Management
Marshall McLuhan (December 25, 1960 age 49). Its time!
I’ve been too busy writing to write you a letter. It seems that Sunday is the only day I can look up from what I’m doing. For years I’ve been reading other people’s stuff. Reading it and re-reading it. Now it’s time for me to see what I’ve got to say. Actually, I’ve found I have a lot to say. I’ve just finished the big book, The Gutenberg Galaxy, my book about yesterday, the world that has ended – 400 typescript pages in less than 30 days. Must go, I’ve got proof reading to do if I’m going to meet my deadline and get this off to the publisher the day after tomorrow. And then I begin the next one, my book about today, the world about us which no one can see, Understanding Media.
Me (January 2010, age 57). McLuhan uses deadlines to speed up.
From what’s said about Marshall McLuhan in magazines, on the web, deadlines are not something you would expect the philosopher of pop cult to be using to get work done. And of course he does use them. McLuhan was a very practical if eccentric genius. For example, he once took a speed reading course to get a fresh take on what it means to read in the electronic age. He said that the main benefit of the course was that he was able to read and dispose of junk mail faster. There are at least two ideas here worth following up. And I will do so in the questions.
If speed reading’s benefit is to allow you to wade through junk writing faster is there a way to tell what’s junk without having to read it? I profile. What strategies do you use? And, in what way do you use deadlines in your own work? School is all about deadlines. But those deadlines don’t work for everyone. Do they, or did they, work for you? Here’s what Julien Smith said about deadlines in a recent blog post.
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, p. 276.
Tags: American mind, Books, Communications, Gutenberg Galaxy, Mechanical Bride, Reading, Speed
Marshall McLuhan (December 14, 1960 age 49). They get someone else to do it and they make sure no one else gets in the way
I just sent off a letter to Claude Bissell, the President of Toronto University, to give him the benefit of my most recent thinking. Hope he finds it useful. I know I do. For example, what do top executives do? Most people say executives make decisions. But that’s not the job. Decision making is impossible in a world that’s changing at high-speed. That’s why so many executives settle for non-decision-making. That’s the easy but ultimately ineffective way out. What’s hard and more effective is to organize or rather coordinate people to make their own decisions when and where they have to and work with one another to achieve results. That is what a symphony conductor does. As information levels and the speed of change keep rising the coordinating or conducting job of the manager-conductor will get greater and greater.
Me (January 2010, age 57). McLuhan versus Mintzberg
Recently Henry Mintzberg wrote a book, Managing, that is a rewrite and update of his 1973 book, The Nature of Managerial Work. Among Mintzberg’s more controversial views is his claim that the job of the manager hasn’t changed in thousands of years. Marshall McLuhan, it’s safe to say would have disagreed with Mintzberg. McLuhan’s fundamental point (see above) is that in the high information flows of the electronic age things are moving too fast for executives to make the decisions. They need to be conductors or organizers, of the other people in their organizations who need to be the ones who decide and act.
What do you think? Has the job of the manager changed? Is Mintzberg right that the President of SNC Lavalin, say, and Cheops’ contractor could switch positions and the great pyramid of Giza and a rail system in Algeria would still get built without a hitch?
(Announcement: The winner of the classify Marshall McLuhan contest is Deborah Hinton, for her entry, “I’d say McLuhan is the third person in our marriage.” )
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Henry Mintzberg. Managing. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2009.
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, pp. 274-276.
Tags: Business, Communications, Management education
Marshall McLuhan (1969 age 58). The solution to life’s problems
My son Eric and Eugene Schwartz tell me that The Marshall McLuhan DEW-LINE Newsletter is selling like hot cakes. I send them stuff when I can and they send it on to my subscribers. Great idea that the Distant Early Warning (Card) Deck. Worked that one out several years ago. Eric put it together from my notes and Eugene came up with the cracking idea to charge the subscribers an extra $5 if they want to get the deck. The card deck is a technology for delivering creative solutions to life’s problems. I call it The Management Game. Actually Games. Here is how to play the simplest one: Take any card. On the card is an aphorism. Relate the aphorism to your current hang up. I drew the 5 of clubs. The aphorism reads: “since life is short our faces must be long.” My current hang up is my health. Nothing seems the same since that brain surgery in November of 67. Well, as Corinne says I must take each day as it comes. Is that my solution, or is that my problem?
