The Character of the Manager

From Office Executive to Wise Steward

G. Beabout

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137304063
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

Explores Alasdair MacIntyre's criticisms of the manager and retrieves an interdisciplinary approach to character transforming arguments. The manager as wise steward is proposed as a model for virtuous management.

1

The Dreams of Future Managers

We need a better way to conceive of the manager. Future managers often conceive of their work in very different terms than future physicians. Rather than seeing their future in terms of helping others, future managers tend to conceive of their work in terms of quantifiable success, especially financial success. Our contemporary context invites a transformation in the character of the manager. With regard to the character of the manager, our culture is in a state of confused transition. Young adults drawn to careers in business administration are given relatively little support to conceive of their career ambitions as service to others. Might the dreams of future managers involve not only making a good life for themselves, but also wisely acting as stewards to advance the common good?

The difference came into focus on a typical Tuesday afternoon. A chance convergence helped me notice something initially hidden but later rather obvious: students pursuing a career in business, for the most part, have very different dreams and aspirations regarding the moral and social significance of their futures than do those going into medicine.

Upon reflection, it’s not so clear to me that they should.

My purpose in this book is to provoke reflection, discussion, and hopefully a transformation. What is the task of moral philosophers with regard to management? Can moral philosophy play a role in transforming the self-understanding of managers regarding the ethical and communal purposes of their work? My goal is to bring about a change in the way we conceive of the character of the manager.

Let me turn to the events of that Tuesday afternoon. It was more than a decade ago. As a philosophy professor, I had been assigned to serve on a committee that evaluates students from our university who plan to apply for medical school. I teach at an institution in the United States that describes itself as “a Catholic, Jesuit university ranked among the top research institutions in the nation.”¹ As an institution, our university has an outstanding record, among other things, of preparing undergraduate students for professional careers in health care, law, business, and engineering while placing a strong emphasis on the liberal arts. For undergraduate students hoping to become physicians, we try to do as much as we can to help our pre-med students increase their chances in the highly competitive application process for medical school. My task on the committee included interviewing a dozen or so pre-med third-year students annually as part of their application for medical school. The students already had cleared several hurdles before being assigned to me for an interview. My job involved asking questions about motivation, academic competence, intellectual maturity, interpersonal skills, and other abilities. At the end of each interview, I was charged with writing an evaluation of the student’s promise as a physician. The report eventually became part of the student’s medical school application file. Inevitably, this involved me asking those dreaming of entering medical practice, “Why do you want to become a physician?” I was conducting such an interview on that day.

Several years before, when I was new to this task, I was amazed by my first such interview. As I expected, he showed up well dressed and neat. That’s not what impressed me. Rather, I marveled as he recounted a long list of experiences volunteering in various health care settings. His talent and his dreams struck me. He told me, “I was always the smartest kid in the class, and I especially liked science. I want to use my abilities to help people.” He had begun volunteering at his doctor’s office when he was 14 years old. Over the next six years, this student had served in a wide variety of health care settings: emergency rooms, nursing homes, the cancer floor of a hospital, even a stint at a health clinic in a third-world country. I had access to this student’s grades. He was bright; his academic record merited him the interview. But he had more than a good mind; his record of volunteering seemed to show he had a big heart.

As it turned out, the next student I interviewed was impressive in very similar ways. In fact, almost every subsequent student assigned to me had a similar story with comparable credentials. Granted, some were slightly more extraordinary than others. The office staff screened the students before assigning them to me, so I only saw those who were on the higher end academically. In addition, these students knew not only how to dress and speak well; each evinced a commitment to “helping others.”

Young people seeking to pursue the life of medicine have been encouraged from childhood to develop a habit of seeing their future in terms of helping others, reaching out and transcending their own interests. Of course, this isn’t completely unusual. Almost every child who is brought up well is encouraged from a very young age to dream of becoming a “community helper.” Who are the community helpers? Firefighters, police officers, nurses, teachers, and physicians. Consider a typical picture book written for young children, I Want to Be a Doctor. It contains colorful pictures of doctors who are happy in their work. The book invites children to dream of a meaningful career. “Doctors help you stay healthy. When you’re not well, they help you feel better.”

