16 Techniques of Critical Thinking

16 Techniques of Critical Thinking

Taken from: http://lukeprog.com/science/16_techniques_of_critical_thinking.html

The most important skill you never learned.

In school, we learn what to think but not how to think. Here’s a crash course in how to think clearly, accurately, and fairly.

Benefits of critical thinking

We have too much information. Critical thinking helps you focus on what matters.

We have too many options. Critical thinking helps you do what matters.

Millions of scam artists want to steal your time and money. You can use critical thinking to defeat them.

Critical thinking helps you avoid false beliefs. Do you believe something because you read it somewhere? Because your family or government or culture told you so? Because it makes you feel good? Because you “just believe” it?

If so, you probably have many false beliefs. Critical thinking can help you avoid those. Who knows? It might even help you form some true beliefs.

But we probably already agree that critical thinking is good. How do we do it?

Techniques of critical thinking

Here are 16 basic techniques of critical thinking.

1. Clarify.State one point at a time. Elaborate. Give examples. Ask others to clarify or give examples. If you’re not sure what you’re talking about, you can’t address it.Unclear: “How can we fix education?”Clear: “How can teachers better prepare students for the workforce?” or “How can we change policies to encourage better teaching?”
2. Be accurate.Check your facts.Inaccurate: “Most people these days are obese” or “Just vent your anger; you’ll feel better.”Accurate: “Most people in the U.S. are not obese” or “Studies show that venting your anger actually increases angry feelings and actions.”
3. Be precise.Be precise, so you are able to check accuracy. Avoid generalizations, euphemisms, and other ambiguity.Imprecise: “Mary is overweight.”Precise: “Mary is 6 pounds overweight according to her Body Mass Index, which is a deceptive measure of healthy weight anyway.”
4. Be relevant.Stick to the main point. Pay attention to how each idea is connected to the main idea.Irrelevant: “Why do I believe in the Christian God? Well, the human eye is too complex to have happened by chance, so God must have created it.”Relevant: “The human eye is a complex system. Its origins, Darwinian or otherwise, are not fully understood. But our ignorance is not evidence for God or anything else.”
5. Know your purpose.What are you trying to accomplish? What’s the most important thing here? Distinguish your purpose from related purposes.
6. Identify assumptions.All thinking is based on assumptions, however basic.Assumptions not identified: “Logically, God cannot exist.”Assumptions identified: “Logic is only a process applied to assumptions. If you apply logic to the assumption that ‘scientific evidence is the only reliable means of knowing something,’ then of course non-physical entities cannot be known using your assumptions.”
7. Check your emotions.Emotions only confuse critical thinking. Notice how your emotions may be pushing your thinking in a certain direction.
8. Empathize.Try to see things from your opponent’s perspective. Imagine how they feel. Imagine how you sound to them. Sympathize with the logic, emotion, and experience of their perspective.
9. Know your own ignorance.Each person knows less than 0.0001% of the available knowledge in the world. Even if you know more about relevant issues than your opponent, you still might be wrong. Educate yourself as much as possible, but still: be humble.
10. Be independent.Think critically about important issues for yourself. Don’t believe everything you read. Don’t conform to the priorities, values, and perspectives of others.
11. Think through implications.Consider the consequences of your viewpoint.Not thinking through implications: “A fetus is biologically alive and mentally conscious. Therefore, killing a fetus is wrong.”Thinking through implications: “Monkeys, dogs, and many other animals are alive and almost certainly conscious. Is killing them always wrong, too? Why do they have less rights than a fetus? Let’s think about this.”
12. Know your own biases.Your biases muddle your thinking. Notice how they might be pushing your thought toward a particular end, regardless of the logical steps it took to get there.Biased: “I’m not sure how to defeat the Kalam cosmological argument for God’s existence, but I know it’s flawed somewhere because God doesn’t exist.”Unbiased: “The Kalam cosmological argument is compelling. I’ll have to think it through before I can say whether or not it indicates God’s existence.”
13. Suspend judgment.Critical thinking should produce judgments, not the other way around. Don’t make a decision and then use critical thinking to back it up. If anything, use the method of science: take a guess about how things are and then try to disprove it.Immediate judgment: “We’re here to promote Johnson’s plan for education reform. What logical arguments can we construct in its favor?”Suspended judgment: “What do we want from our educational system? Once we know, let’s use critical thinking to find the best ways to do those things.”
14. Consider the opposition.Listen to other viewpoints in their own words. Seriously consider their most persuasive arguments. Don’t dismiss them.Narrow-minded: Reading an essay and letting it persuade you.Open-minded: Reading an essay, then reading an essay that argues the opposite point.
15. Recognize cultural assumptions.People from different times and cultures thought much differently than you do. In fact, your ideas might have arrived only in the last 50 years of human history! Why is your perspective better than that of everyone else in the world today and throughout history?
16. Be fair, not selfish.Each person’s most basic bias is for themselves.Selfish: “I can’t know everything. It’s not my fault I made that error.”Fair: “I can’t know everything, but I could easily have done some basic research before making such a bold statement.”

