“I don’t work in a startup,” writes Prof. Louis Menand in “The Life Biz” (New Yorker, 28 March 2016). He continues, “I work in a brick-and-mortar university, one of the most institutionally conservative workplaces in the world outside North Korea. But my colleagues and I all value flexibility and innovation. We are against routine thinking and rote learning. We teach our students to think outside the box and to be comfortable with failure. We stress the importance of teamwork and interaction; we seek to have our students take ownership of the classroom and to insure that they have a psychologically safe space in which to discuss their ideas. We want them to be smarter, faster, better. If someone said, “Sounds like you’re running a startup,” most of us would be quite offended.”
Confession: university = institutionally conservative workplace = North Korea is exactly the kind of witty academic reasoning that appeals to me, especially at the tail end of a long school year.
For those who are curious about The Life Biz, it is a review of Charles Duhigg’s newest book, “Smarter Faster Better: The Secret of Being Productive in Life and Business.” While Menand doesn’t challenge the book’s core advice concerning productivity (“Does anybody think it’s unwise to be lean, nimble, and innovative?“), he cuts it down to size by comparing it with other books in this genre (Samuel Smiles published “Self-Help” in 1859), and he notes the ease with which academia absorbs values from the surrounding culture (“We didn’t consciously adopt these values [wanting our students to be smarter, faster, better] from the contemporary workplace. But we have internalized them from the general culture“).
Perhaps most important of all, Menand advises us to put some distance between ourselves and whatever lifestyle is being promoted by the latest generation of management theorists. “It’s not surprising that every era has a different human model to suit a different theory of productivity, but it is mildly disheartening to realize how readily we import these models into our daily lives. … Does becoming a more productive worker make you a better human being?”