In a similar way, the pre-med students I interviewed, still a couple years away from medical school, had been encouraged to take on aspects of the character of the physician-as-community-helper. Almost every single student I interviewed had volunteered and served in the community in various ways: assisting in hospitals, tutoring children in reading or mathematics, helping in soup kitchens, and doing a wide variety of community service. The Catholic, Jesuit character of our university certainly contributes to this ethos of service. In addition to our commitment to academic excellence, we have a special commitment to educating “the whole person” and helping our students acquire a formation whereby each learns to make sound judgments by coming to see the world as a wondrous opportunity for growth and good works. Our campus has multiple offices with full-time staff that coordinate student volunteer service activities. Of course we are not alone in these efforts: many colleges and universities, including most secular and government-run schools, share this goal, especially for students preparing for careers in health care.

I served on that committee for several years, and after a while, I came to expect that each student I interviewed would have remarkable stories to prove his or her motivation. Again and again, I asked, “Why do you want to become a physician?” I filled a notebook full of responses. Over time, the answers became routine.

“I want to help people.”

“I want to make the world a better place.”

“I want to serve God by serving my neighbors in need.”

“I like helping people, and I think going to medical school and becoming a physician would be a way for me to help people even more.”

“I believe each person is given talents to use for others, and I think the practice of medicine would allow me to develop my talents while helping others.”

Dulled now by the repetition of these interviews, I must have been feeling a bit grumpy on that particular Tuesday. I was trying to squeeze in one more such appointment before my afternoon class. Here was another aspiring physician, not yet 21 years old, who had a very long list of ways in which he had used his abilities to help others. So, I pointed out to this chipper young man, “There are other ways that you can help people, you know. I mean, you don’t have to become a physician. Have you ever thought about becoming a nurse? Or how about a teacher?” I pointed out that, at that time, there was a need for more schoolteachers, especially teaching science or mathematics in inner cities and rural areas.

The student responded by explaining how his intelligence and skills were particularly suited to life as a physician. So, I suggested that it might be possible that he is drawn to the prestige and pay that physicians generally receive. “Perhaps you are really motivated by these things. Doctors are paid well, after all.”

This seemed like a revelation to him. “Oh, no. I’m not really interested in the money at all. Of course, I’d like to have enough to pay my medical school bills and to raise a family. But most of all, I want to help people.”

Time had gotten away from me, and I had to rush off to teach a class. So, I brought the interview to a close and shuffled across campus to teach a section of “Business Ethics.” While I began teaching that afternoon’s class, the earlier conversation from the interview lingered in my memory. On a whim, I asked the students, mostly business majors, the same sort of motivational questions.

“Why do you want to go into business?”

“We want to make money.”

I countered, “Why not go to medical school? After all, won’t most physicians make more money than many of you who are pursuing a career in business?”

I began to see the divergent tendencies in the self-understandings of pre-med students and business students: while pre-med students tend to articulate the purpose of their future careers and of their lives as community service in which they will use their talents to help others, business students frequently understand their work, and perhaps their lives, primarily in terms of self-interest, seeing any public benefit as an unintended consequence. This understanding of business activity seems deeply ingrained, not just in students who aspire to a career in business, but also throughout the culture of advanced capitalism, even among professors, especially in those of us who teach the humanistic disciplines. For more than a generation, business as profit maximization has become the default assumption.² This fits with a widespread theory of the firm where the purpose, existence, size, and boundaries of business organizations are accounted for in market terms: business firms exist to reduce transaction costs while maximizing profit. Viewed this way, businesses exist for efficiency and effectiveness. The goal is success, especially financial success. Even many not-for-profits have adopted a version of this approach where the purpose of the organization and aim of the manager is a specific, quantifiable outcome subject to measurement, such as moving up in a ratings system. From this perspective, it seems natural and sensible for one pursuing a degree in business administration to think of the purpose of one’s career, and perhaps of one’s life, in terms of quantifiable success such as “making money.” Isn’t that every business manager’s goal?

When pressed, the students in my business ethics class recognized that “money-making” is not adequate as an expression of their own personal life goals. When asked whether money-making is a worthwhile goal, several of the students recognized that money-making is a means to other personal goals. Several business students spoke of their personal motivations, expressing a desire to support a family and raise children, to provide for their future children a good home and a secure life, and to be able to give something back to their community.

One way to move toward a reevaluation of the purpose of business administration is to notice a distinction between entrepreneurs and managers. The entrepreneur, as a character, is both well known and quite attractive to us. Steve Jobs, the cofounder of Apple, personified the entrepreneurial type. A lover of beauty, he was applauded for innovative insight and creative risk-taking while possessing an almost intuitive gift for sensing hidden possibilities while identifying and seizing new opportunities. Energized by the joy of fresh ideas, the entrepreneur is motivated not by money, but by the possibility of bringing about social change.