Where to go from here

These techniques are only the beginning. To practice and grow your critical thinking skills, try these resources:

Beginner
A Rulebook for Arguments (the best)
Asking the Right Questions (critical thinking basics)
Foundation for Critical Thinking (great mini-publications)
How to Think Critically (good blog articles)

Intermediate
How to Think About Weird Things by Schick & Caughn (a nice intro)
Critical Thinking Web (free tutorials)
Critical Reading (free lessons)
Critical Thinking on the Web (directory of online resources)

Advanced
Introduction to Logic by Copi & Cohen (popular logic textbook)
Critical Thinking Mini-Lessons (logic lessons)

Critical Thinking Methodologies

http://www.uea.ac.uk/~e490/skills/crit-think/sld003.htm

Purpose, Teamwork and Culture: Management and the vital trio of purpose, teamwork and culture in business

Taken from: http://www.thinkingmanagers.com/management/purpose-teamwork-culture.php

Three of the most basic and critical questions in management are:

(1) Who’s in charge here?
(2) How much power should they possess while they stay in charge?
(3) And how long should that stay endure in the event of failure?

The standard answers are clear:

(1) A single, designated person, subject to collective oversight
(2) As much power as they want
(3) No time at all.

The standard practice, however, is somewhat different. The following real-life case history can also stand as an interesting test for any would-be board chairman. What would you do if, having appointed a new managing director to lead a troubled company out of the dark and into the light…

In Year One, he closes several operations, fires 50 people – and the company, after related charges, loses $4.4 million. Never fear, in Year Three he assures you and everybody else that ‘We successfully turned the company round’. Profit that year is $3.6 million, followed by $5.7 in Year Four. The next year, though, the recovery reverses, and 46 more staff are removed from the roster.

That doesn’t prevent 79 more forced departures in Year Six, together with a $7 million loss – and more closures. In Year Seven, your chosen boss announces his fourth major reorganisation in seven years, splitting the company into three. He reassures you, again, that the company, ‘in my opinion, has turned’ – and still he remains in the job.

THE UNFILLED GAP
Would you, as chairman, have retained the services of such a spectacular non-performer? Who did? The awful answer is the man himself. The company is Unisys, whose boss, James A. Unruh, combines the posts of chairman and chief executive. All the figures, for losses of money and jobs, need multiplying by 100. Thus in Year Six, Unisys lost $700 million and 7,900 employees. Over the past decade, its shareholders have lost an annual 11.4% on their investments. On any reading, this mournful series of events shows (a) that Unisys has totally failed to fill the vast gap created by the collapse in its sales of mainframe computers: and (b) that the critics of downsizing in general are right in this specific case. Each successive reduction in the capacity of the organisation merely set the stage for the next decline – and at long last, in June, for Unruh’s departure.

