For me, the only sources of moral values are the pursuit of understanding and the pursuit of happiness.
Matthew Stewart
At its best, management theory is part of the democratic promise of America. It aims to replace the despotism of the old bosses with the rule of scientific law. It offers economic power to all who have the talent and energy to attain it.
We are all equal not because we partake in some peculiar nature or because we share in the same credo of unreasoned beliefs, but because we take it that no thinking being is incapable of seeing reason.
I don't have an M.B.A. I have a doctoral degree in philosophy - nineteenth-century German philosophy, to be precise.
Whoever pays the consultant gets pretty much what they want to hear.
During the seven years that I worked as a management consultant, I spent a lot of time trying to look older than I was. I became pretty good at furrowing my brow and putting on somber expressions.
At the decisive Boston town meeting of Nov. 29, 1773, while ships loaded with cargo from the East India Company idled in the harbor, Thomas Young was the first and only speaker to propose that the best way to protest the new Tea Act was to dump the tea into the water.
Wherever I was in the world, at the beginning of every consulting project, one thing was certain: I would know less about the business at hand than the people I was supposed to be advising.
What do you need to succeed in business? You need the ability to think critically and communicate, and those things you can get just as easily out of a philosophy degree.
Generations of devoted American history buffs have spent countless hours reading and writing long books about the American Revolution without ever having come across the name of Dr. Thomas Young. Yet it was Young who came up with the idea for the original tea party - the one in Boston Harbor.
Benjamin Franklin maintained that every star is a sun, and every sun nourishes a 'chorus of worlds' just like ours.
Thomas Young was born in 1731 in upstate New York. The child of impoverished Irish immigrants, he grew up in a log cabin without the benefit of a formal education. But he was an avid reader who began collecting books at a young age and eventually amassed one of the finest personal libraries in New England.
Sir Isaac Newton gave the extraterrestrials their biggest shot in the arm when he embraced the infinite universe as the basis for his hugely influential system of physics. Even so, the aliens of the early modern period remained creatures of philosophy rather than science.
I would eventually leave the business in 1999 to work full-time as a writer, but during the previous decade, I would advise French businessmen on how to succeed in Germany; tell Americans what to do in Eastern Europe; show the Spanish how to become more like the Americans. I spent one particularly haunting year advising bankers in Mexico.
Like many of the ideas that mattered in the American Revolution, extraterrestrials got their start in antiquity. The Greek philosopher Epicurus speculated that the universe must be infinite, eternal and abounding in 'worlds' just like our own.
Nature's God really descends from an ancient Greek tradition that was passed along to the early modern philosophers. And these were quite radical thinkers who were really challenging the ways of thinking of their time and the established religion.
George Washington participated as a vestryman in his local congregation, but that didn't really imply any particular kind of religious belief. This was necessary in order to participate in the society.
Ethan Allen was convinced that every planet out there has its own intelligent extraterrestrials. And this, as you can imagine, is a radical, inspiring, but very unsettling, idea.
We're just one rock surrounded by this immense universe.
In order to produce generalist courses, business school professors have been forced to invent subjects called strategy, called organizational behavior and so on.
In business, experience is the big teacher.
We mislead ourselves when we pretend we can make someone into an effective manager by putting them through a few courses in business school.
The conservative interpretation of American history says that wherever the word 'God' appears, it's obviously our God, it's obviously a Christian God; it's usually an evangelical God. The simplest point I'm making is: That is just absolutely not true.
Most religions assume that you find purpose through some agent that sits above or outside the world and imbues it with purpose.
I'd like the United States to become what it was always meant to be, which is a secular nation - more publicly committed to reason, to improving understanding, and promoting education.
One of the distinguishing features of anything that aspires to the name of science is the reproducibility of experimental results.
It's wrong to look at what we call 'Enlightenment values' as some fad of the 18th century. It's deeply rooted in ancient history.
It was 1988, and I was just finishing a D.Phil at Oxford University on the topic of 'Nietzsche and German Idealism.'
Like ministers of information, consultants condense the message, smooth out the dissonances, unify the rhetoric, and then repeat and amplify it ad nauseam through the client's rank and file.
America's revolutionary deists saw themselves as - and they were - participants in an international movement that drew on most of the same literary sources across the civilized world.
The core of the consulting business is going in and essentially making yourself indispensible by eating the brain of the organization, meaning that the consultants go in and assume key functions in the organization.
If you're working for somebody and trying to check on them, it never works. You're just saying what they want you to say at the end of the day.
In the ideal scenario, consultants work for a board, and they're helping the board check on certain aspects of management. Their work is made public and transparent.
There were about two years when I literally paid no rent anywhere in the world. Everyone's a contact, but there's no real human interaction. That's a very wearying thing.
Most management systems have to do with establishing trust and getting people to cooperate. They're not really about expertise or science.
Businesspeople get a little bit of bad press sometimes. There are a lot of normal and ethical people.