In contrast, most of the students in my business ethics class were pursuing degrees in business administration; they were not going to become entrepreneurs. Most would become managers of one sort or another. As managers, they would come to find themselves charged with staffing, arranging, planning, and monitoring various organizations. In some organizations, a single individual carries out both roles: the entrepreneur with a new idea later “changes hats” to become the manager who organizes the group and executes the plan. However, it more frequently happens that separate people play these two roles. In my classroom, the students as future managers I taught a decade ago have gone on to find themselves working in a vast range of positions: some in publicly traded companies, others in private firms, and many in nonprofit organizations. Indeed, managers work in many social groups: at various levels of government, in health care and various social services, in NGOs and civil society groups, in retail and hospitality services, in transportation and delivery, in athletic and cultural endeavors, in churches and religious institutions. Managers are needed just about everywhere that people work together.

Future managers who aspire to make a lot of money might seem to have good reasons for their hopes. Having been brought up in a consumer culture where wealth is glamorized (sometimes almost idolized as the highest good), it’s not unusual to hear of top executives demanding rock star compensation that equals or exceeds the fortunes of superstar athletes and Hollywood celebrities. In advanced economies, the salaries and compensation packages of CEOs has risen rapidly, far outpacing both the rate of inflation and stock values, even as almost everyone else is seeing incomes stagnate or slip. For students majoring in business administration whose stated motivation is “to make money,” perhaps their inspiration is the highly paid top office executive.

I asked my business students to consider another question. “Over the last hundred years, which did more to benefit society and make everyday life better: medicine or business?”

At first blush, almost everyone might think that medicine has done more good than business, but with more reflection, the complexity of the question emerges. Consider all of the ways life has improved because of business and the work organized by managers — the improved buildings in which we live; the heating and cooling systems on which we rely; electricity and communications; better transportation, food and clothing; and innumerable luxury and entertainment items. Of course, we have greatly benefited from medicine as well, but most of us make use of medical advances less often, perhaps only on a few dramatic occasions in life. Besides, health care is increasingly part of the business sector drawing on and sometimes dominated by values of efficiency and effectiveness. Quite a few idealistic pre-med students later come to find themselves making decisions about their own career – about medical specializations, residency options, and employment opportunities – while having to balance a genuine desire to promote health with business concerns attuned to financial realities.

I asked the students to think back over the past century. “Trace back your family’s history as far as you can, or do what you can to imagine what life was like 100 years ago. Then, ask yourself, which has done more ‘to help people,’ the health care sector or the business sector?”

When I focus on my own family, this question is not easy to answer. While the health care sector certainly has helped me and my family, the impact of the business sector has been perhaps even more direct and more tremendous. A hundred years ago, my grandparents lived without electricity or indoor plumbing. My father, who was born in 1931, once wrote me a letter in which he described the impact of modernization on his childhood home. “I remember the excitement and anticipation of the arrival of electricity on the farm as something that paralleled the joy we shared at the end of World War II. When I hear biblical passages about coming out of darkness into light, I recall the sharp contrast between finding your way to bed with a kerosene lamp versus the illumination of the miracle of electricity.”

The business sector has helped people in countless ways.³ When I contrast in my imagination the descriptions from my father of the farmhouse where he was born (without running water or electricity) and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  The Dreams of Future Managers
• 2  Moral Philosophy and the Manager
• 3  MacIntyre, Our Gadfly
• 4  The Manager as Office Executive: Emotivism Embodied in a Character
• 5  Strengths and Weaknesses of Treating the Manager as a Stock Character
• 6  Plot and Perspective: Character Traits and Their Cultivation
• 7  The Setting: Institutional Social Structures, Success, and Excellence
• 8  MacIntyre against the Manager
• 9  The Virtuous Manager, the Art of Character, and Business Humanities
• 10  Character Transformation in the Friendship of Readers and Writers
• 11  Transforming the Character of the Moral Philosopher
• 12  Transforming Character: The Manager and the Aesthete
• 13  Transforming the Character of the Rhetorician
• 14  The Manager as Wise Steward: Activities, Practice, and Virtue
• 15  Management Is a Domain-Relative Practice
• 16  The Dispositions of the Wise Steward and the Parts of Practical Wisdom
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index