Turn to another company, and to a report in the same issue of the Wall Street Journal, and you find that SBC Communications ‘is the only Baby Bell that hasn’t resorted to massive lay-offs to trim its work force’. Its double-digit percentage rises in annual profit have led the telecoms industry despite lack of cutbacks – or is it because of a policy which has earned the company ‘loyalty among its employees’? You won’t find much loyalty at Unisys – or at another telecoms group where, according to a middle manager in Europe, ‘Nobody here has a clue what the strategy is’.

That group, the giant AT&T, is now planning to join SBC (in origin, an AT&T division) in the largest merger in history – $50 billion plus. The two share a common feature with Unisys: in all three cases the chief executives are also chairmen, and their near-absolute power appears to be independent of success – or failure. The CEO of AT&T, Robert Allen, has even clung to power in a bizarre interregnum before an outside appointee takes over. Yet the company has lost shareholders 16% of their capital since end-1995, while market share in the long-distance trade has been slipping. The fundamental questions raised at the start, which apply to appointments at every level, have received the same wrong answers as at Unisys. (1) The wrong person was appointed; (2) given excessive power; and (3) allowed to survive too many proofs of his unsuitability.

(1) and (3) certainly don’t apply to Edward J. Whitacre, Jr. of SBC. But what about (2)? He manages in dictatorial style (‘spare on words, long on action and powerful in execution’), says the WSJ. The same paper reports a pregnant saying from a manager whose company was acquired by SBC: ‘We have a joke about SBC’s management: It’s “Ed Says”. Anytime you ask why a particular decision was made, it’s “Ed Says”. That’s it’.

Given a choice between ‘Ed Says’ and Unruh’s rule, anybody would settle for Ed. An effective dictator has to be superior to an ineffective one. But that doesn’t settle the power issue. Is dictatorship justified by results? Does one-man rule have a better record than collective, collegiate management? Is the award of absolute power consistent with modern management necessities?

INSUFFICIENT ATTENTION
It’s doubtful whether any of these questions trouble the minds of boards deciding on the appointment of a chief executive. Indeed, making the choice ‘is frequently carried out with insufficient attention – particularly with regard to investigation of the chosen candidate.’ The quotation comes from Taking Charge, in which two researchers for the Judge Institute of Management Studies at Cambridge investigate what makes CEO succession work.

As one selector told the researchers, commissioned by the head-hunters, Saxton Bampfylde International, ‘The more I do of these things, the more I’m conscious of the fact that all of them have to do with the effect of people on other – with relationships between people.’ That being so, personal style is crucial, especially since among ‘the most urgent tasks facing the new CEO… is that of establishing an executive team with which he or she can work effectively.’ Teamwork hardly fits with ‘Ed Says.’

Each task is different, though. In crisis, an Ed could be essential. It’s a matter of horses for courses – which is why making the choice comes third of the ten stages that are recommended in Taking Charge:

1. Planning – agree on what the job entails.
2. The search for candidates – where they come from may determine where they take you.
3. Making the choice – a considered judgment, please, not a whirlwind romance.
4 & 5. Appointment and interregnum – the decision is made (and fresh uncertainties begin).
6. Starting work – new CEOs should look before they leap, gathering information relentlessly.
7. Orientation – relationships are the heart of the matter.
8. Team-building – knowing who to replace (and when to button your lip).
9. The strategy review – learning and giving ownership.
10. Implementation – establishing and communicating the new leadership.

In my view, the key stages, after the right person has been carefully picked, are 6, 8 and 9, which mesh closely together. Bob Baumann made this point powerfully in describing his first months at SmithKline Beecham (previously reported in Thinking Managers). The process of gathering information, by asking people at all levels about their perceptions of the company, its strategy and their particular roles, gives insights into both colleagues and the corporate condition; begins a working relationship with individuals; and starts along the road to full-blooded teamwork as the senior executives re-examine the strategy with their new leader. The vital trio of purpose, teamwork and culture are all involved.

