness to "have a say". When students use a lot of voice in the discussion, sometimes those using less voice get frustrated and would like the teacher to move the discussion forward. Yet, it is also quite hazardous to break up the discussion when it has begun. You need to have built a lot of respect with the students to enable you to silence others when you feel it is necessary. David mentioned this in his comment about belly dancing on David Hawk's management class.
3. Theretical alertness. I have found that the teacher should have a theoretically interesting question, comment or reflection on each individual commment. This is demanding as you have to be alert to each and every comment.

Commenting on this blog

I have been pleasantly surprised that some friends and colleagues have commented on this blog. I discovered, however that one could only comment if one chose to register. I have turned this setting off, so now everybody can use voice if they want to. Please feel free to do so, looking forward to hearing from you.

On books and blemes

By reading Ola's blog again, I have learnt a new work, 'bleme' ('bleemi in Finnish'). It appears that a bleme is a meme (a self-replicating cultural phenomenon), which is replicated through blogs. It appears that the word 'bleme' was created by Kriisi. I think I crashed one of her parties when I was under age.

While I tend to think meme theory is a rather lame attempt to understand culture, I like to formulate top ten lists. While I'd really like to print out my ten favorite Star Trek episodes, I will aim for something a bit less nerdy and allow Kriisi's book bleme replicate itself through me. :-)

1. A book that changed my life

Probably Constitution of Society by Anthony Giddens, which helped me make sense of my PhD topic. Might have been Esa Saarinen's Länsimaisen filosofian historia huipulta huipulle, which was my introduction to philosophy.

2. A book which you have read more than once

Well, I have read the Lord of the Rings 12 times. How nerdy of me.

I also read Neil Peart's Ghost Rider twice,which I rarely do, even if I like a book quite a bit. Peart is the drummer and lyricist from Rush, my favorite band. His lyrics often strike a chord and somehow I enjoyed reading his prose. The book was about a journey he took after losing his wife and daughter and is mainly about recovery. The problem of Peart's prose I think is that he is brutally honest and allows his non-politically-correct sentiments and views show. In Ghost Rider this works, as such unsympathetic emotions just deepen the process of grief he is recovering from. In his later works, I have a harder time relating with him.

3. A book to take with you on a desert island

Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, probably. Or Aristotle's Metaphysics. Something profound, yet non-technical.

4. A book which made you a tramp ('Hupakko' in Finnish)

Foucault's Discipline and Punish. I can never do mainstream management research after reading this.

5. A book which made you burst out in tears

There are so many of those... :-) A good example is Pavane by Keith Roberts. An alternate history, which touches on some basic issues in ordinary life so beautifully.

6. A book which you hope would have been written

I sure wish George R.R. Martin would already have finished his Song of Ice and Fire series. It is probably the best there is in the fantasy genre these days: realistic, unsaturated plotlines, in-depth characters, mature topics. But it sure takes a long wait.

7. The book you wish would have never been written

Straying from the Flock by Alexander Elder. Elder is a successful stock market analyst and author, and apparently, a kind of a self-help guru. I innocently read his New Zealand travelogue, with the intent of experiencing New Zealand. Instead, I got a mouthful of judgmental prose on the characters he meets and at least 57 mentions of him using his credit card. To be avoided.

8. A book which you are currently reading

Viriconium by John M. Harrison. I have a soft spot for pretty much any far-future scifi: The City and the Stars by Clarke, Book of the New Sun by Wolfe, Dying Earth by Vance, Dancers at the End of Time by Moorcock, etc. So, I have great expectations for this one.

9. Book which you have intended to read for some time

Organizational evolution and strategic management by Rodolphe Durand. I promised to write a review to the Scandinavian Journal of Management, so I'd probably better get to it, then.

2007-01-31T22:24:00.000+02:00

Dialogue and debate

Just a brief reflection about teaching after which has been a mixed day: a great discussion with a colleague, framed by an extravagant lunch at Savoy, elation at being able to start work with some old friends on a new paper I feel strongly about, the feeling of chaos finally subsiding at work, yet saddened by the hardships encountered by two very dear friends in their careers.

But, my point was about teaching (my 2-year old daughter commented, when I came back from work today: "daddy has been working again. Daddy teaches people on how to do things"). Yesterday I had a lecture which I still feel unsure about. I have been trying to make sense of why this is.

In a nutshell, the problem seems to be that I had the feeling that I was not able to communicate with the students. I have little idea of whether what I was talking about made sense to them. The lecture, a guest lecture at HUT, was about critical viewpoints on organizational strategy. As the topic is often quite counterintuitive to many students unexposed to such ideas ("what do you mean? of course you need to have strategy!") , I found myself really pushing the topic through.

In the process, I may have forgotten that the point is not to push a topic through but to engage in a dialogue with the audience and have them engage the topic themselves. With more familiar and easily marketable topics such as strategy implementation, or whatever problem with practical or managerial relevance, it is much easier to try to locate the starting point the present students have on the topic. In situations where you have to validate the topic itself, dialogue easily becomes a debate.

2007-01-28T14:56:00.000+02:00

Winter wonderland

Winter has finally made its presence known in the last few days. This weekend, we have been engaged in a variety of winter activities for the kids, involving sleighs being dragged around and friendly quarrels with Outi about whether it really builds character to be frozen stiff, standing in the snow.

I do prefer the snow to the dark, wet alternative when winter keeps at bay, however. Last Tuesday was a particularly memorable evening, when we were celebrating the end of an era at STRADA research program, my previous employer at a restaurant at the heart of Helsinki, overlooking the Esplanadi park. It had started to snow and the gentle evening created the perfect atmosphere for celebrating a cherished time, which had inevitably passed all of us by.

Then Yoda spoke: "Difficult to keep the horizon level, it is".

2007-01-03T22:21:00.000+02:00

Heaven. We spent two weeks on holiday at Lanzarote. The sun. The sea. Pepper steak. Sangre de Toro. Inflatable castles for kids to jump in.

The comedy in natural phenomena

While was jogging at the beach, I suddedly became aware of waves crashing to the beach. For some reason, I felt like laughing. The sea, minding its own business, just crashing away.

Later, I realized that there was an explanation offered by two classic thinkers, Aristotle and Henri Bergson. Aristotle has famously made a classification between four kinds of causes. The two causes relevant here are the efficient cause, which accounts for why some event took place by a chain of previous events; and final (teleological) cause, which accounts for why some event took place by giving it a meaning with reference to a purpose, or a goal.

On holiday, looking at natural phenomena at length, I realized that when one accounts nature with a teleological explanation, there is a potential comical element to nature. Henri Bergson, in his analysis of laughter, noted that common to comedies is the idea of there being "something mechanical in something living". That is, human beings, whose actions are explained by final causes - intentions, beliefs, purpose - are comical if they act as if being moved by an efficient cause.

