Methodology or Mythology?
Recently a friend told me a funny story about a presentation she had just heard. The presenter, working from a script and maybe a little nervous, kept misreading “methodology” as “mythology.”
We had a laugh over this, but the really funny part — scary-funny, not “ha ha” funny — is that a lot of companies that think they have a solid methodology for, I don’t know, scheduling flights in and out of major hub airports, in fact have something closer to a mythology about how their business is supposed to work. In some fantasy world.
Anthropologists will tell you that myths have a vital role to play in the formation of cultures. Founding myths can be useful to companies, too: just consider how much pride HP and Agilent take in the (factual, but mythologized) story of Mr. Hewlett and Mr. Packard working in that famous Palo Alto garage.
But those myths are rooted in the past, just like the folk stories from different cultures that explain where the oceans came from, or how the leopard got its spots. If we try to live by unsubstantiated myths in the way we do work from day to day . . . well, it hurts when those illusions crumble.
What unhelpful myths do you see affecting the business world?
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(The image is the cover of the New York Review Books edition of D’Aulaires’ Book of Norse Myths, which, if you want my advice, you should go out and buy right-now-this-instant, it’s that good. Especially good if you have a youngster to read it to at bedtime.)
Category: The working life
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Nice article Tim. There are lots of examples of this.
Great post! I don’t know that a mythology is always fictional, although it may not be literally true. I think of mythology as a good way of communicating common values and principles.
Southwest had a mythology of being low-cost, irreverent and scrappy. When a corporate mythology works its leaders display behavior in keeping with it (think of Herb Kelleher’s arm-wrestling match with Kurt Herwald of Stevens Aviation over a tagline). In that case the rank-and-file workers adopt the values and principles implicit in the mythology (be scrappy, have fun).
When a corporate mythology doesn’t work, it’s likely because the leaders don’t act like they believe it. In that case mythology does become fictional.
Just to clarify I read two arguments here. One is the issue of habitual business practices that have become tribal knowledge. And thereby attained the status of mythology about “the way we do things around here”. Examples - well, gee how ’bout the airline, auto, finance and retail industries - “this is our business model” and it works just fine. Obviously each takes 20 layers down, e.g. we make our money on leverage, hub-n-spoke saves total costs, we can’t make money in small/medium cars, customer service is to expensive in retail…
Then there’s higher level mythology about what are our core value, precepts and percepts - how do we think we ought to govern our behavior, intra-company and inter-company relationships, what criteria do we use to make hard decisions, who and what is valuable to us and so forth. You know the whole Campbellian list. I’d argue that that there’s an enormously strong correlation between strong, workable and adaptive values and long-term organizational performance. My ultimate case-in-point being the USMC, but HPQ ain’t bad. And I’d even argue that what Hurd has done is return it to its’ roots. Consider the vaunted strength of Goldman’s culture and what it apparently has done for performance. And contrast that to Citi, et. al.
Great post….and works wonderfully well btw with your Hilbert problem post.