Leadership and Wisdom

Narrating the Future Responsibly

Wendelin Küpers, Matt Statler, Wendelin Küpers, Matt Statler

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351869713
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Business
• Sous-sujet: Management

Leadership and Wisdom: Narrating the Future Responsibly gives business students and practitioners the opportunity to re-read tales, poems, myths and fables that have been interpreted by leading management scholars in order to translate the world's folk wisdom into insightful and actionable lessons for a more responsible leadership practice.

Most, if not all, cultures generate narratives that teach people how to make sense of the world and how to respond to challenges with wisdom. These sources provide a medium for character, as well as a guide for decision-making in ambiguous and uncertain circumstances. Management and organization scholars increasingly focus on what narrative wisdom traditions can teach us about leadership and organizational practices, and this book is designed to bring it to students and practitioners. Statler and Küpers have assembled a world-class team of contributors, who reflect on narratives near and dear to them, and draw out the lessons for leaders.

With consistency throughout and end-of-chapter questions, this book enables all readers – including undergraduate and postgraduate students of leadership, management and organization studies, as well as interested researchers and practitioners – to reflect on the contents and implications of folk wisdom.

1

The Sandpiper and the Clam Struggle

Christopher Michaelson

[This ancient folktale is called 鹬 蚌 相 争 (Yù bàng xiāng zhēng), or The Sandpiper and the Clam Struggle. The following version is my mother’s, Margaret Wong’s, translation, with some minor embellishment.]

A clam had just emerged at the edge of the shore. It unlocked its shell to dry itself in the sun. At the same time, a sandpiper was flying overhead, observing its prospective prey avariciously.

The sandpiper swooped down as the clam’s shell opened, extending its long beak to devour the clam’s flesh. The clam suddenly and forcefully closed its shell, tightly clenching the sandpiper’s beak. The sandpiper pulled with the strength of its spindly legs to break free, but it could not liberate itself from the clam’s grasp. Meanwhile, the clam could not return to the water, as it did not have the muscle to move itself while also dragging the sandpiper.

The sandpiper said, “If you insist on holding on to me, and it does not rain today or tomorrow, you will dry out and die of thirst.” This angered the clam, who retorted, “If I do not release you today or tomorrow, you will not be able to eat, and you will die of hunger.”

[At this point, one of my children asks, sarcastically: How can they each talk to the other when their mouths are both occupied?]

Neither the sandpiper nor the clam would yield to the other. As they struggled, by chance, a fisherman walked by. When he saw that both animals were unable to move, he snatched them up in one motion and took them home for his dinner.

[The traditional folktale concludes with the proverb, 鹬 蚌相争渔人得力 (Yù bàng xiāng zhēng, yúrén dé lì), or “The Sandpiper and the Clam Struggle, and the Fisherman Gets the Benefit.”]

Introduction

This story was related to my children and me by my mother when we were on a beach. She teaches my children Chinese language and culture, although she left her native country when she was only 8 years old. We were together in Florida, where relatives from around the world had gathered for a family reunion. In two boats, we sailed from the marina to a crescent-shaped beach, where so many seashells had collected that we could hear them as though they were chimes that nature had dropped into the surf. The animals occupying the shells attracted sandpipers and other birds, looking for a meal. Further down the beach, fishermen were casting their fishing rods.

Coquinas – tiny invertebrates whose pastel-hued, bivalve homes are barely the size of a fingernail – were revealed at the edge of the shore with each retreating wave. They would race to burrow into the sand again before a sandpiper’s pointy beak reached into the shell to eat them. This sequence repeated all day long. As each wave crashed on to the shore, the sandpipers ran away, the coquinas appeared and attempted to disappear, and the sandpipers ran back toward the water, hoping to dine before they were chased away by the next wave. It was such a soothing ritual from my vantage point that it was easy to forget that the participants were battling for survival.

Like many scenes of natural competition, this one offers an allegory for business competition. Each of Porter’s five forces (1980) are present. There are predators and prey, but there are also threats from competing predators, the risk of too many competitors for an insufficient quantity of food, the peril of bad weather and other environmental factors influencing the availability of supply, not to mention the intrusion of alien species like me, there to collect empty coquina shells as the sandpipers flee when my steps come uncomfortably close.

Even when they bury themselves beneath the sand, the coquinas leave air holes on the surface that give away their locations. A coquina’s only real protections are the other coquinas, that there might be one slower or more enticing than oneself, and the waves, that they might return faster than the sandpipers. Meanwhile, when there are more sandpipers vying for coquinas than there are coquinas visible on the wet sand, they must compete with each other for the spoils while remaining watchful for their enemies.