Something’s missing from the ten stages, though. Taking Charge assumes that the new boss will have a separate chairman – which wasn’t true, as noted, in the three cases set out at the start. The researchers quickly found that the chairman-CEO relationship is loaded with potential for trouble. To quote one interviewee, ‘the chairman lives in a world where quite clearly he is the most important guy in the company. Now I live in a world where the CEO is the most important.’

But the issue of importance is irrelevant. Purpose is all. The prime task of the chairman, as the first among equals on the board, is to agree on the overall targets by which the CEO and his executive colleagues will be judged (‘agree on what the job entails’). The second task is to relate the strategy adopted by the executive team to those targets. The third task is to judge the CEO on his performance as the actual results come in – of which more later.

The final task for decision-makers, after making that diagnosis is to agree on a vital prognosis. Can the incumbent take the company forward, or is another change needed? If so, the sooner action is taken, the better. The board of Pilkington gave Roger Leverton several years before concluding that profitability was far too low compared to French rival St.Gobain and that the change process at the British glassmaker had simply taken too long. Leverton was unceremoniously replaced by a recently appointed Italian. But had Leverton been required to reach a profitability target by a certain time? If not, why not?

MISTAKEN APPOINTMENTS
Mistakes in appointments are much more likely to happen when the decision-taker hasn’t decided firmly what ‘the job entails.’ That’s asking for trouble, just as much as failing to exercise due care and attention over the actual choice. As the researchers heard: ‘The whole process of recruitment is extremely difficult and most people are very bad at it… because they don’t take enough time about it, in thinking it through, in checking references, in doing every sort of thing they can to find out if it’s the right person… even at this level.’

The words ‘this level’ refer to the CEO, but the situation described is general. You are not recruiting a person for their personal attributes alone, but on their fitness for the particular purposes of the business and for their ability to create the teamwork and cultural enviroment that will serve those purposes excellently. Any uncertainty about purpose, teamwork or culture will have immediately damaging results, as Mary Walton shows in an alarming account (Car: A Drama of the American Workplace) of events at Ford Motor.

The programme for the new Taurus, Ford’s flagship in the US, was based on the soundest principles of modern supply management. You choose a single supplier as a partner in both developing and making what you need. Walton earlier wrote an excellent book on W. Edwards Deming, whose ideas underpin an approach that was accepted by the East long before it came back to the West. Ford ‘had been persuaded by the Japanese that it was better to establish long-term, familial relationships with a few suppliers rather than play them off against each other with constant rounds of bidding. The result was supposed to be a harmonious give-and-take between supplier and supplied.’

So far, so good. Unfortunately, the style of the Taurus programme manager, Dick Landgraff, who believed in the high decibel school of management, was inimical to the new philosophy. If cost overruns were threatened, Landgraff would say, ‘Let’s bring these guys in and smash them’. At meetings with suppliers, he would ‘close the door and yell at them about cost overruns. Landgraff didn’t care if he wasn’t Mr Nice Guy.’ In one sense, Mr Nasty won: the Taurus came in on time and on budget. But Ford lost.

In one example, Walton gives a horrifying account of the near-disasters in seat design and manufacture – work previously done in-house. Having closed down its own seat-making capability, Ford was utterly dependent on a young and over-stretched firm named Lear. That sounds a loud warning about supplier partnerships: the choice of partner is as crucial as any personnel appointment, and the partnership must be as tightly controlled and smoothly managed as the overall programme.

BULLYING TACTICS
You can’t afford errors like Ford’s poor choice, nor its late approval of the seat design, nor the cultural clashes between supplier and customer. Pernicious side-effects may well follow if you try to cure such mistakes by bullying tactics. According to Walton, the difficulties with suppliers ‘symbolised an entire project gone bad. Ford pushed too hard on many fronts.’ She links this basic error to the fact that the Taurus proceeded to flop in the marketplace: the top-seller for five golden years fell to third.

The implication is that Mr Nasty may make things happen, but that Mr Nice Guy makes them happen better. Also, the appointment of tough, hard-driving, ‘Ed Says’ shouters is a sign of possible deeper problems in the organisation. Consider this view from Taking Charge: ‘The more autocratic and centralised the prevailing management style, the less likely it is that individuals at lower levels will have been given the space and authority to develop their own confidence and competence.’