If we look at natural phenomena as if they were beings capable of final causes, they may look funny. The sea looked like a small child, fascinated with a toy, mechanically repeating a set of moves. Another funny thing was the constellation of Orion, who lay on his side.

Orion, standing erect...

The mythical figure, Orion, was a hunter, or some other powerful, male character. The stars in the night sky on the equator made it look as if orion had lain on his side. I got the distinct impression that he was drunk.

Tekla has an encounter with an inflatable castle...

Holiday paradise at dusk

2006-12-25T13:33:00.000+02:00

Why are Hemuli and Cow about to Climb a mountain?

I wish all friends and strangers merry Christmas by inviting you to write your own Christmas story. Why are Hemuli and Cow about to climb a mountain?

(The picture was a reflection on our living room wall of two of Tekla's new toys after the presents had been opened.)

2006-12-22T09:12:00.000+02:00

Change and definition

Michel Foucault wrote in his Archeology of Knowledge

"Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same [...] Let us leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order."

I discovered this from a book called FOUCAULT. A Very Short Introduction. I guess the sentiment kind of overrules the very notion of writing a very short introduction, or indeed, any introduction.

In any case, I wanted to share this snippet of wisdom with the lonely abyss of cyberspace. It is a reminder that the act of definition is also an act of freezing something, that is, an act of violence. None of us wants to be reduced to a set of axioms.

Been listening to Keith Jarrett's new album while working, a set of solo improvisations on the piano. Improvisation if anything portrays one's appreciation to the fluidity of things of which Foucault so eloquently reminds us.

2006-12-12T22:00:00.000+02:00

On coiled springs and reflective capability

In an interview of Chick Corea's Electric band, drummer Dave Weckl was described by the magazine (Downbeat) as a 'coiled spring'. When a roadie passed by and met the drummer's gaze, Weckl was immediately handed a pair of sticks and he immeditely began playing patterns on his knees.

Lately, I have felt the same coiled spring effect. As the season is coming to an end, things tend to pile up. I become nervous and tense. On moments like this, I tend to lose any capability to reflect. This, I think, also means that you hand out a valuable aspect in your life. At EGOS last summer, my fiend and colleague Wendelin told me that every evening, he spends some time reflecting on the day. I find the practice of making time like that very compelling, yet how you find such a mood utterly escapes me, being the wound-up father of two that I am.

There are moments where reflection is enabled more easily, such as jogging or strolling, particularly when I am alone in a foreign environment. Indeed, strolling in a foreign environment "to get the feel of the place" is the absolute opposite to the frenetic "taxi from the airport" -type of life one often experiences abroad, a combination of security and disconnectedness. This was another important insight I got from Wendelin, getting a feel of a place by getting involved in it, walking through it.

Recently, a friend commented this blog ( - and I thought I was yelling into the emptiness of the cyberspace -), asking whether I always have such a placid state of mind, calm and composed. He said that he gets a sense of peace by reading this blog. I was really surprised about this - in a sense I have had the most hectic autumn that I've had in a long time, with the birth of our son, moving, changing jobs, and so on. Then I realized, that indeed, writing this blog is a way to stop and reflect, summarizing and narrativizing the chaos going through my consciousness.

Maybe this is indeed a more general aspect to blogs: people seem to appear more calm and composed in their blogs. As such, they are wonderful channels for everyday escapism for readers, as you get to share some of that sense of calm when you tap into somebody else's process.

2006-12-12T21:00:00.000+02:00

Rituals and practice of science

I was honored to participate in two public defenses (public examinations of PhD theses) last weekend. On friday, I made my debut as an opponent (thesis examiner) for a thesis focused on the tension between continuous and planned change in a knowledge intensive organization. On saturday, my wife and I were invited to the public defense and doctoral party of my cousin Markus, a musicologist. His thesis is an examination of (the classical pianist) Glenn Gould.

I was a bit nervous about my debut as an opponent. Would I be able to rise to the occasion and present a sound and balanced critique of the thesis? As the occasion got nearer, however, I began to realize that it really was not about me rising to an occasion. A public defense is maybe the most valuable ritual in our local scientific community where the practice of science is revealed to the public. The point really is not about appearing to be smart but to re-enact the practice of science, scientific debate to the public, thus in a small way, re-establishing the very practice of science. The public defense in the end is not about anybody appearing to be smart, but letting the practice of science have the spotlight. You should be prepared and do your best, but in the end, it is not about you.

My cousin Markus did well in his defense, or so I hear. We ended up skipping the actual defense because of child care arrangement, but at his party, everybody seemed happy. It was striking to navigate from a group of business scholars to a group of ethnomusicologists and seeing the very same practice of science being re-enacted. In her speech at the doctoral party, the opponent for Markus's thesis addressed the doctoral party as an event where scientific enemies meet and reconcile their differences for the evening, bowing down to the same idol that is science. I liked that notion.

2006-11-22T09:57:00.000+02:00

Respect

Teaching frenzy continues. I have been blessed with very smart and motivated students this autumn. A group at the Helsinki University is doing work on reputation management, Pekka and I continue to be impressed and invigorated by the students' insight as we read the cases they prepare. My strategic management course at Hanken consists of a bunch of hard working and smart students who work like hell to make sense of the incredibly tangled thicket of strategy discourse.

For me, the most important job of a teacher is to work towards an atmosphere of respect on one's courses: respect for the work of the other students, to the work of the teacher, and of course to one's own work. The teacher needs to show his/her respect to the work of the students. I certainly have no problems doing that this semester.

2006-11-14T00:07:00.000+02:00

A privileged meeting

Last week, I was invited to give a talk to a group of psychiatrists. The topic was knowledge interest, that is, why the practitioners of different branches of science seek knowledge. More specifically, I was looking at the tensions, experienced by psychiatric practitioners, between the technical interest of biological psychiatry, and the hermeneutical/dialogical views of therapeutical views. In my mind, this tension is not that different from that experienced by a management scholar, trying to tackle with the always-popular interest of organizational performance on one hand, and more interpretive approaches on the other.

The meeting was a privileged one for me, as it struck me how lucky I was to be invited to be sharing views with practitioners from such a worthwhile pursuit. There is an intense pleasure involved in the meeting of minds across genres and scientific discourses. It is also very touching to be invited, requested. This is a key notion to keep in mind in times of intense stress (read: November). The feeling of doing something worthwhile and being wanted should be the basic human right of everybody. I was reminded of this when I saw a poster on a Metro train station with the information that every other day a lonely elderly person commits suicide in Finland (see http://www.vanhuusilmanyksinaisyytta.fi/).