Me (January 2010, age 57). Playing a different game
The distant early warning or DEW line was a 1950s cold-war radar alert system Canada and the United States built in Northern Canada in the 1950s. The system was designed to give Americans and Canadians a heads up if Russia attacked by sending planes or missiles over the Arctic circle. McLuhan liked to announce himself in speeches as a voice from the DEW-line. That is he had to come to warn of dangers ahead. But in naming his card deck – which if you live in Montreal you can see on display at the Canadian Center for Architecture until February 25th, 2010 – after this famous piece of cold-war technology, McLuhan misleads. The name doesn’t quite fit. The deck says you can find answers for your hang-ups or problems by contemplating the aphorisms on the cards. Yet the DEW line was not a system for finding solutions to a problem (say nuclear attack), but a system for knowing whether you have a problem (look there’s a bomber!).
Let’s play McLuhan’s Management Game differently. Instead of calling “to mind a private or corporate problem as you shuffle the cards,” as the game suggests, and then picking “a card and … [applying] its message,’ let’s shuffle, select a card, look at the aphorism, and only then decide whether in fact we have a problem.
The card I’ve drawn for us all is the 4 of spades: “When all is said and done more will have been said than done.” Sounds like a call for action. I know what I’m going to do. (Tell you about it on Tuesday.) What will you do?
(Look next week for the announcement of a winner to our classify Marshall McLuhan contest.)
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Readings for this post
Marshall and me, Reading Marshall McLuhan’s Cards, December 3, 2009
Marshall and me, What’s Marshall McLuhan’s Stuff Worth, December 4, 2009
Tags: Advertising, Business, Communications, Creating, Thinking
McLuhan (November 14, 1968, age 56). “The victor belongs to the spoils”
You will find the aphorism “The victor belongs to the spoils” on the 8 of clubs in my DEW-LINE card deck. The deck is a technology I invented some years ago to quickly produce creative solutions to puzzles by playing the management game. There are in fact four games you can play: let’s play the first one. “Take any card. Relate the aphorism to your current hang up.” My card is the 8 of clubs and my current hang up is money. You see a year ago I had what the English would say was “a bit of bad news.” I had an operation to remove a brain tumor. Hurt like hell and cost a fortune. The operation was in New York City. I survived. But haven’t felt much like myself ever since. What with their poking around my brain for 22 hours and those damn drugs they say I have to keep taking. Can’t seem to match names up with faces and a lot of stuff I know I should know – dates, books, characters, plots – for the life of me I can’t remember. On top of all that everyone says I need to make as much money as I can while I am a top celebrity. Question is, how does the 8 of clubs aphorism relate to my hang-up?
Me (December 2009, age 57). Okay, Let’s play
“To the victor goes the spoils” is the way the original proverb reads. Marshall McLuhan plays around with this to get “the victor belongs to the spoils.” The question is what controls what? Do victors possess the spoils, the money, or do the spoils, the money, actually control or possess them. If the latter, which is the message on the 8 of clubs, Marshall McLuhan would be well advised to spend less time worrying about money, or rather let other people continue to use his name (the McLuhan brand as people now say) to make money, and spend time on the preservation and growth of his intellectual reputation.
How much money was involved? Who was cashing in? Consider the year 1967 before it all went bad with the brain surgery. Marshall McLuhan had won a $100,000 Schweitzer chair at Fordham University. At that time a Professor of English literature, which is what McLuhan was, earned a salary of $14,000 a year. $100,000 was big money. Today adjusting for inflation $100,000 would be worth something like $500,000. Of course this sum did not go all to McLuhan, others got a part of it. For example, McLuhan hired his colleagues and friends at Toronto Ted Carpenter, Harley Parker, and his son Eric McLuhan to be his research team to help him teach a course called “Understanding media,” and do some projects. And that was part of the problem. Marshall McLuhan was now a business, an industry. What was good for the business was not always good for Marshall McLuhan.
Challenge: Try Marshall McLuhan’s Management game and tell me how it goes.
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: the medium and the messenger, 1989, p. 227.
Tom Wolfe, “What If He’s Right,” reprinted in The Pump House Gang. 1968, pp. 163-166
Tags: Business, Communications, Creating, Hot and cool media, Thinking
Marshall McLuhan (March 14, 1951, age 39). Literature is dead
I wrote today to Innis. He has written a dazzling book, Empire and Communications. I shared with him some of the ideas that flowed from our meeting of minds, both in writing and in conversation. For example, literature today is in decline. (Innis shows in his book how few the ages of literature have been and how short.) The end of the present epoch of the book is evident in so many symptoms exhibited in our world today – for example the shortness of the attention span of young people.
