Page 215 - The Resilient Organization

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While the engineer who devises war instruments that may save his city
is a worthy citizen, you would hardly permit him to marry your
daughter.
—Plato, quoted in Gilfillan (1945: 72–73)

This postcard is a call for inventive experimentation by scholars and prac-
titioners of management jointly. The development of management practice
is too important to be abandoned by scholars. Such shared responsibility, I
suggest, derives from three sources.
First, managers are often myopic (Levinthal & March, 1993). Not only
do they (as people in general) learn vicariously, but they suffer from selec-
tion bias (Denrell, 2005): by focusing on winners alone, we may not realize
that winners and losers may share the same characteristics (such as ambi-
tion), which then become hailed as “key success factors.” It is also difficult
as an insider to develop an unbiased view of the organizational environ-
ment in which one operates (Mezias & Starbuck, 2003).
Second, it does matter which management ideas get invented in the
first place and eventually included in the repertoire of new and standard
management practices. If a critical (life-saving) invention is not brought
forward or is brought forward too late, consequences may be dire such as
the disappearance of an entire civilization (Diamond, 2004). Or if the
inquiry is done along lines that are blatantly wrong, the mistake may have
lasting consequences as in the case of Soviet Union’s falling behind in

This chapter is modified from a paper originally developed by Liisa Välikangas as a Woodside
Institute Working Paper, Woodside, California, in 2006 and presented to the Organization
Science Winter Conference in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, 2007 and to the Academy of
Management, Anaheim, California, in 2008.

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