The link between organisational behaviour and the conduct of individuals is evidently powerful. In business, as in personal life, the bullying manner is often a cover for lack of confidence, which is intensified by ‘or-else’ organisational pressures: ‘bring the Taurus in on budget, or else’. The prime purpose of the whole programme was surely to create a new car even more successful than its predecessor: meeting the cost parameters was an important, but subordinate aim.

Since the success or failure of project leaders and CEO appointments alike hinges on the right choice and prioritisation of objectives, unless that correct choice governs the selection of the leader and everything else, the project or the company is likely to fail. How you then react to that failure is vitally linked with another question raised at the outset, which is the degree of power allowed to the incumbent. The clue lies in this pregnant sentence: ‘The key is to understand that no project is complete until it is systematically reviewed and its lessons learned.’

Here, Professor David Garvin of Harvard Business School is talking about the way in which the US Army has been improving its ‘management’. The conduct of war has many analogies with running a business, and the HBS case study believes that the army ‘has perfected a remarkably efficient process for correcting its mistakes and sustaining its successes.’ The ‘action review’ method amounts to no more than, to quote the Wall Street Journal, ‘reviewing what happened and applying its lessons.’ Boston University’s School of Management calls the result ‘a process of continuous learning and improvement’ – precisely what the work of any chief executive or manager of any kind should engender.

Indeed, to ‘sharpen your leaders’ is how one general describes the whole purpose of the process, which for the military involves drawing the lessons of both simulated combat and the real thing. In management, the lessons of failure teach more than those of success. But the routine policy of firing the authors of failure and promoting the successful teaches nothing. That was a key reason for the celebrated failure of the army in Vietnam. The constant change of officers meant that the US didn’t fight for nine years, but for one year nine times. Managers also rotate quite frequently. But there’s no reason why they should be condemned to make the same mistakes as their predecessors – or themselves.

ACTION REVIEW PRINCIPLE
The action review principle matches Bob Baumann’s policy of information gathering, teamwork and strategy review at SB – and should certainly help to avoid that folly. When any programme is started, or appointment made…

1. Agree clear objectives, first in written terms, then translated into relevant numbers, financial and non-financial.
2. Stage regular review meetings at which progress is measured against the objectives, and both adverse and favourable deviations are analysed and explained.
3. Initiate action to (a) correct the effects of the adverse deviations (b) ensure that the causes do not recur (c) codify and learn the lessons of failure and success.

The obvious question is who conducts the reviews. The usual boss-subordinate process is not appropriate, since the object is to get things right, not to award blame – and the responsibility could lie with the boss. Interestingly enough, Robert Allen at AT&T instituted evaluation of his performance by his subordinates. Its ineffectiveness can be judged by the results. A collegiate group – non-hierarchical and not ‘Ed Says’ – is required.

Thus the answer to the three questions changes. (1) Who’s in charge here? A primus inter pares, a leader among equals. (2) How much power? What’s needed to lead the group effectively. (3) How long a stay in the event of failure? Use the action review principle, and failure will become the springboard of success as purpose, teamwork and culture fuse into a vital whole.

Personnel Management: Get human resource management right and customers will follow

Taken from: http://www.thinkingmanagers.com/management/personnel-management.php

The more things change, the more they are the same. That old piece of French cynicism certainly applies to management in general, and management of people in particular. Every now and then, maverick companies tackle in revolutionary manner the way in which they treat their workforce. They remain one-offs, even if their ideas influence traditional companies to some degree – and that is happening.

Take the case of St.Luke’s. When this London advertising agency was born in 1995, as a 45-person breakaway from the Omnicom giant, its practices were weird even by unconventional ad-world standards. They went beyond eccentric office design, abolition of personal offices and farming-out activities normally kept in-house. For a start, everybody owned the business equally, from managing director to receptionist – not something that would much appeal in traditional boardrooms whose stock options are massively top-heavy.