On the musical front: Brad Mehldau trio, Art of the trio, vol 3. He seems to play chess with himself. There is such an sense of invention and adventure in Mehldau's playing: a sense of an open road that can lead anywhere. And the fact that he is a virtuoso with amazing command of polyphonic lines does not hurt either.

2006-11-08T08:37:00.000+02:00

Good morning!

This morning, walking yet again through the graveyard to work, the iPod favorites playlist provided me with a delicious contrast between two views on female adolescence. First, Norah Jones sang:

"My heart is drenched in wine
you'll be on my mind
forever."

Whereas Tori Amos had a slightly different angle

"And if I die today I'll be the happy phantom
And I'll go chassin' the nuns out in the yard
And I'll run naked through the streets without my mask on
And I will never need umbrellas in the rain
I'll wake up in strawberry fields every day
And the atrocities of school I can forgive
The happy phantom has no right to bitch
oo who
The time is getting closer
oo who
Time to be a ghost
oo who
Every day we're getting closer
The sun is geting dim
Will we pay for who we been"

These two brilliant insights into the adolescent female psyche, which so often alludes us males approaching middle age, was confidently buffered by Wes Montgomery, a shy, big, virtuoso male playing a subdued and tasteful version of The Days of Wine and Roses. What a way to start the morning!
Yippee! I was first to arrive at work, got to turn the lights on. Oh, what a glorious feeling. Call me weird... and you're probably on to something.

Two early morning tidbits of information which I found from the book The Corrosion of Character by Richard Sennet, one of my favorite social theorists:

""Career" [...], in its English origins meant a road for carriages, and as eventually applied to labor meant a lifelong channel for one's economic pursuits. [...] The word "job" in English of the fourteenth century meant a lump or piece to be carted around. Flexibility today brings back this arcane sense of the job, as people do lumps of labor, pieces of work, over the course of a lifetime."

And now.. time for some more teaching frenzy.

2006-11-01T10:17:00.000+02:00

Teaching frenzy

"Frenzy" seems to be the buzzword for this autumn. Getting a new job, then a second child, a new apartment. This was coupled with an academic writing frenzy, completing a load of demanding revisions during September and October to meet deadlines. And now, it's time for some teaching frenzy.

What person in his right mind would organize seven hours of teaching for the same day. I had that on tuesday: three hours at the Helsinki University and four at Hanken. Whine Whine. On the other hand, that is what high school teachers do each day. But us academics, we've come accustomed to such a carefree existence...

I haven't taught either course before. I get to teach the course at the Helsinki University, Reputation theories and organizational meaning environments with Pekka Aula, a good friend and colleague. It's extra interesting, because I get to teach at my old Alma Mater, where I studied philosophy so many years ago. And we get to dicuss the results of our book with students. There seems to be a critical and attentive group taking the course. Indeed, the last lecture was done in a discussion, revolving around one slide. I'm really looking forward to the student case works where they look at different cases of organizational reputation strategy.

The second thing at Hanken is part of my regular teaching load, an advanced course on strategic management. The introduction lecture was a great experience. We tried out a working method from high school Finnish, as the students got short excerpts from key strategy texts ( Chandler, Mintzberg, Porter, Hamel & Prahalad - I even threw in a little Taylor to show what a pre-strategy view of the organization looks like) to read at the classroom. We read each text, followed by a reflection discussion about what the text regarded as strategy, and why it was strategic.

Another interesting event during the week was when I got to see external evaluations of my academic work, which were ordered for a job I was competing to get (which I did not get). Boy, this job is good for maintaining one's humility. :-)

2006-10-25T10:42:00.000+03:00

Purple Haze

I have spent the last few days in Purple Haze. We moved to a bigger condo to facilitate the needs of our extending family. Three days of working from 0800-2400 doing hard manual labor makes me really happy to be back at work. The best way to spend your money, hire professionals to move your stuff. Even though we did this, the effort level was rather high. Kudos to the lovely friends and family who volunteered to help us at various stages of the process.
Music from the iPod this particular morning was a pleasure. "Here comes the flood" from Peter Gabriel's first solo album fit the rainy morning:

When the night shows
the signals grow on radios
All the strange things
they come and go, as early warnings
Stranded starfish have no place to hide
still waiting for the swollen Easter tide
There's no point in direction we cannot
even choose a side.

I took the old track
the hollow shoulder, across the waters
On the tall cliffs
they were getting older, sons and daughters
The jaded underworld was riding high
Waves of steel hurled metal at the sky
and as the nail sunk in the cloud, the rain
was warm and soaked the crowd.

Lord, here comes the flood
We'll say goodbye to flesh and blood
If again the seas are silent
in any still alive
It'll be those who gave their island to survive
Drink up, dreamers, you're running dry.

When the flood calls
You have no home, you have no walls
In the thunder crash
You're a thousand minds, within a flash
Don't be afraid to cry at what you see
The actors gone, there's only you and me
And if we break before the dawn, they'll
use up what we used to be.

Lord, here comes the flood
We'll say goodbye to flesh and blood
If again the seas are silent
in any still alive
It'll be those who gave their island to survive
Drink up, dreamers, you're running dry.

2006-10-18T15:42:00.000+03:00

The book Hyvä yritys, which I wrote together with Pekka Aula, a good colleague and friend has won the Pro Oeconomia prize, the highest price to be awarded to a business/economics book in Finland. This came as a surprise, as the book is quite heavy on theory and also contains a critical angle toward certain business practices such as strategic management.

To be acknowledged by a board consisting of company CEOs is highly gratifying, as it says that meaningful, non-diluted dialogue between practitioners and academics is both possible and worthwhile. It is even more sweet that the book was a labor of love of sorts for both Pekka and me, as we felt so passionately for the topic that the actual work of writing the book did not feel like work at all.

2006-10-18T08:31:00.000+03:00

On moral subjectivism and objectivism

I had a rare morning, as I had time to glance through the newspaper before rushing off to work. In Helsingin Sanomat, two students had written an opinion in which they argued for moral objectivism (according to which moral values exist regardless of our interpretation of them). They were criticizing a previous editorial in Helsingin Sanomat, touching the recent (in)famous Islam example by the Pope. The editorial had promoted a what the students regarded as a subjectivist view on morality (only people's interpretations of moral values exist).

In their rebuttal, the students, after referring a whole number of historical authorities from Socrates to Newton, argued that moral relativism and subjectivism are dangerous views, according to which we cannot condemn, e.g., Nazi atrocities. "Moral relativism is a view best left within university walls".

