I have this T-shirt – well you saw the picture. D&D – Drucker & Deming. 

Always makes me laugh – me and the very, very few people who get it. Still I love to wear it to expert exchanges, knowledge sharing events where I think I meet the three other people in the world who both know the game and the wizards of management theory. They could summon ideas like a level 20 – well let’s say at least 18 – wizard with 20 INT and spell save DC 19plus with slight frame and a bit of a belly. Too much? I know. I turn them into wizards, while they are just great thinkers. And I make their methods look like magic.

The Board Room Version: We confuse the Image of methods with the methods themselves. Boorstin tells us that the Ideal is replaced by the Image. We are only interested in how we are seen, not in what we must do. Similar Goffman, describes the Frontstage vs. the Backstage — the show becomes the only important thing, forgotten is, how and by whom it is created. RCA, PDCA, ISO, Continuous Improvement become brands instead of tools — we like the sticker but ignore the uncomfortable truth they can show us. Who does not face the mistake cannot solve it. Don Quixote saw giants where there were only windmills. The Image eats the reality.

I can be a horrible fan-boy at times. I always revered Steve Jobs for his visionary genius to use unix as a base for MacOS and nearly hyperventilated whenever he showed off the beautiful, minimalist industrial design of Apple’s latest gadget in the early 2000s. See, doing it again. I think nobody comes close to Immanuel Kant’s mind-blowing thought constructs and getting through these mazes always filled me with joy. Tolkien is king, because he wrote the best book on the planet: The Lord of the Rings. And Neil Gaiman’s stories always feel excitingly eerie and comfortably warm, like a fireplace in a haunted house. 

But let’s face it, Steve was just a great businessman who had always assembled great but less visible people around him. He was a visionary because — by combining the arts and technology — he created his own reality, a wonderful theater production — first colorful, then white, finally metallic silver — nevertheless it was a production. Kant was a genius thinker but a shitty writer, and he is to blame that I still think it is ok to form sentences that span entire book pages. Tolkien wrote a masterpiece but could have taken an introduction to modern dramaturgy course because 10 pages of walking is not interesting and don’t create one of the best character in literature – Tom, of course – just to abandon him after a chapter. And Neil, well, Neil is genuinely awesome, but he used to write  comic books. That’s why he is so cool. 

But all of this is triggering something more personal somehow. Hard to explain. Let me try. I wrote a short story once about a guy struggling not to become like Don Quixote, not fighting windmills and losing the connection to reality. I understand now why I was struggling with writing it. Same reason I am troubled with this here.

Why is this a topic I’m bothering you with? Why is there a problem with Drucker and Deming being called upon whenever we talk about management? Why is it an issue that they were just normal people who studied their stuff extensively, experienced a ton of companies, refined their ideas and what came out is quite neat? Yes, they are only humans. The problem is that we turn them into something easier to carry. A name, a quote, an image. That is the sin.

In tons of speeches I heard Deming quoted: If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. I’ve seen it on LinkedIn and Instagram — underneath an elderly gentleman in shades of grey and always with black background. Charming. The real issue is not even that the quote is wrongly attributed to Deming. What is really problematic is that it is absolutely wrong and the exact opposite of what Deming said: “It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it – a costly myth.” The argument was about how damaging management by numbers is. While data is important it is certainly not the only thing and has to be used very carefully in analyzing problems, not in managing organizations. Two separate things, please always remember that, and I also say that to myself, because I did commit that sin, too, in lectures, in trainings with that exact quote. And there are more examples of this – and it happens in other fields, too. Friends confirmed this to me. My wife told me it even happens in pedagogy. Misquoting Montessori. How can they?! Wait, who is… 

Why am I so shocked about this? Well, I studied Literature first and there, something like this – alongside plagiarism – is like the worst crime you could commit. Now, in other examples it is a little more subtle. Sometimes it’s just making a quote a bit punchier. OK, neither Drucker nor Edgar Schein ever said “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” But Schein said that “… culture determines and limits strategy …” and that was in a paragraph about conflicts in merging companies. But ok, that’s not that bad. The meaning is still there, somehow, somewhere.

