Who Are We?
115
As we saw in the last chapter, Friedman did an excellent job
of answering the third question—What will work in the
world as it is?—and maneuvered astutely and opportunisti-
cally across a political minefield. But she was also successful
because these two stories illuminated larger social realities:
the ethos of the winning team and the frustration of feel-
ing, as Terry Fletcher did, on the outside looking in. This
enabled her to turn her meetings with Fletcher into useful
and sympathetic counseling sessions that eased his way out of
the company and ultimately into a better job.
In short, you can use your own sense of the key experi-
ences and stories of your organization to answer the fourth
question. Put differently, what matters to you may well shed
light on what matters to others. Hence, when you face a hard
gray area issue, you should spend a few minutes stepping
back and trying to understand the situation in terms of some
of the defining experiences in your organization’s history that
matter to you and help you understand what your organiza-
tion stands for.
From this perspective, a manager facing a hard problem
isn’t simply trying to find the right answer. He or she is also
writing a sentence or paragraph in the long narrative of an
organization’s history. By putting a particular problem in this
larger context, a manager can sometimes see elements that
would otherwise be overlooked, eliminate some options that
pass the tests of consequences, duties, and pragmatism, and
elicit more support for whatever he or she decides—because
others will feel that the manager’s decision is helping to
strengthen, build, or protect the values and norms that define
their organization.
Chapter_05.indd 115 10/06/16 11:25 PM
Managing in the Gray
116
Explain Yourself
Another way to get a clearer understanding of important
norms and values is to try a simple exercise. It is also a way
to avoid the risk of becoming the type of “organization man”
that William Whyte warned about. In other words, this exer-
cise can help managers facing a gray area problem resist the
pressure to do something about the problem, do it right away,
deal with its immediate financial, organizational, and politi-
cal elements, and then move on to other work.
The exercise is this. Imagine you are standing in front
of each of the groups that will be affected by your deci-
sion. Imagine you have just explained your decision to
them. Then ask yourself: How will they react? What will
they think and feel and say? What you would be thinking
and feeling, if you were one of them? Will they see you as
one of them, struggling to express and live by important,
shared values and norms or will they see you as an out-
sider, an alien, as someone who doesn’t “get it” and doesn’t
belong?
The aim of the exercise is getting a clearer understanding
of the implicit norms, values, and ideals that really matter to
the people your decision will affect—and doing this before
you make a decision, so your understanding of these values
can shape your actual decision. To see what this means in
practice, try rethinking the Shi Tao incident.
Yahoo! faced a very difficult issue in China, once the state
security officers appeared at the Yahoo! offices. But the com-
pany might have handled it better, if its executives had fol-
lowed some version of this exercise in the months or years
before Shi Tao’s arrest and imprisonment. They could have
Chapter_05.indd 116 10/06/16 11:25 PM
Who Are We?
117
asked themselves how they would handle a situation like the
one that actually occurred—after all, a request from Chinese
state security authorities for personal information about a
political dissident was hardly an unlikely scenario. And if
they ultimately decided to handle it in the way they actually
did, Yahoo!’s executives might have understood how difficult
it would be to explain this decision, in terms of basic values
and commitments, to everyone it would affect.
Would this exercise have made a difference? There is no
way to know. But it might have become clear that doing
what Yahoo! actually did was an untenable response to the
situation, and the company might have taken some useful
precautions. For example, the office manager who identified
the journalist had no guidelines or training for handling
situations with state officials. There was no senior Yahoo!
official available for him to consult. And the information the
police wanted was readily available, not stored in a remote
server or protected by passwords or approvals. In contrast,
Google kept its personal identification data on servers in
Hong Kong.
None of these steps would have eliminated the problem,
but some combination of them might have given the com-
pany time to work on tactics and perhaps negotiate with the
Chinese officials. Just as important, steps like these would
have enabled Jerry Yang and Yahoo! to explain, to critics
and to Shi Tao’s parents, that they had done all they could,
aside from leaving China altogether, to protect the privacy of
Yahoo! customers and stand up for Western values of free
speech. Yahoo! and its employees would also have known
that the company had done all it could do to adhere to the
values that defined the organization.
Chapter_05.indd 117 10/06/16 11:25 PM
Managing in the Gray
118
The practical guidance for answering the fourth ques-
tion—working first on the other three questions, loosen-
ing your thinking and trying to get “a sense of the whole,”
reflecting on your real self-interest and your organization’s
defining stories, and testing how well you can explain pos-
sible decisions in terms of basic norms and values in a
company—seems to add yet another layer of complexity to
resolving gray area problems. But these steps don’t create
complexity. They reflect it and reveal it. The complexity is
out there in the world. It is an intrinsic part of gray area prob-
lems. And, sooner or later, you have to grapple with the com-
plexity when you face a gray area problem. Yahoo! learned
this the hard way when it brushed up against the buzz saw
of complexity, because it had failed to anticipate how doing
business in China would challenge its important relation-
ships, values, and norms.
Clarity and Simplicity
The fourth question is another basic tool for improving your
judgment about gray area problems. If you use this question
and the other three, you will understand the full human
complexities of these problems. We all suffer and we all seek
joy and happiness, so consequences really matter. We share
the same humanity, so we owe each other basic duties. We
are vulnerable to chance, surprises, and malevolence, which
is why pragmatic, realistic thinking is so important. And we
are all shaped and defined by communities around us, their
“mystic chords of memory” and their sense of shared purpose.
Chapter_05.indd 118 10/06/16 11:25 PM
Who Are We?
119
Your answers to these questions are critically important
for resolving gray area problems, but they aren’t enough. If
you have serious responsibilities, at work or elsewhere in life,
you have to do more than grasp complexities. Responsibility
also means deciding and acting. At some point, you have to
say to others and to yourself: “This is what we are going to
do and this is how we will do it.” In the end, what matters
for resolving a gray area problem isn’t complexity. It is clarity
and simplicity.
But what is simplicity in a gray area and how do you find
it? A powerful answer to this question comes from Oliver
Wendell Holmes Jr. He is best known as an associate justice
of the US Supreme Court, and his opinions shaped much
of American life. Holmes’s thinking about complexity was
influenced by a deep humanist perspective. As a judge,
for example, he moved away from legal formalism, with
its sharp focus on the precise meaning and application of
laws, toward legal realism—which he summarized in the
sentence “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been
experience.”
28
Even before his long legal career Holmes had grappled
hard with complexity. He grew up in Boston, the son of an
important doctor and scientist. Though he spent his early
years living comfortably and attending Harvard College, he
volunteered to fight in the Civil War. Holmes was seriously
wounded on three different occasions and, each time, once
he recovered, he returned to combat. During his early years,
Holmes also struggled to comprehend how the country he
was fighting to preserve could be dedicated to liberty and yet
treat some human beings as private property.
Chapter_05.indd 119 10/06/16 11:25 PM
..................Content has been hidden....................
You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.