I would argue the absolute opposite. Moral objectivism is a dangerous view, best fiddled with within university circles. Academics can play their games, exploring what it might mean that moral values have objective existence. In practice, objectivism very easily leads to religious fundamentalism, when people rush to read holy scriptures in their attempt of finding the TRUTH about morality. These processes typically lead to people getting hurt.

Indeed, I find the notion that the moral subjectivist cannot condemn perceived moral atrocities, e.g. , the massacres conducted by Nazis, rather strange. Of course a subjectivist can condemn such actions. Indeed, he or she will, if she regards them as atrocities. It seems that indeed, most people do. I am puzzled by the fact that so many people seem to fear morality lacking an universal ontological bedrock. Isn't it an uplifting thought that morality is what we manage to make of it?

Some soothing music on the bus today. The song Middletown Dreams from Rush was playing in my head when I woke up and I had to play it from my iPod on the way to work. It is a melancholic, yet sympathetic acccount of life in a small town.

The boy walks with his best friend
Through the fields of early May
They walk awhile in silence
One close - one far away

But he'd be climbing on that bus
Just him and his guitar
To blaze across the heavens
Like a brilliant shooting star

For me, the text has wider meaning, also somewhat relevant to the subjectivist / objectivist debate. Most of us dream of making something big of ourselves. In the end, most of us do not reach the stars, but have to accept a mundane existence where the value of what we are doing is mostly our personal interpretation. Yet, in the end, this seems like not such a bad existence after all.

2006-10-14T18:01:00.000+03:00

Is positivism really dead?

Saturday. A good beginning of the weekend. Got to spend some time playing with lego bricks (and my daughter). Also an enjoyable jog in the forest of falling leaves. Autumn at its best. OK, the morning was a bit drab - standing in the rain at the playground.

In the sauna after the jog, I immersed myself to an article in the London Review of Books (Sept, 21 issue, pp. 9-10). Jerry Fodor, one of my early philosophical heroes, had reviewed a book in which the author tried to do an anti-Copernican turn from a positivist standpoint, along the following lines (I will do a gross simplification):

1. What exists must be perceivable
2. Stars and quasars have (meaningful) existence only because we have the ability to perceive them
3. Maybe we are after all the center of the universe.

Fodor does not seem to have a stomach for this kind of an argument. He notes that:

The universe would still be just the size it is even if there weren’t astronomers to measure it. And water would still be H2O even if there weren’t chemists to analyse it. And water would still run downhill, and there would still be hills for it to run down, even if none of us were here to take note of its doing so. You can’t pin the natural order on me, Frayn; I’m not guilty. I didn’t make the universe; I wasn’t even there at the time.

How on earth can anyone seriously suppose otherwise?

Fodor argues that Fray (the author whose book he critiques) makes the same mistake that he takes as a mistake being made by positivists: confusing epistemology with metaphysics, that is, to make arguments regarding what exists (or can/must exist), based on what we can know.

Frayn’s discussion of perception offers a clear case of his general tendency to confuse epistemology with metaphysics. I have ten toes, I can see that from here (I like to type with my shoes and socks off). Now, there’s a lot we don’t know about seeing.

One of the key arguments against phenomenalism (all meaningful statements must be reducible to primitive or pure perceptions) is that there really is not primitive perception. Perception is filtered through all sorts of conceptual things, or directed by them. Touché, I would say. However, Fodor makes references to 'common sense' and ' neo-pragmatism that is as close as anything gets to being the current philosophical consensus ' which sound curious:

How on earth can anyone seriously suppose otherwise? That’s a long story, and it comes in a lot of versions. There is, however, a gaggle of fallacies that generally get committed when a philosopher tells it, and Frayn’s book is no exception.

In a sense, this sounds like Fodor's argument boils down to his being 'as close as anything gets to being the current philosophical consensus'. Sounds a bit unphilosophical to me.

This reminds me of an interview I did with Fodor long ago to Niin & Näin, a philosophical journal (link to the interview). I asked him about the Language of thought hypothesis, which is one of his key theoretical foundations, that is, that there exists a symbolic language for human cognition. I was interested in understanding his ontological position:

JF: I take it that the way you find about ontology is to find out which explanations work. I'm a fervent believer in arguments to the best explanation. I don't know how else you do science. So I assume that if we can show that given the available data the mind seems to work the way it would work if it employed a sentential means of representation, then that's a pretty good reason to think that it employs a sentential means of representation.

SM: This brings us nicely toYour ontology. Did I just detect a pragmatist flair?

JF: No. Pragmatism says "whatever works is ipso facto true". I was saying only that if a theory works, then, all else equal, the best hypothesis is that that's the true theory. So I was endorsing a kind of realism, not a kind of pragmatism.

2006-10-06T09:00:00.000+03:00

An upbeat morning, some extra family time in the form of a shared breakfast and drive to work. Led Zeppelin's IV was playing in the car. I was struck by - as stupid as this might sound - what a great song Stairway to Heaven is after all. Evocative lyrics, great arc, a masterwork guitar solo, nice sound.

Maybe it was the amount of mind altering drugs that lyricists took back in the seventies, but somehow there is an irresistible fairy tale quality to many of the classic rock texts:

"And it's whispered that soon, if we all call the tune
Then the piper will lead us to reason
And a new day will dawn for those who stand long,
and the forests will echo with laughter."

I have no idea what that means, nor do I have a particular inclination to, but it sure sounds great. Another great text, also featuring a piper, is King Crimson's In the court of the crimson king:

"The rusted chains of prison moons
Are shattered by the sun.
I walk a road, horizons change
The tournaments begun.
The purple piper plays his tune,
The choir softly sing;
Three lullabies in an ancient tongue,
For the court of the crimson king.

The keeper of the city keys
Put shutters on the dreams.
I wait outside the pilgrims door
With insufficient schemes.
The black queen chants
The funeral march,
The cracked brass bells will ring;
To summon back the fire witch
To the court of the crimson king."

And now, back to work. Now where was I? :-)

2006-10-04T08:17:00.000+03:00

I recall a discussion we had with my classmates in high school about the life of a researcher. In our math book, there was a picture of a great finnish mathematician called Rolf Nevanlinna, who was instrumental in creating complex numbers. We were looking at the picture and one of my friends made a joke: "what would that guy's day be like?" Did he come to the office, grab his coffee, say good morning to his colleagues, sit at his desk and ask himself: "now, where was I?"

We all thought this was great fun, but in the end, how did we end up? Although none of us is a math genius, nor an scholar of international acclaim, the guy who made the joke is an independent AD. He comes to the office, asking himself: "innovation, innovation... Now how would I portray innovation..."

As an organizational researcher I literally come to the office most mornings, say good morning, grab a cop of coffee and start thinking: "now where was I? Temporal forms of agency and middle management involvement in strategy..."