Nor was that all. Juniors were encouraged to criticise superiors openly and frankly. This full frontal approach was reflected in the appraisal system, which was both upward and downward. Staff were even involved in deciding their own pay. The system looked outward as well as inward: the business wasn’t organised by function or department, but by customer. The whole structure was animated by a management style that was unbuttoned, unencumbered and loose – and remained so through St.Luke’s subsequent successful career.

Old-line managers might argue that what’s good for a small, fast-growing creative business, full (they assume) of zanies, isn’t good for General Motors. They would be wrong. Many aspects of St.Lukeism are reflected all over the corporate world. At Nestle (as stodgily Swiss a company as ever was), new CEO Peter Brabeck glories in being conservative, evolutionary and not revolutionary. Yet three years ago he ripped apart the Vevey headquarters on Lake Geneva in ways that resonate at St.Lukes:

“Everyone had closed, individual offices. Walking through the halls, you wouldn’t see anything – no people, no products. It was almost like we had something to hide…We made the whole building transparent. We knocked down all the walls and put in glass. People still have offices, but everyone can see each other”.

Brabeck’s reasons are instructive. The modern leviathan, just like little St.Luke’s, wants to put put customers and products first, which can’t be done unless people “see each other and talk all the time” about their products and customers. The CEO told the Harvard Business Review about making individual offices smaller, creating spaces where people could meet and talk. The sixth floor, too, was transformed with a permament product exhibit, tasting kitchens, and a meeting-and-talking coffee-bar.

More revolutionary still, “We went as far as installing rooms like those you would find in the homes of our typical customers…a teenager’s room, with music playing, posters of rock stars on the walls, and candy wrappers on the floor…a kitchen of a small apartment, shared by two people, showing how many of our culinary products are used”. These sober moguls have realised that managers’ own behaviour has a profound impact on how the company behaves towards customers, and have acted accordingly.

The unusual element is the deliberate action, and not the realisation. Focussing on customers and their needs has been preached by every guru and honoured, in the breach rather than the observance, by every major company. Under the pressure of over-supplied and highly competitive markets (few more so than Nestle’s), functional organisations have become obsolete, abandoned in favour of organising round the product. From there, the jump to organising the business round the customer – a satisfied one, of course – is a logical step: but not an easy one.

The difficulty arises partly because there is an intermediate step of vital importance. Commonsense suggests strongly that dissatisfied employees will not create a satisfied customer. Research by Sears, the US retail conglomerate, has discovered that a 5 unit favourable change in employee attitudes towards the company and the job drives a 1.3 unit increase in “customer impresson” which drives a 0.5% gain in sales. So virtue is more than its own reward.

Even without this statistical encouragement, companies have been adopting more progressive policies towards their “human resources”. Upward appraisal St.Lukes style, for instance, is now fairly common, while flat structures are praised as much as hierarchical ones are deplored. Employee (though far from equal) ownership has been encouraged by governments. Few employees below the top influence their own pay directly, but rewards are now commonly linked to individual as well as unit or company results. And you will hear stolid directors speaking in favour of “fun” – creating situations in which people actually enjoy their work.

That’s much easier in a Silicon Valley superstar, like AMD. This microprocessor company, a perpetual underdog to Intel, stimulated its employees to fight the good fight with lavish employee parties, at one of which 4,000 people enjoyed rock bands and lavish food and drink, racking up a bill of $750,000. Fun, indeed. But the lesson is serious and widely followed: if you want to achieve success (and all managers do), celebrate success. Parties big and small are ways in which senior managers can express thanks and encourage further effort – and at the company’s expense.

Celebrations also symbolise the belief that employees at all levels are indispensable contributors to corporate achievement – a fact that has become increasingly relevant and apparent with the rise of the knowledge worker. People (or their egos) need pampering if you depend on their creativity. One software ace, in fact, was considered so indispensable that his employer, hearing that this eccentric genius loathed open-plan offices, constructed a traditional office in the middle of the open floor – just to keep him happy.