The struggle between the sandpiper and clam seems a fairer fight, between an irresistible force (the sandpiper) and an immovable object (the clam). Hoping to seize the advantage in this natural competition, the sandpiper has swooped in to attack a nearly immobile target. The clam has no means by which to attack, but it has ample resources to defend itself from a small predator like the sandpiper. They lock themselves together, each unwilling to renounce its position. Neither wants to risk loss by letting go of its grip, which means that sooner or later, both of them will lose. Having chosen together the worst possible outcome, their fate comes earlier than expected in the form of a lucky fisherman.

The Sandpiper and Clam as a Battle for Survival

One way to read this tale is as a Darwinian drama. And, because Darwinian competition has been evoked by ethicists (e.g., Michaelson, 2012) and economists (e.g., Frank, 2011) as a metaphor for business competition, the tale can also be understood as an allegory for Darwinian business competition. From this perspective, business is a zero-sum contest in which, for there to be a winner, there must be a loser. If neither wins, both lose. There is no scenario from this point of view in which both can win.

The tale reminds me of the scene in Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier (1912/1995), in which the young protagonist who will grow up to become an unscrupulous investment banker develops his worldview of Darwinian competition. Frank Cowperwood, on his walks home from school, passes a fish market every day. One day, he notices a rectangular tank has been put on display, containing a lobster and a squid. The lobster is confined to the bottom of the tank, and the squid occupies the water above.

Like the sandpiper and clam, the lobster and squid are locked in a zero-sum competition. They are one another’s only potential source of food, and if neither captures the other, they will both die. When Frank sees that the lobster has seized the first of the squid’s tentacles, coming back for more each day thereafter, Frank resolves that he wants to be a lobster, not a squid. He does not stay around to find out what happens to the lobster after its meal is complete, but it portends Frank’s future. The lobster is trapped, alone in a cage with no allies. It will likely become somebody else’s meal.

How can the sandpiper and clam avoid the fate of becoming the fisherman’s meal? For one thing, they would have to collaborate. They would have to free one another from the mutual embrace, and in doing so, the sandpiper would have to sacrifice a meal. The reward for its sacrifice would be the ability to fly away, unencumbered, hungry but free to live another day.

Perhaps, in the course of its escape, the sandpiper might help push the clam back into the water, out of the baking sun and the sight of the fisherman. It does not altogether solve the problem that the sandpiper originally flew here to solve, but it is a happier ending than the alternative.

The Sandpiper and Clam as a Tale of Greed

The sandpiper is the aggressor in this tale, accused of greed by the clam. The clam is unwilling to change its position, not wanting to test whether the sandpiper will pull away or push further in if the clam loosens its grip. Had the sandpiper sought out a smaller mollusk, it would not be locked in this battle. It also would have had a chance for a much smaller bite, but as it is, it risks no meal at all.

The sandpiper’s stubborn pursuit of its satisfaction reminds me of a tactic I saw on television as a child, used by hunters in tribal Africa to capture monkeys. The hunters would hollow out a small hole in a tree, large enough for the empty hand of a monkey to reach in for some nuts that the hunters would leave there to attract their victim. The monkey would grab a fistful of nuts, only to discover that a full hand could not exit the hole as easily as an empty one had entered.

Unwilling to let go of its reward, the monkey traps itself with greed and is captured easily by the hunter. When my own children were young, I observed this same monkey behavior when they grabbed in a jar for fistfuls of candy. They were like a cartoon bank robber, who cannot outrun the police because the sack of money is too heavy.

The tale evokes a familiar truism: Do not bite off more than you can chew. This is true in dining and in life in general, but it is particularly salient in business. If material survival is a project akin to a business venture, this story warns us not to try to accomplish our goals in one fell swoop. Success more often requires hard work and persistence, not one single stroke of luck. The bad news for the sandpipers on the beach of coquinas is that they have to work hard all day long to find enough coquinas to satiate their hunger. The good news for them is that they do not face the existential threat posed by the struggle with the clam.

The Sandpiper and Clam as a Prisoner’s Dilemma about Trust

Why will the sandpiper and clam not let go of each other and move on to pick another fight? If the sandpiper relents, it will lose its meal, the reason it is here in the first place. If the clam relents, it risks being eaten by its adversary that it hopes will fly away. As alluded to earlier, the clam in particular mistrusts the sandpiper, and with good reason. Without trust, no movement can occur.