A young man came to see me in my office today. He asked me what was the use of reading Edgar Poe. I decided to do a Euclid on him. I said, “Have you read ‘A Descent into The Maelstrom’?” “Yes,” he said. “Good,” I said, “here’s a dollar.”
Michael Hinton (2009, age 57). With friends like Peter Drucker who needs enemies
Marshall McLuhan’s claim that literature is dead was one of many statements McLuhan would make over his career that drove his enemies and quite a number of his friends crazy. Consider for example what Peter Drucker, “the father of management,” said about McLuhan in 1994 when he was asked to reflect on what he had learned from Marshall McLuhan. “Not one of McLuhan’s specific predictions has come true and not one of them is likely to come true.” If Drucker meant this statement seriously, either it reveals his ignorance of McLuhan’s thinking or his willingness to engage in the slander of the reputation of a man who thought of him as a friend and colleague.
To give but one example of a McLuhan prediction that came true, consider this anecdote recounted by Professor Abraham Rotstein, Professor emeritus, economics, at the University of Toronto, and a member of McLuhan’s circle in the 1960s, in a conversation I had with him in August about McLuhan. “Mcluhan comes into class sometime in the 1960s and waves a plastic card at the students. ‘This, ladies and gentlemen is a new kind of credit card, it lets you pay in cash.”
Is Drucker right? Are McLuhan’s predictions all bogus? Is Drucker simply being a cranky old man?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Marshall McLuhan, edited by Corrine McLuhan, Matie Molinaro, and William Toye. Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, pp. 223.
Barrington with Maurice McLuhan Nevitt, Who was Marshall McLuhan? 1995, pp.122-126.
Tags: American mind, Communications, Conversation, Culture, Education, Learning, Literature, Management education, Medium is the message, Relationship, Technology
Marshall (November, 1949, age 38). An airport is a wonderful thing
Visually that is. Last night I saw a friend off on the plane to New York, which left from Malton Airport. There is something grand about an airport especially at twilight when there’s just enough light to see but not so much as to take away the sky.
Me (October 2009, age 57). An airport is a horrible thing
The beginning to James Hilton’s Lost Horizon contains a magical scene in which three old school friends are having a party at Berlin’s Tempelhof International Airport. They talk, drink, and watch the big planes land as the sky turns from blue to black. Today such a scene is impossible to imagine. Since 9/11 the airports of the world have become increasingly unpleasant places to be without it seems becoming significantly more secure. The eye is forced to watch endless TV. The ear is forced to listen to endless commentary on the need to watch your luggage. The body is groped and scanned. Flights are more costly, take longer, and are less comfortable. Whenever possible I try not to fly.
Is there a silver lining to the modern airport? Can the past be recovered?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
The Letters of Marshall McLuhan. Selected and edited by Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 207.
James Hilton. Lost Horizon. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1933. (Or watch Frank Capra’s 1937 film-version of the book, with the same title, starring Ronald Colman and Jane Wyatt)
Tags: Global village, Medium is the message, Visual perspective
Marshall (September, 1948, age 37). Appeal to the young
To appeal to the young is to speak to people who have not made up their minds about everything. The old – that’s me and many of you – typically have not made up their minds by carefully thinking things through. They haven’t. They’ve just acquired answers, positions, points of view, ideas that they are more or less comfortable holding. The young have not. Therefore you can talk with them.
Me (October 2009, age 57). Wake up and wake other people up
What Marshall is talking about here is the need for rhetoric, that is the art of persuasion. Rhetoric has had a bad reputation ever since Plato said Socrates said that it is the art of making the worse case the better. But Plato and Socrates got it wrong. Rhetoric is the art of dealing with ordinary people who are indifferent and stupid – like you and me. All of us, perhaps I should add – some more, some less – are asleep to the world about us. The world pulsates with life. But we don’t see it; we’re stupid and indifferent to it. There are tricks for waking up. The top three being travel, talk to a child, break your routine and do something different. However it is done, and there are many other ways to wake up and be woken up, to persuade people of whatever it is you want to persuade them of you need to wake them up, to excite their curiosity and speak in a way that makes it easy for them to understand what you’re saying. Not to talk down to people, but to speak at their level.