2006-10-03T08:16:00.000+03:00

A monad = Luke Skywalker's helmet

This morning, while passing through the Hietalahti graveyard with its monumental tombstones I had the strangest realization. You know how in the back of your mind, there are pictures representing abstract things that you take for granted but never really realize that you have? In my case, last week a colleague Aki-Mauri Huhtinen used the word "monad" to characterize an issue. I hadn't heard the word in a long time. The strongest recollection of monads was from the time I was nineteen, just getting into philosophy by reading Esa Saarinen's book on the history of philosophy.

Today, 13 years later, I realized that in making sense of the difficult concept, I had associated with the conceo the image of the closed helmet Luke Skywalker wears in Star Wars while practicing his lightsaber moves. This was probably because of the notion that "monads are windowless". It is funny how the consciousness is layered. You are aware of an association on one level, yet it may never really surface.

I am reading another Neil Peart road novel, Landscape with Drums, where he accounts for life on the road on Rush's 30th anniversary tour. Strange how somebody else's mundane experiences can transport you into another place. I guess we all long to be somebody else. Maybe that's why people watch Big Brother, too.

The Hietaniemi graveyard is another pleasant recent find. The
monuments that people have built for themselves are astounding, at least in our subdued, protestant culture. One family actually has a tomb carved into a hillside with a granite
archway and an imposing padlock.

Passing through the cemetary each morning on my way to work, I cannot help but wonder the Freudian nature of it all: in the cramped space, the monuments compete like skycrapers for attention in a metropolis. In the end, the largest one is the winner.

2006-09-09T11:34:00.000+03:00

Strange and powerful times. We got another child two weeks ago: a boy. It's remarkable how the presence of a new person in the family only gradually sinks in, especially when the newcomer is a calm and patient type like our secondborn. A son will no doubt be a chance for me to get in touch with my masculine side (if any)...

2006-08-10T13:49:00.000+03:00

Almost two weeks in a new position now. Learning to speak Swedish little by little. I am gratified by the warm welcome, the change of pace. I am feeling refreshed after the vacation and have found a good working groove.

During the vacation I had a good discussion with some friends, which I think has certain regarding the principle of respect which I have discussed before.

The discussion was about whether there was something morally dubious about outsourcing household chores such as cleaning. I was presented with an argument, which I am sure resonates with many people: everybody should be able to clean up their own homes if they are physically able. To have somebody else "cleaning your shit", so to speak, is to support the creation of a "maid society".

While I understand the sentiment where this kind of argumentation stems from (the so called "Lutherean work ethic"), I still find that when examined more closely, this kind of argumentation has very little rational basis. Indeed, such arguments may actually be interpreted from a strikingly different angle.

I would respond to such critique with a question: do you not respect the work of cleaners? Indeed, after Durkheim's notion "organic solidarity", that is, people having respect for each other because of the recognition of the mutual interdependency between different roles, it is clear that specialization is a fact in a modern society. I would argue that there is nothing morally dubious in specialization, doing what you are trained to do and doing it well.

Arguments such as "nobody should be cleaning up my shit" are actually implying disrespect for cleaning professionals, who serve in a crucial function. "Maid societies" and so on are born when such disrespect exists, not when people rely on the expertise of others in their daily lives.

2006-07-26T18:33:00.000+03:00

Summer holiday is nearing its end. I am looking forward to starting in a new position and pursuing a number of research and teaching projects. I feel quite refreshed already, although am not particularly eager to pack and move all the stuff in my old HUT office.

My family has moved a lot during the summer, from one country location to the other. It is good to be home again. There was, however, an unfortunate incident of me losing my wallet this monday,. I had carelessly placed it into the package holder of our baby carrier, already full of groceries and library DVDs. The incident created a story which I wish to share with the emptiness of cyberspace.

Getting my wallet back and dealing with the after effects renewed my respect for the man in street, as well as government organizations. Conversely, it deepened my disrespect for a certain myltinational banking organization. My first pleasant suprise was that, not only did the person finding the wallet return it without trying to use my credit cards, he had actually returned the around 60 euros of cash within.

"Folks are basically decent, conventional wisdom would say. We read about the exceptions in the papers every day", wrote Neil Peart, the lyricist and drummer for my favorite band Rush. The song is contained on Hold your fire, and album published in the eighties, which I consider to be Rush's masterpiece. I must have listened to it a thousand times since I bought the first vinyl in the mid-eighties, and always find something new. For me, the album brings everything Rush had been striving for in its career, then spanning 20-years: the search for a lush, perfect sound, smart musical ideas, instrumental virtuosity. Yet, the songs are very focused, delineated and do not fall prey to megalomania. Most importantly, Peart's lyrics, initially ripe with grandiose science fiction ideas and metaphysics, had been condenced into little insightful gems, dealing with very human topics from a seasoned, yet compassionate perspective. For instance, I do not know a better way to sum up the pursuit for a lasting relationship than the verse in the song Open secrets:

"I find no absolution
In my rational point of view
Maybe some things are instinctive
But there's one thing you could do
You could try to understand me-
I could try to understand you..."

Anyway, the second pleasant suprise was with the police lost and found office. The lady was very helpful and pleasant in the process of returning my wallet and I left buth relieved and pleasantly suprised.

The bank was another story. I needed to get two credit cards renewed after cancelling them earlier after losing the wallet. I had to push the clerk through a number of stages, i.e.,

- determining where the renewed cards could be claimed (two different branch offices across town)
- determining whether they could be delivered to the same branch office (after being assured that it was unheard of to deliver them to my home location)
- determining the opening hours for the branch offices
- determining a branch office which would be open after 4 PM and close to the place where I work.

Achieving each step made the clerk moan in distress. I am not sure whether it is reasonable to expect that the clerk would voluntarily and actively do the footwork to find out the path of least effort to the customer in a situation where he needs help. All the management books I read at least emphasize the strategic importance of "customer orientation".

I find that it is often easier to find customer orientation in governmental organizations than in big old firms. Maybe they have found determination in fighting the red tape which is so often attributed to their customer service functions.

2006-07-10T12:26:00.000+03:00

Spent four days at the European Group of Organization Studies (EGOS) conference in Bergen. There is a standing working group centered around Strategy as practice, that is, a new tradition of strategy research centered around what strategists in organizations do, that is, not primarily on what they should be doing (this of course is a gross simplification. This working group has been my home base for many years and it contains some of what I (and also some other people) regard as the most interesting kind of strategy research right now.

Scientific conferences are interesting, socially speaking. I have always enjoyed EGOS because the atmosphere is so open, friendly and encouraging. It is as if all participants acknowledge the notion that while during the academic year, we struggle over money, publications, administration and who knows what, the conference is a venue for celebrating science and our community of scientists. PhD students get the attention of, and encouraging feedback from, senior colleagues, everybody is interested in the kind of research you do and considers your work valuable.

