Psychomanagement. Robert Spillane
well below acceptable international standards.
Releasing Enterprising Nation to the public in April 1995, David Karpin suggested that Australians need to revere their business leaders. He made the familiar pleas for more women in management, best-practice management – Australians should be more like American managers – and more and better training and education. But the bad news was that there were no ‘world-class management schools’ in Australia. We need management schools that employ around 110 academics and our little schools are well below that number. Therefore, we are not world-class schools.
Newspaper headlines were predictable: ‘Australians: No Brains for Business’ (Australian Financial Review); ‘Report Slams Managers’ (Courier Mail ); and ‘Schools Not up to World Standard’ (The Australian). With a few exceptions, Australian journalists delighted in reporting our faults to the world.
Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, Gerard Henderson thought it appropriate that the Karpin Report was launched on the day after Anzac Day: another Aussie failure. He concluded that there was not much enterprise in the Karpin Report and pointed to its bland observations. He acknowledged that the authors asked important questions but their recommendations were pedestrian and bureaucratic. The Report abounds with clichés and tautologies:
‘All enterprises are experiencing change as we move towards the twenty-first century’. Well, fancy that. Finally, the authors’ indulgence in simplistic theory is embarrassing. For example, we are supposed to believe that we are moving from old to new ‘paradigms of management’. Once upon a time managers were consumed by ‘vicious circles’ but now they are blessed with ‘virtuous circles’. ‘The essential problem with Enterprising Nation is that it bagged Australian managers without defining precisely whom it had in mind…As a short, middle-aged Anglo-Celt, I keep my weighty volumes to stand on as required.8
Fred Emery thought that the Karpin Report was a ‘deeply disappointing blockbuster’. He criticised the authors for assuming that management is a newly emergent science. Management is not and never will be a science, yet the authors assumed that there is an emerging body of empirically-grounded knowledge that is worthy of the title ‘management sciences’ which are applicable to anything called management. More importantly, Emery wondered why the authors of the Report did not ask whether changes in the workforce towards self-managing groups eliminate the need for the supervisors who are included in the authors’ definition of ‘manager’. They assumed that supervisors can be retrained as leaders, mentors and coaches. This is assumed in the face of one fact, which they probably did not know, that in the 1950s the movement to retrain supervisors in human relations was a dismal failure; and in the face of another fact, which they certainly did know, that human resource people do not know how to train the much better-schooled managers to be leaders, mentors and coaches.
The analysis of the task-force reveals that Australian management is faced with more of the same old challenges; the recommendations add up to more of the same old solutions. Although the Report lists a depressingly long series of complaints about the state and insularity of Australian management education, it can do no more than recommend higher salaries for professors, forming one really big national school of management and capping the lot with a national body to certify management education and “continue the work of the task force”. Heaven forbid.9
If it is true that Australian managers are criticised for being insufficiently American, it does not follow that they should replace Australian humanism (which defines truth as correspondence with the facts) with American pragmatism (which defines truth as what works). If truth is what works for different groups, the dominant group’s ‘truth’ will quickly become the received wisdom until a stronger group replaces it with another version of what works.
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