Do you expect people to be awake, to be intelligent and passionate about the world? If so, how well has that served you? In what ways other than travel, children and routine breaking can you wake people up?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
The Letters of Marshall McLuhan. Selected and edited by Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 203.
Christopher Bonanos. “Textbook Obama: Which predecessor does his rhetoric most nearly echo? The data don’t lie: It’s Ronald Reagan.” New Yorker, September 21, 2009, p. 16.
Paul Strathern. Socrates in 90 Minutes. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1997.
Tags: Communications, Education, Global village, Medium is the message, Rhetoric
Marshall (August 1948, age 37). Speed up or slow down
I’ve noticed that people today read at only one pace. Whatever that pace is, usually it’s the one you see people reading novels at the beach, they expect that every book can be read at that pace. This is crazy and yet it is the fundamental unexamined assumption of all of our ‘best’ literary critics. The fact is that some books (such as E. Pound’s) can only be read slowly and some (such as A. Christie’s) can be read extremely fast.
Me (October 2009, age 57). Business books are best read fast
Most business books if they are to be read at all, and a great many need not be read, can be read very fast. To read a business book slowly is to pay it an undeserved compliment. That there are ideas there it will take deep thought to unlock. There is a lot of jargon, metaphor and euphemism that can slow you down – but as Micklethwait and Wooldridge say in The Witch Doctors, “Dig into virtually any area of management theory and you will find, eventually, a coherent position of sorts. The problem is that in order to extract the nugget you have to dig through an enormous amount of waffle.”
Which is why you need to read them fast.
How fast do you read business books?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
P.S. See you here next Tuesday
READING FOR THIS POST
The Letters of Marshall McLuhan. Selected and edited by Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 200.
John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. The Witch Doctors: Making Sense of the Management Gurus, New York: Times Books, 1997, p. 19.
Tags: Business, Communications, Education, Global village, Medium is the message, Reading, Speed
Marshall (July 1948, age 36). The necessity & impossibility of creating a group
Talk is vital to my thinking and writing. It seems impossible, but absolutely necessary, to gather a group of 10 competent people around me here in Toronto to enable me to talk, think, and write. Even in New York, Paris, or London. It would be impossible.
Me (October 2009, age 57). The impossible happens
By 1953, with the help of a Ford Foundation grant he obtained with a group of two: himself and the anthropologist Ted Carpenter, who he met in 1948, McLuhan put together a group of 5 around him to think, talk, and write about culture and communications: Ted Carpenter, Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, Harley Parker, Tom Easterbrook, and Carl Williams. Five was enough for the group to come up with “the crucial discovery,” as Philip Marchand says, “that media are extensions of the human body and of the nervous system.”
Do you want to be part of a group to think, talk and write about business, culture, and communications? Let’s have a conversation.
Cordially, Marshall and Me
P.S. See you here tomorrow
READING FOR THIS POST
The Letters of Marshall McLuhan. Selected and edited by Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and Wiliam Toye. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 197
Seth Godin, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us. New York; Penguin Group, 2008
W. Terrence Gordon, Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding. Toronto; Stoddard, 1997, pp. 160-165.
Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger. Cambridge: Mass.: MIT Press, 1989, pp. 124-137.
Tags: Business, Communications, Culture, Global village, Medium is the message
Marshall (April 1946, age 35). Exams create paralysis
Exams have a “paralyzing [effect on the] independence of mind.” That wrangler Keynes learned this first hand at Cambridge. I’m learning it second hand at Toronto. I want to take “a practical critical” approach to literature but my students have been trained like Pavlov’s dogs to salivate at the prospect of recall not independent thought.
Me (September 2009, age 57). You can start creating and stop being paralysed
If you manage people - are you teaching your people to make creative contributions to the enterprise, or are you teaching them to pass annual performance reviews, quarterly tests and other exams?
If you work for someone else – are you learning how to make creative contributions? Or are you learning how to pass annual performance reviews, quarterly tests , and other exams?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
P.S. See you here tomorrow
READING FOR THIS POST
The Letters of Marshall McLuhan. Selected and edited by Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 190
Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, 1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman. London: Macmillan, 2003, pp. 83-84.
Tags: Creating, Education, Exam, Global village, Medium is the message