There is, however, even at EGOS, always an implicit social order, maintained by various tacit tools and methodologies. Most importantly, there are degrees of insidership. Some people have published more and have been participating in the discussion longer to have created all sorts of norms of what is regarded as a proper topic or sentiment within a specific dialogue. I guess this is all about building a scientific paradigm, even scientific knowledge, and a drive to get more recognition certainly can be a positive motivational force for a junior colleague (such as myself). However, there are times when young people are crushed and pushed aside and this is regrettable.

I was impressed by the way the senior colleagues at our present working group invited the junior ones to participate. Seniors openly sought the company and collaboration of the juniors, seeking for their viewpoints, offering feedback, encouragement and suggestions on their work. This resulted in a very nice win-win situation where there was respect for the founding work by the senior people, who in turn invited dialogue from the junior colleagues. This dialogue in turn resulted in a feeling of progress being made, research thriving.

This makes me think of a lecture way back in 1994 when I was just beginning my undergrad studies. I attended the lecture on otherness by Esa Saarinen, a philosopher who was largely responsible for reinvigorating public interest in Finland during the 1990's. At this lecture he offered two "otherness principles". "When I'm old and grey, and you find me at a party somewhere", he suggested, "I want you to thank me for offering these two". "I better pay attention", I thought. This is how I remember the two otherness principles:

1. Every person is intrinsically afraid of the other
2. Every person is intristically most motivated to discuss his or her own affairs.

You can view the principles, which I later found to be derived from the work of some fundamental continental thinkers, from multiple angles. They can be the foundation for cynical exploitation and "networking", the domination of others through exploiting their vanities and fears. However, I don't think how they were meant. I think they were meant as personal challenges to be overcome. To not to be intrinsically afraid of others. To treat their interests as intrinsically interesting. I have worked on these principles as challenges and there is certainly more work to be done, especially on the second one.

Watching the senior people at our working group perform this year really provided an inspiration. The way they treated their juniors, seeking their company, inviting them to join, and treating their research as valuable and interesting was a personal inspiration.

2006-07-09T15:14:00.000+03:00

A lovely two holiday weeks on the lakeside. Family time, comic books, football. Moods portrayed in photographs.

2006-06-11T21:22:00.000+03:00

There is a certain quality which makes a piece of music or art special. It is a certain reassuredness, a calm undertatement which takes hold of the recipient and makes him or her feel at home. It is a feeling that what is perceived is enjoyable without any demands, intellectual or em0tional, being placed. Maybe this quality should be called 'serenity' or something.

While I certainly feel that art should often make demands on its audience, works of art which manage to grab a hold without impressing, astonishing or provoking do have a place. I think Kind of Blue from Miles Davis is certainly such a work of art, maybe even an archtype. Today I found such an approach in Donald Fagen's new solo album, Morph the Cat, especially in the song "What I do". In the song, Donald accounts for a visit from the ghost of Ray Charles. It is a warm, melancholy tribute to a master. I particularily like Ray's verse:

"He says Don don’t despair - just take some time
You find your bad self - you’re gonna do just fine
Its what I do - its what I do
It’s not some game I play
It’s in my DNA
Its what I do".

Another place where I have found such solace lately has been the landscape photography of Charlie Waite. His pictures take one into another place, yet not through provocation or flamboyance but through simplicity and charm.

2006-06-09T23:24:00.000+03:00

A stressed-up week, starting to look forward to the summer holiday. I'm going to be changing jobs in August and am trying desperately to wrap everything up before I leave. Looking forward to the new position, new ideas and shaking up my basic sense of security as I am socialized into a new orgnizational culture. Also looking forward to teaching new courses to new students.

One of the most exciting new ideas I have been working on with a bunch of colleagues is an upcoming web community called Opensource organizing. Our idea is to create a community where everybody can access and develop strategy, leadership and organizing practices, and their share experiences of using different such practices in different contexts. It will be a meeting place for academics and practitioners. From an academic viewpoint such as mine, most of the interesting action in organizations takes place where such practices are employed, and through a knowledge transfer between practitioners and academics, we can hopefully learn new things about organizations.

All in all, the open-endedness of my current situation is very pleasing after a long stretch of doing basically the same things. That... and the upcoming summer holidays.

2006-05-29T22:19:00.000+03:00

Another rewarding day at the studio on saturday. We finished Eveningstar's guitar and synth parts. I got my first chance to play my prized PRS Hollowbody on tape. To my surprise, it works on both clean and high distortion lead parts. You can play a jazzy rhythm part and a creamy, distorted solo part on the same instrument.

Looking forward to hearing a final mix. Krisse played some mean synths. He was especially creative in the supporting rhodes behind the guitar solo. His ARP-sound synth solo is a gem, both in terms of how it helps the song to progress towards the finale and as a standalone solo. Understated, melodic, and it tells a story.

I have been listening to John Coltrane's last studio masterpiece, Interstellar Space, a series of duets with drummer Rashied Ali. This monument to improvisational dialogue was reconmmended to me by Matt, a fellow philosopher-cum-organizational scientist. While the duo format makes the listening experience perhaps a bit easier than Coltrane's other free jazz explorations such as Ascension or Meditations, still it's striking how free jazz demands a form of surrender to the music: it cannot be appreciated from an angle where the music is used as a servant: to soothe an anxious mind or provide a pleasant background. Free jazz embraces the listener.

2006-05-18T20:02:00.000+03:00

The whole family has been ill for a week now. Today I discovered how much voice is related to social control. I was giving a lecture for a group of experienced practitioners, and while I think Ibuprofen helped to control the temperature and I was feeling somewhat lucid, the fact that I had little voice just made me lost the room, I think. It's not as if the people did not hear me; it's about one's ability to control the dynamics of the social situation by using one's voice. When there's only one setting: low and mellow, the room is soon lost.

On a more cheerful note: I have re-discovered the Muppet Show, one of my childhood favorites. I was particularly impressed by the show's ability to do comedy with just music, no lyrics involved. Think about the drummer character, Animal from the house band "Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem". I think he defines the rock drummer stereotype: violent, beastly, non-cerebral, yet kind of cuddly and cute.

I also discovered a new favorite character while watching a recently published DVD boxed set with my daughter: the saxophone player Zoot. A laid back character, he portrays how the cool, possessed by so many jazz sax players can be both convincing and ridiculous at the same time. Wikipedia has a particularly helpful entry on Dr. Teeth's band. On Zoot, it states that:

Zoot's claim to fame was playing the final off key note to the end theme of the show, then looking into his saxophone with a bewildered expression, checks his music and gives a satisfied nod and looks around at the other musicians and gives the same nod. Curiously, the note played is the lowest note on the baritone saxophone, and most of Zoot's other playing has the sound of a tenor saxophone, while his instrument appears to be an alto.