The somehow is the issue. Time for Daniel J. Boorstin’s “The Image”. Written in 1962, Boorstin was describing how journalism shifted from reporting on events to helping create them. The emerging mass media of the time had created a huge demand for the stuff they wanted to sell: News. But it does not come in a regular constant stream, like for example oil, oh, wait… Well think of something else. So news is created — by the media, by governments, by companies staging events the media can then report on. Think that is terrible, immoral, totally utterly false. Actually, a press conference, a product presentation, the safety message you receive in your inbox on Monday morning, would fit the bill perfectly. These pseudo-events as Boorstin calls them, a relatively fresh concept in the middle of the last century, are the norm nowadays. 

From events he goes to people. Individuals known purely for being known are basically the human equivalent of pseudo-events. Oh, wait I know that… Ah, celebrities. Yes, Boorstin makes a separation between heroes or anybody known for their achievements or courage or moral actions and the people who are just visible. I have to steady myself a bit here. This is all too familiar. And I don’t mean the instagram celebrities and YouTubers. The real impact lies in the more subtle forms of this phenomenon, where it is more a shift: the politician who is more a media personality, the CEO who seems to be more on stage and social media. I spare you Boorstin’s whole riff that no-one is a traveler anymore and we have all become tourists. And by the way pseudo-events are not untrue by definition, neither are celebrities nor tourism.

Then what is the problem with that pseudo-thing. OK, we don’t like some of these staged events or these used-to-be-the-real-deal-celebrities, but they don’t hurt anybody, right. The problem is not with anybody or anything in particular. It’s what happened to the relationship between the two. The ideal — what the event, the hero or the travel actually means — has been separated from the image – the fabricated event, the celebrity, the well organized packaged trip to Asia for just 999.-, airport and tourism taxes not included. And the ideal is something demanding. It judges reality. It costs effort, discipline and change. 

Think of improvement actions in companies for example. The time it takes to keep at it, hours of boring data analysis, process analysis, trying never to skip a step, endless concentrated discussions working with the needs and wants of stakeholders to get buy-in and then another dozen rounds to get them to pay the costs. 

Images are comfort food. The whole point of them, their intention are to be consumed. They are made to be attractive, easy and useful. They do not challenge anything. “We are trying to become the best quality provider of smartphones and we are not there yet.” That is an organization speaking in ideals. An image company will just say we are the best. But we all have heard that, right. It’s like good advertising, actually. It is Apple’s creative and rebellious Think Different. It’s Nike’s Just Do It. Or one of my favorite Patagonia slogans, Don’t Buy This Jacket creating a flair of ethical anti-consumerism. What worries me is not so much that I or we – all of us poor consumers – would be fooled by these phrases. Because we are not, right. We know that Apple must be a tightly organized tech company and very few of its employees can actually be really creative and individualistic. Nike is just trying to motivate you, because “Just Do It” doesn’t even tell me anything about the product. It’s a message to me as a sports person. And Patagonia is literally trying to sell me a jacket by saying not to buy one. But all of this is just background noise, right? No, it is much more than that. 

The slogans are not false in the crude sense. They are even worse than false: frictionless. They remove the limits, the conflict, the actual work. And on top of that, they — the slogans, the images — work against the ideal.

See, at least according to Boorstin, organizations are increasingly replacing ideal with images. Less “what must we do?”. More “How should we be seen?”. The showing drains energy from the doing. Read him. The analysis is more than half a century old and more relevant today than when it was published. Because we see that today, right, we do that today, I do that today. No safety effort without a campaign. No customer presentation without meaningless slogans in front of a multicolored AI generated picture. No trip without an Instagram post.