Some people dislike all offices. Here the IT revolution has boosted an already growing trend towards letting workers stay at home, at least some of the time. If they can be reached swiftly by mobile phone or e-mail, and linked to their office contents via laptop, stay-at-homes are just as available, but presumably more contented. Back at the ranch, another form of contentment is created by team formation and working – and that, too, has mounted as companies operate more and more by “project management” that identifies team members with specific tasks and rewards.

All these powerful trends have long been backed by the theories of management gurus, ranging from the sage Peter Drucker to the ebullient Tom Peters. Management ractice always lags far behind theory. But practice also runs far ahead of management’s own awareness of what’s rally going on. Thus individual managers led the PC revolution by buying Apple IIs under the pretence that they were typewriters. Similarly, today, companies whose directors have no e-commerce strategies are actually moving towards internet-based platforms. Each small step forward makes blatant good sense: taken together, they will transform management .

You can justify BT’s intranet, if necessary, by its replacement of a hard-copy directory, saving £900,000 annually in printing costs alone. But what value can you place on being able to locate any employee at any time, together with details of his or her work and that of the department? Or on enabling employees at the R&D facility to call up a moving picture of the traffic outside to check whether it’s worth leaving yet? Or showing them how near the next bus is to their stop?

Intranets can, of course, do vastly more important tricks, like giving employees full information about employment and training opportunites. Unisys is only one example of a company which operates an internet (or rather intranet) university. More important still: the internet encourages and facilitates better communication in every direction – upwards, downwards, sideways and outside. E-mail combines with intrarnets, extranets, teleconferencing, etc.to further all kinds of cooperative work and information-sharing. This is the “Digital Nervous System” which Bill Gates uses at Microsoft and (naturally) wishes the whole world to adopt.

That may very well happen, much to the delight of the gurus who have been preaching the case for open-door, open-plan, open-mind management, with flat, democratic structures and shared visions. But would a visitor from the corporate past, a Rip van Winkle who had missed all these goings-on for many years, notice much real difference inside corporate head offices? He would instantly spot the proliferation of PC monitors, of course (and marvel at their relative absence on the most senior desks). But he would quickly find that “command and control” (or “order and obey”) still dominates most cultures, and determines the corporate structure – even physically.

Why, for example, is top management so often and so literally on top? It can’t be because its members enjoy a longer elevator journey to their work on the topmost floor. The traditional locations symbolises supremacy and forces other employees to waste up-and-down time. Honda’s leaders many years ago saw the folly of this tradition, and located themselves in the middle of the building. What’s more, top managers, to facilitate discussion and interchange, all shared round tables in an open office. At Intel, chairman Andy Grove moved quite recently from an office to occupy a cubicle, like everybody else (you can inspect Grove’s 8 ft by 9 ft pad via a 360-degree tour on the corporate website).

Anyone who has read the hard-driving Grove’s books will know that his move wasn’t inspired by soft-hearted democratic notions. He simply thought that the new set-up would be more effective. That’s the true key to what has led business, sometimes slowly, sometimes fast, in the St.Luke’s and Silicon Valley direction: the knowledge that working conditions exert a significant influence on individual and group performance. Just as satisfying employees ultimately satisfies customers, so improving the quality of life at work improves work.

Functional factors sometimes drive in the opposite direction. The returning Rip van Winkle would surely have been amazed by one brand-new aspect of business life: the City dealing room, with its rows of desks, batteries of screens, flashing communication boards and endlessly used telephones. These are the latter-day equivalent of the now vanished “bullpens” – the gigantic spaces where people like insurance clerks worked in long rows of identical desks (the system immortalised in the Billy Wilder/Jack Lemmon film, The Apartment). The dealers almost deserve their astronomical pay for putting up with the dire conditions.

People’s rising expectations of their employers, however, have helped to make paying mere lip-service to the gurus of modern management less and less tenable. When the staid Swiss of Nestle start imitating the wild ways of Silicon Valley, the writing for the old order is plainly on the wall. And a good thing, too.