His name comes from "zoot suit", a large-shouldered, taper-waisted, gaudy garment popular in the 1940s. It is alternately possible that his name comes from Zoot Sims, a great jazz tenor saxophone player. Others believe that he is based on the great blues saxophonist Lou Marini. Zoot's appearance seems to be an amalgam of Latin tenor saxophonist Gato Barbieri and Frank Tiberi, longtime member and current leader of the Woody Herman big band. Yet another version is that Zoot is based on tenor-sax player Yaroslav Yakubovich, Israeli jazzman, who immigrated to the USA and continued his stage career there during the 1970s. Zoot is performed and voiced by Dave Goelz.

2006-05-13T19:52:00.000+03:00

Spent tuesday and wednesday in Paris. Presented a paper with Mikko Ketokivi, a friend and colleague at HEC, a business school outside the city. Got a chance to meet some interesting colleagues on the top of their respective fields, including an old acquaintance, Xavier Castaner, Mikko's coauthor.

We presented a paper in a joint seminar with Bill McKelvey, a giant in organization theory, which was somewhat unnerving, yet I think we did ok. The main idea in our paper, that the current practice of equating specific research designs (e.g., hypothetico-deductive, inductive, hermeneutic/dialogical, etc.) with specific basic forms of inference: inductive, deductive, abductive is simply unwarranted, did not meet any open resistance, so I think it's worth developing the paper further.

The last time I was in Paris, I have been told, was when I was a babe in arms. So, it is a new city for me. In new cities, I enjoy immensing myself in the art of strolling around. It's strange how strolling creates a completely different mode of being, a connection with the city. Typically, when in a conference, you emerge out of the airport, give an address to the taxi driver, and emerge in some location separated from the airport. You do your stuff at the conference, and take yet another taxi to a hotel. You jump between discrete geographical points, without commencing in the process of living in a new city.

Strolling is a perfect antidote to such alienation from one's surroundings. I try to find a few hours in each city just to wander around. Actually, I think there was a philosophical movement for strolling in cities I read about recently, but don't remember much of what it was about. I also had a digital compact with me for capturing some moments in time.

Some glimpses of Paris-in-practice, submitted to memory:

- at the airport two African (I think they were) nuns, a young and an old one. The younger guiding the elder, holding hands.
- people facing each other on the streets, animated in conversation, hands waving wildly in the air.
- dogshit everywhere.

2006-05-08T10:15:00.000+03:00

Friday afternoon, sitting under a tree, waiting for drumsound to be finished, I got a call from a journalist Helsingin Sanomat. It turned out that a US general Gregg F. Martin has published an academic paper titled "Jesus the Strategic Leader", where he argues that the example of Jesus Christ should be taken seriously as a model of strategic leadership. For instance, love should be assumed as one of the cornerstones of strategic leadership.

The reporter wanted to know how this sounded to me. The article came out yesterday (sunday, May 8th, 2006), where I was quoted saying that yes, Jesus can be an example of good leadership. It is also a very non-surprising proposition, as religious speech has for long been part of the official discourse of strategic mananagement. Think of Hamel and Prahalad arguing that organizational strategic intent should convey "a sense of destiny".

The point I was unable to make in the article, however, was that strategic management nowadays draws influences from many traditional discourses such as technology, warfare, sports and yes, religion. Each discourse has its uses and important limitations. Religious language is uften used to mystify organizational decisions, and legitimize them unquestioned.

At its worst, Martin's doctrine of love, for instance, can turn out like the "ministry of love" in Orwell's 1984, that is, a Stasi-like organization veiled to be built on a principle of caring for the public.

2006-05-08T09:50:00.000+03:00

Great weekend. Spring has finally arrived or maybe it's summer already. Spirits uplifted, listening to 80's heavy metal with the iPod which is a good sign (the metal, not the iPod).

Spent friday in the recording studio. We worked on one of my reworked compositions from the early 90's, a tolkienesque mini prog-rock opera called Eveningstar. Yes, I do believe what the world needs right now is another tolkienesque mini prog-rock opera. :-) Actually, it's quite liberating to revisit an earlier work which you can treat with an ironic distance. I actually believe in the concept even if I would never consider writing a song like that now, the cynical thirtysomething I am now.

I was working with an old friend Krisse, a classical pianist and a IT entrepreneur. He is one of the prog-rock pioneers in the Finnish counterculture in the eighties (in the eighties people were still so traumatized by 70's prog rock operas, that you could not do prog rock within anything resembling the mainstream). I had a small stint in Krisse's band Rivendell in the early nineties when wrote Eveningstar for them. Recently, I heard their new album, Mars, which I really enjoyed. I had met Krisse backstage after a gig and Eveningstar came up. He graciously offered to rework the song with me in a studio he shares in southern Finland with a Seppo Silaste, another Rivendell guitar alumnus.

Me and Seppo used to study philosophy together in the Helsinki University (he specializes in Adorno). He inherited an idyllic farm where Krisse and Seppo share a studio. I really admire his habitus these days: a combination of farming, composing and programming.

Working from the early afternoon to 1 AM without having a meal we managed to get down drums, bass and vocals for the track. We still need to get down the guitars and keyboards. The musicians did a splendid job: I really admire their combination of professionalism and creativity. The drummer Nikke Lindholm did 83 takes and got better each time. We would have been happy with the things he got down earlier, but he instisted doing more and astounded us by the things he came up with, Listening to the raw mix, I find myself grinning at the crazy things he did. Mikko Jokinen got the vocals down in a few virtuoso takes. I really admire his command of phrasing and rhythm, which I think are the things which differentiate a good singer from a great one.

2006-04-30T07:46:00.000+03:00

Creativity is a strange beast. Pursuing creativity involves a paradox: seeking creativity seems to be self-defeating as the creative urge is often regarded to arrive when you least expect it. I recently encountered this paradox while working with organizational narratives. The storytellers of one organization both yearned for a more creative time they had enjoyed in the past, when they were active participants in a future yet unmade. Yet this longing for past glories is a contradiction, escaping the creative urge.

The album Kind of Blue by Miles Davis is one of those creative legends. It has been canonized as the jazz album that best captures the momentary creative urge. Ashley Kahn has written an informative book about it which I am in the midst of reading. The only musician from these sessions still alive, Jimmy Cobb maintains that "it was just another session for us back then", which I find plausible. Creativity hits you when you're ready, but not when you expect it.

