For this issue, contributing editor Anne Lazurko interviewed McGill’s Henry Mintzberg — arguably Canada’s foremost business prof — in search of insights for managing a farm, which Mintzberg does have. But instead of telling us how farmers should copy all the good things that his corporate clients are doing, Mintzberg had a different message.
Don’t copy their mistakes, he told Anne. Don’t go wrong where they go wrong. In particular, don’t let management get disengaged from production. If you do, Mintzberg implies, you’ll get autocratic and you’ll follow those big corporations into their current nightmares.
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Mintzberg also warns against letting business become too much about business. If we do, he says, we’ll risk making it a failure. We need to recognize that farming for example is a calling that demands passion and dedication, not just business smarts.
It turns out the business world often gets psychology wrong. An easy example is brainstorming, a technique developed by Manhattan advertising executive Alex Osborn way back in 1948. Osborn said that you could multiply a business’s creativity by sitting your team members in front of a flipchart and getting them to fill page after page with ideas. It doesn’t matter how fanciful the ideas, Osborn said, just write them down, and never ever criticize any idea at this stage, because criticism kills creativity.
The idea helped Osborn peddle his best sellers. Indeed, brainstorming is a routine part of business at many companies. Some companies build their entire culture around it, and even some larger farms have toyed with it.
Except it doesn’t work. As early as the 1950s, psychologists put brainstorming to the test. When they asked college students to come up with ideas via brainstorming, or via a more aggressive debate system, they invariably got more and better ideas by debating, not brainstorming.
It’s a message that farmers will feel they’ve always known. But that doesn’t mean farmers have learned all the lessons that psychologists can teach.
If you agree with the psychology, you’re acknowledging the crucial role of frank discussion on the farm. But as we all know, not all farms are open for debate. Instead, individuals become entrenched, or one individual assumes they know what the other will think — there are endless variations — and you end up getting into a corner.
In fact, it’s partly because of these family dynamics that psychologists also say you’ll come up with your best ideas if you talk to people who are like you, but not too close.
We get lots wrong at Country Guide too, although we do have what you might call quality control strategies. We talk to multiple sources. We ask the same questions in different ways, and we talk, talk, talk to our farm subscribers.
We also go looking for viewpoints you otherwise might not hear, like Henry Mintzberg’s. Are we getting it right? Let me know. I’m at 519-674-1449, or email me at [email protected].