And Boorstin is not alone, take Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, published in 1959. Social interaction can be imagined like a play being performed. There is a frontstage and a backstage. They are separated on purpose. You cannot let the audience see what is happening in the back. There would be no play otherwise. You don’t see the kitchen in a restaurant. Customers don’t see what is happening inside an organization. Sometimes I like him better than Boorstin because although they describe more or less the same thing, Goffman is clinically analyzing, no judgement, that is just how social interactions work. Makes me feel a bit better whenever I step on a stage and perform the latest production of “Hail to PDCA and RCA” or “Waiting for WIIFM”.

We even created acronyms to create these acronyms. KISS, BLUF, SCQA, ELI5 and one that I actually use SUCCESs – no typo: the method is Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Stories, so no second s. Aside from that acronym-crime, this approach by the Heath brothers is very good, it’s sound, doesn’t oversimplify, because even the Simple is more about getting to the core of an idea and not just dumbing it down to easy digestible slogans. Unexpected is a neat trick to get attention. Being Concrete is always important because it often makes your messages clearer. And who can argue about the importance of Credibility? I’m not so much a fan of Emotional and Stories, but I use them sometimes, although carefully, because I am very aware of the danger of it all. Simple can very rapidly lead to amputation of an idea. Concrete, Emotional and Stories often turn out to be anecdotal, manipulative ways to replace analysis rather than carrying it. 

What really worries me is the poster that shows a hungry little kid asking you to donate: I hate that. It’s not how I would do it. I would put together some information on the region facing famine, trying to make you understand why help is needed. I can tell you what the region looks like, who lives there, the historical and economical development, what is actually happening. If that doesn’t land I haven’t educated anyone, I have made no sustainable impact. I’ve lost to a better image. And this will always happen because the little kid will always get more donations. So I revert to SUCCESs.

But it puts me in difficult situations of making the right judgement call. That is always the danger with these pseudo-things. And these acronyms are just another pseudo-thing. 

And all these tools which are so useful and essentially important for an organization’s wellbeing become brands, a shiny and simple reflection of the method. But why, why do we do this pseudo-stuff. Take Root Cause Analysis – RCA, yes, again. It’s the shit everybody always says that is needed. Auditors expect it when people have to fill out these damn audit follow up reports. Quality people say it makes improvement sustainable, because not the tree is the real problem, the root is. Actually neither are the problem – trees and roots are solutions not problems. And that guy, yeah look at him, that auditor-quality-trainer-mismatch is me, exactly what I do. The thing is that we like the brand, what it tells us, the image. The truth is what we don’t want to see. Because the uncomfortable truth about root causes is they show us that we often have fundamental or systemic issues in organizations. Stuff that is really big, really costly, would require significant changes. So often, we do not like what we see when we dig deeper. We prefer to cover up the hole with a nice sticker RCA or Continuous Improvement Champion, rather than fixing it. 

If you cannot face the error, meet it eye to eye, and stare it down with improvement, you will fail. If you are not curious enough to go down that root cause hole you’re less capable for management than a little girl called Alice. Schönreden does not help anybody, not you, your organization, your customers or your market value. I am pointing at you but thinking of me. 

Don Quixote kept losing the connection back to reality. He couldn’t stop seeing giants where there were only windmills. The image consumed the reality. I am not sure I always avoid that myself.

Because right now, I’m sitting at my desk, feverishly hacking on my keyboard, hoping that all of you love me. In the end, I do this not for you but mainly for myself and that is probably the uncomfortable truth behind both Goffman and Boorstin. Not that we cover up something with images, not that we hide behind the curtain. We are afraid of the ideals behind them. 

Is your job just for show? Is the organization you work for just about shareholder value? Am I good enough for this world?

I try, I truly try, believe me. But how can I ensure that I am worthy of your trust? 

I guess there is more to explore. Worse: it includes myself.

Your thoughts: LinkedIn

Don’t just take it from me, here is some good stuff to read:

Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image, 1962

Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1959

W. Edwards Deming, The New Economics, 1993

Chip Heath & Dan Heath, Made to Stick, 2007

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, 1605