A jazz metaphor I have found useful lately is the notion of "groove" or a "pocket". In organizational life, often a fruitful tension must be found between freedom and structure, for instance between individual disgression and official policy. In storytelling, for instance, one needs a certain amount of coherence, yet individual voices should not be smothered. In organizational culture, an "integrated enough" culture is needed, yet not a monolithic one. In jazz, there are "tight grooves" and "loose grooves", characteristics of individuals and subgenres. Similarly, in organizational life, the official policy and an individual need to negotiate between tightness and looseness.

2006-04-28T20:09:00.000+03:00

Two very intensive weeks. Some colleagues/friends from abroad with whom I had wanted to work with for quite some time visited my team in Finland and we did a strategy storytelling workshop with an international group of dedicated management practitioners. I find myself energized, refreshed after seeing this group work.

This extra energy paid of as I facilitated a two-day workshop on organizational culture with a group of eMBA -students in Oulu this week. Having watched my friends work with their facilitation techniques gave me a bunch of new ideas and I had a really great MBA group to try new ideas with. These people were willing to appreciate contradictions and paradoxes in management literature and we could look at culture phenomena from multiple angles and appreciate the differences and tensions.

For some reason, I find myself really abhorring the tendency to make syntheses out of things nowadays. I seem to relish conflicts and struggles.

I am faced with a learning challenge: next autumn I am going to have to be able to speak Swedish on an everyday basis at work. The humiliation involved in speaking a language I practically have not spoken since high school will probably do me good.
Have been reading "The Club Dumas" by Arturo Perez-Reverte. Many of us know the movie "The Ninth Gate", directed by Roman Polanski. The movie is one of my favorites, and the movie follows the book quite closely. Still, it's been an enjoyable read, as the author has a very entertaining way to build on anecdotes from classical literature and mythology. He also introduces enticing details about book-collecting. Besides, the book shows what a great actor Johnny Depp is. His performance is a virtuoso portrayal of Johnny Corso, the cynical book hunter, a true antihero.

2006-04-17T20:30:00.000+03:00

We spent Easter on the seashore. No signs of spring yet, except for birdsong. The sea still covered with ice with little sun.

Somehow I find this kind of experience of nature the most rewarding one. The bleak desolation really reminds one how there are no narratives in nature. Desolation resists sensemaking. The world is just there, not to support a wealth of plant- and animal life, or idiots on waterscoorers.

Finished reading Tuulen Varjo (The Shadow of the Wind) by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. An enjoyable romantic horror story, which was really a description of the upheavals in Spain during and after the civil war. Despite this, they key insight I found in the book was the expectation that we all seem to have about people existing for us. Fathers do horrible things to children, because the children fail to do what is expected of them, fail to fulfill their parents' dreams.

2006-04-13T09:04:00.000+03:00

Blogging is strangely like an old senile man sitting in a corner of a crowded room, talking endlessly to himself. There is the same tragic element of wanting to be heard, and the remote possibility of that actually happening.

There was a teutonic shift in my value system yesterday when I surprised my self by bying the new album Ringleader of the Tormentors by the brit pop grand old man Morrissey. For as long as I can remember, I have hated brit pop in general, and Morrissey in particular. It represents non-musical singing and campfire-type guitar playing at its worst. However, a the phrase

And I just want to

I want to see the boy happy

With his arms around his first love
Is that too much to ask

kind of caught me off guard. I downloaded the album from iTunes and find that all of a sudden, I could relate to the music, brit pop and all.

It's funny how musical tastes develop. My taste usually works by accepting a foreign element when it's presented among familiar elements. For instance, my introduction to jazz, my current greatest musical love was through prog rock, my greatest musical love when I was in my teens. The drummer of both Yes and King Crimson, Bill Bruford is basically a jazz drummer, and his first solo album, Feels Good to Me - still a brilliant album after all these years - seemed to present many of prog rock's finest elements in the context of a jazz fusion album. When I had gotten used to the sound of the album, I started to introduce myself to the Biches Brew -era Miles Davis and slowly started my journey into jazz.

I guess the brit pop thing is the fault of a terrific neo-prog rock group called Porcupine Tree, the music of which I have listened to quite a bit lately. Their masterpiece In Absentia integrates heavy metal, prog rock and melancholy brit pop into a strange soup.

The problem with Morrissey is that there is less and less music that I hate. This is a problem, as I have always valued disidentification as a nice way to build one's identity. We are who we are by knowing who we dis.

2006-04-12T09:08:00.000+03:00

Sunday night, while jogging in the rain, I was pleasantly surprised by my iPod, which started the evening random playlist with the song "Eagle fly free" by the teutonic heavy metal of Helloween. The band and the song were among the favorites of my early teenage years. For the first time, I noticed that the drummer in the band was actually quite good. The double-bass drum -driven assault was fluid and all over the set, and there was actually a groove, which is by no means a given in such a context.

I seemed to remember that the drummer had later killed himself. A curious association to one of my childhood friends, a great fan of the band and song at the same time. We lost touch in our later teens, me taking the beaten path to academic studies, him choosing a life of drugs. Last year I saw his obituary in Helsingin Sanomat. I still don't know what happened to him.

There is a curious and sad triangle between the dead drummer, the song and my friend wandering off the beaten path. The bridge and chorus of the song are the following:

In the sky a mighty eagle
Doesn’t care ’bout what’s illegal
On it’s wings the rainbow’s light
It’s flying to eternity

Eagle fly free
Let people see
Just make it your own way
Leave time behind
Follow the sign
Together we’ll fly someday

2006-04-10T07:59:00.000+03:00

I thought that I would not have the time to write a blog. Maybe I don't. We'll see.

The reason I decided to try this is that I have noticed that I occasionally enjoy reading people's blogs. When I am bored, I sometimes check a blog written by a famous person whose work I enjoy, like (the guitarist) Robert Fripp's long-running weblog, or (fantasy author) George R.R. Martin's new blog. Writing a blog of my own from this basis would not be such a good idea, as I am not famous, but recently I have found that I enjoy readind blogs written by acquantainces such as the blog written by Ola Rinta-Koski, an old bandmate who moved to Australia and seems to enjoy a fabulous existence down under.

The thing I enjoy in blogs are not so much the little things from mundane existence but reading the thoughts of another person regarding some little thing or the other.

I'n going to give myself some ground rules. This blog is going to be about thoughts of things small and big. I am not going to discuss doing the laundry as something profoundly interesting. Yet if I have thoughts while doing the laundry, that's another story. I am not going to discuss details of my personal life: at least not the sort of things that would enable somebody to rob my house while I am away or cause embarrassment to a loved one. So while family life for instance does constitute a significant portion of my daily existence, I am not going to discuss it here.