Is Experience Necessary for Insight?

What percentage of management gurus and/or motivational speakers have actual, meaningful management experience?

- Linkedin question

Excerpts from answers:

1
I think what managers are looking for is someone who has the time to focus on an issue, then bring a new view to it without the "distraction" of managing.

2
I have also encountered a number of these people who talk the talk extremely well, but have never really walked the walk. Or, they have walked it poorly.

3
...some are more adept at teaching/observing/coaching/consulting than they are at "doing." Some are better at studying and researcing high performance and then putting those principles into usable and teachable formats than those who actually lead organizations.

4
There are many examples of people with years of experience, but little high value insight.

5
Real world owners of companies turn to consultants to get an outsider's view of within.


A quotation from Samuel Johnson:

You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables.

From a blog:

One of the disadvantages to experience is that it can lead to being too skeptical. It's that "been there, done that" attitude. The problem is, it comes across as being close-minded and not open to change. Phrases like "we tried that and it didn't work", or "that's just a newer version of an old idea" may be true, but they can take the wind out of the sails of creativity and engagement and inhibit our learning.

- From a blog

Measure to Make It Happen

If something is not measured, tracked, and rewarded, it does not get done… however much you emphasize and reinforce it.

Please share your thoughts and comments.

- My question on Linkedin

Excerpt from an answer:

One tack that I would like to bring to attention, though, is the fact that what is measured is often what can be measured. This fact alone often skews priorities and can lead to failure precisely because what can be measured may not be mission critical.

Excerpt from another answer:

I noticed that when we measure some tasks and not others, the unmeasured tasks get much less attention and resources and are completed at a much lesser rate than the measured tasks, regardless of who we assign them to.

Excerpt from the blog of an instructional designer:

... the first thing to be sacrificed at the altar of business is "good". Good is a subjective, an often intangible measure. Fast is measurable... Quality, in spite of all the parameters, remains largely unmeasurable.

 - ID and Other Reflections

Peer Conformance

In the late 1970s, University of Illinois researcher Leann Lipps Birch conducted a series of experiments on children to see what would get them to eat vegetables they disliked. This is a high bar. We're not talking about simply eating more vegetables. We're talking about eating specific vegetables, the ones they didn't like.

You could tell the children you expect them to eat their vegetables. And reward them with ice cream if they did. You could explain all the reasons why eating their vegetables is good for them. And you could eat your own vegetables as a good role model. Those things might help.

But Birch found one thing that worked predictably. She put a child who didn't like peas at a table with several other children who did. Within a meal or two, the pea-hater was eating peas like the pea-lovers.

Peer pressure.

We tend to conform to the behavior of the people around us.

- From a Harvard Business Review blog

Leadership Lesson from Randy Pausch

Pausch did a great job in elucidating the fact that a good leader understands the subtleties of his/her actions and the impact of the responses that are elicited from those actions.

One example of this was, quite simply, a day he had planned to spend with his niece and nephew. He picked them up in a brand new car and his sister gave her kids a stern reminder not to get the car dirty. Randy proceeded to open up a can of pop and poured it on one of the back seats. He then told his companions for the day, that they had nothing to worry about, because the damage had already been done. The kids and Randy had a great day because the focus was on productivity (having fun) and not on avoiding a negative event.

The point he obviously was making, was that just a few words from a leader can either set us up for failure (or tenative thinking, at best), or free-up the person to perform at a high level. In the kids case, they had a high level of fun.

- From a Linkedin discussion