Paul M Culmsee - The Heretic’s Guide to Management: The Art of Harnessing Ambiguity

The Heretics Guide to Management

The Art of Harnessing Ambiguity

Copyright 2016 by Paul Culmsee and Kailash Awati

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

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ISBN: 978-0-9946314-0-4 (e-book)

ISBN: 978-0-9946314-1-1 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-0-9946314-2-8 (hardcover)

Heretics Guide Press
PO Box 3816
Marsfield NSW 2122
Australia

www.hereticsguidebooks.com

First Printing: 2016

Paul:

To my colleagues/friends/collaborators who either influenced or helped shape this book. In no particular order, John Robertson, Mike Kapitola, Neil Preston, Andrew Jolly, Chris Tomich, Peter Chow, Du Le, Bill Cullen, Paul Taplin, Robert Bogue, Lou Zulli, Simon Buckingham-Shum, Lee Horn, Ryan Scott, Arthur Shelley, Vanessa Oats, Margot Wood, William Wardlaw Rogers, Jeff Conklin, KC. Burgess Yakemovic, and Jess Steele.

To my father, Mike Culmsee, who once again reviewed the manuscript and made us take out our excessive use of parentheses.

Especially to my wife Terrie and my wonderful kids, Ashlee and Liam. For their support, feedback and patience.

Kailash:

Management books tend to draw heavily on the experiences of their authors. This book is no exception. To this end, I've been fortunate to interact with a large number of individuals who drew my attention to some of the paradoxes and subtleties of managing ambiguity. They are too numerous to mention by name so I'd like to take this opportunity to thank them collectively.

A big thank you to Yasuhiro Nishimi, En-Hao Chua, Anusha, A. Alexis-Ann Dizon and Joe Helo for their help and support over the last few years.

It is my pleasure to acknowledge interesting conversations on ambiguity and other matters with Chris Tomich, Simon Buckingham-Shum and Karuna Ramanathan.

Ive benefited from the ongoing support of numerous friends from the BITS Pilani alumni community. Thanks guys and I know youll all forgive me for not calling you out by name.

Finally, and most crucially, my deepest appreciation to Arati, Rohan and Vikram who, quite unambiguously, make it all worthwhile.

Paul and Kailash:

We have to call out one person in particular. Ashlee Culmsee, a very skilled and talented artist whose wonderful work graces not only the cover of this book, but all of the diagrams throughout. In between study for final year exams, she still managed to not only bring our ideas to life, but give them a character all their own. Thank you so much, Ashlee. You did an outstanding job!

The first thing that will strike anyone who has read (or even just browsed) our previous book is this one is considerably shorter. This is deliberate: after churning out a book that ended up being 411 pages, this time around we wanted to create something a little less like a double quarter-pounder with extra cheese. In keeping with that, we will be equally brief with this preface.

Our first book, The Heretics Guide to Best Practices, was written five years ago (three years ago if you count the reprint). In between, a lot changed for us professionally: Kailash moved to Singapore to set up an IT Service Centre and Paul had a go at the world of start-up companies. In that time, we spoke to each other regularly, and one of the topics that kept coming up in our conversations was that we should do another book. The basic theme presented itself gradually through our almost daily experiences in dealing with ambiguity.

Most management techniques aim to reduce or eliminate ambiguity. Unfortunately, they usually suck at it and somewhat ironically, often increase it. This is reflected in a tragedy that plays out over and over again: a new technique or approach promises plenty, but when applied, delivers much less and ends up being labelled a fad.

Although most fads start out as legitimate efforts to finally get things organised, they all seem to come undone because of inherent contradictions that become apparent only after theyve been around for a while. There is good reason for this: management techniques deal with what can be seenthe external manifestations of thoughts, actions and events. By and large, they do not address the effect that ambiguity has on peoples thoughts, intentions and behaviours.

But this is precisely where the problem is. Unless one understands ambiguity and its effects on individuals, it is highly unlikely that any management method will get anywhere at all.

In this book, we place ambiguity centre stage, and do so in a way that we hope you will find both informative and entertaining. Like our previous book, there is irreverence and humour, but be warned that you may have your cherished beliefs tested. Ah, and as the cover suggests, youll likely meet a few teddy bears along the way, teddies you will probably recognise as being tightly held by your colleagues and friends.

Enough said! We hope youre intrigued enough to read on.

Paul and Kailash (Perth/Sydney, June 2016)

Guru: Hey! Who wants to get rich today?

Homer Simpson: (among a chorus of voices): Me! Me! - Me! Me! Me! Me! I said it first.

Guru projects a picture of a pyramid on a flipchart marked with a red cross

Guru: Let me assure you that this is not one of those shady pyramid schemes you've been hearing about

Guru replaces pyramid picture with projects a modified one with a flattened top

Guru: Our model is the trapezoid that guarantees each investor an 800% return within hours of your initial

Sirens blare in the distance

Guru: Uh-oh! The cops!

Guru jumps out of the window

We are going to start this book with an ice-breaker activitythe kind that facilitators do when starting a workshop, to get people in the right frame of mind for the work ahead. Of course, we realise this doesnt quite translate to the solitary task of book reading, but we request you go with it anyway we will be asking you to go with it a few more times in this book so this is a good opportunity to get used to it.

Lets determine what your supermodel catwalk name is. The process is simple: take the name of your first ever pet, append to it the name of the street you first lived on, and there you have it your model name. For the record, Pauls is Teo Kingsfold and Kailashs Goldie Minns.

Now you might well be wondering about the point of that exercise. It is that we want to let you in on the best kept secret about how to make it in the competitive world of management consulting (or selling pyramid marketing schemes for that matter). If you really want to hit the big time, you need to create a management model, market it well and hope like hell that it catches on