As any business negotiator can attest, even competitive business requires trust. Trust must obtain between supplier and customer that products and services will be delivered and that compensation will be returned. Trust must exist between manufacturer and user, that products will perform as intended and will be recalled if defective. Business functions more effectively in jurisdictions in which the rule of law reinforces trust, and corruption reigns and inefficiency mounts where trust is lacking (e.g., Donaldson & Dunfee, 1999). Trust enables financial markets to forge trading relationships among distant strangers (e.g., Redding & Witt, 2007).

The situation in which the sandpiper and clam find themselves is a kind of Prisoner’s Dilemma. While that classic of decision theory can take several forms, the essential elements of it are that two prisoners will serve less time and realize the best mutual outcome if they both trust each other, they will serve more time if they both betray each other and realize the worst mutual outcome, but if one betrays the other, the betrayer will be set free, and the betrayed will serve the most possible time. As with the two animals, so with the two prisoners, there is a collectivistic incentive to cooperate and an individualistic incentive to betray each other.

Much is made by sociologists and other culture scholars of the differences between an ostensibly collectivist East and an ostensibly individualist West (e.g., Nisbett, 2003). While it is important not to exaggerate these differences and not to resort to simplistic stereotypes, the general claim that Eastern civilizations sometimes skew more collectivist than Western civilizations has some merit. In China, from which my mother’s family emigrated, the family may be considered the basic unit of social analysis from which identity flows. For example, as in many Asian cultures, my family’s surnames come before their given names. My uncles have the character of our Chinese last name embossed on the furniture in their homes. My mother knows her siblings in relation to their position in the family: big sister, little big sister, little brother, and so on. By contrast, in the United States, where my father’s family settled a few generations ago from Western Europe, the individual is the basic unit of social analysis. The given name comes before the first name, and family keepsakes sometimes have the initials of their individual owners monogrammed on them.

The capitalism inherited from a Western-dominated 20th century tends to emphasize individualism. It has given rise to a “winner-take-all” society (Frank & Cook, 1995) in which first movers and leveraged capital translates into massive spoils for a few (Piketty, 2014). Small performance differences can yield large differences in rewards, sometimes resulting as much from luck as from quality. Former competitors like MySpace and Betamax were rendered defunct by single competitors Facebook and VHS that happened to attract enough early adopters to corner their respective markets (Frank, 2016).

However, the capitalism that will evolve over the 21st century may well lean more collectivist if the cultural values of the largest and fastest-growing emerging markets take hold. The oft-perceived lack of regard in the East for intellectual property, antitrust, and other inventions of Western legal systems are sometimes taken by their detractors to mean disrespect for the rule of law. Viewed through a collectivist lens, though, intelligence is meant to be shared, and collaboration among market participants can sometimes yield more mutual benefits than competition among them (Michaelson, 2010). The tale of the sandpiper and clam might well be teaching us to collaborate with our competitors for our mutual survival.

The Fisherman as a Disruptive Innovator

When neither party to the competition between the sandpiper and clam is able to gain the upper hand, the combatants stay too focused on their immediate adversaries. In the course of their struggle, a third, stronger party, of which they were previously unaware, enters the fray and acquires both of their assets.

The fisherman who seizes the opportunity that the inertia of the sandpiper and clam has gifted to him is like a disruptor who changes the field on which the antiquated competition was played (Christensen, 1997). He is like the technology entrepreneurs who changed the way car services are hailed and hotel accommodations are booked, who took market share from competitors who were locked in competition with each other and did not foresee the emergence of another combatant.

The failure of the sandpiper and clam to look aroun...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Photos
• Acknowledgements and Dedication
• List of Contributors
• EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION: Overview of Chapters
• PROMETHEUS, HUMBLED: Leadership and Hope in the Anthropocene Age
• 1 The Sandpiper and the Clam Struggle
• 2 “Don’t fly too close to the sun”: Using Myth to Understand the Hazards of Hubristic Leadership
• 3 Choosing Our Cross with Wisdom: A Folktale for Living and Leading
• 4 King Popiel, the killer mice and the story of the post-lie leadership
• 5 The Wisdom of Others: Cultural Acclimatization and Engaged Leadership
• 6 A Tale from The Ah-Ah Country
• 7 Laocoön, leadership and wisdom
• 8 How You Wanna Go?: Learning from the Unfortunate Rake
• 9 The Story of Merlin as a Tale of Wisdom
• Index