Corporate Morality and cultural alignment

The larger the company the more and tighter the rules that are required to do anything. The stereotypical garage start-up with two people rarely needs permission to try something new. The multinational corporation with 100,000 workers scattered over five continents requires forms (on paper) signed by a senior general manager in advance to someone to take a $10 taxi ride.

The rules and governance are required to make sure everyone knows the correct, acceptable thing to do within the culture of the corporation. The more people involved the harder it is to align standards without externalising them into pre-defined processes. The trouble arises since pre-defined processes are generally applied to trivial and obvious things while the important and ambiguous cannot be so simply prescribed. The solution is therefore to boot the decisions up to the food chain - hence dis-empowering the general staff and ensuring that senior managers, who don't actually care about the matter at hand, are too busy to think about what they are doing.

There is a connection here to social media and the control of the message that your company is putting out. If a company is uncertain about how closely the opinions of its staff align with that of the senior management then they will try to make sure that the staff do not say anything publicly that may embarrass the company. The obvious solution is to make sure that the staff ARE aligned with the company goals - a process that, in management-speak, is called 'employee engagement'. When the disconnect between workers and governed [board level managers can be considered the legislative arm of the company] is small, the friction within the company is reduced and things really get moving. When they are not aligned there is a lot of effort wasted in just keeping things together.
But in general people do not change their opinions very easily and engagement can be difficult. How much easier it would be to align corporate goals with the common morality or ethical stance of the staff. Except where the company government which set the corporate goals have a completely different set of morals to the people doing the work.

One obvious consequence of this view is that the hiring policy should be focused on employing people who's opinions and approach align with the company culture. And indeed this this the approach that is starting to filter into the corporate world, especially by companies such as Google.
There are a couple of issues that immediately come to mind:
1) what happens when the companies expressed aims do not align with the real culture? I would think this *should* be rare but I would not be surprised to find that it is fairly common. After all, corporate governors are as likely as the next person to have an incorrect self-image - and culture will follow actions, not expressed intentions (see Google again).
2) If everyone in a company is the same, it really restricts the creative options available. In the extreme it amounts to having only middle-aged married white men on the board. There is a single, constantly re-enforced, point of view which leads to a massive corporate myopia.

Cargo Cult Management

Actually observing the management style of some of the people I have worked for recently brought to mind the idea of Cargo Cult Management - which I think I'll coin (if no-one has already done so before me).
This is management by the book: saying the right thing ("thanks for that valuable input") and doing the right thing ("I appreciate your effort over the weekend") according to the latest management treatise doing the rounds. Be it '7 Habits' or 'Who moved my cheese' these people are following the prescriptive advice without actually understanding where it comes from. I won't make any direct comment on the books themselves except to say that there seem to be an awful lot which flash in and out of fashion like an old fluorescent tube.
Commonly the followers of this management style are ex-technical people who are deliberately trying to be leaders. Sadly, many of them were better leaders when they weren't trying to be managers; when they weren't trying to live up to some imaginary standard.
On the other hand, there are a great many senior managers - who should know better - who come up with Mission Statements and Visions etc. These can useful tools to bind a team and engage employees. But something whipped up on a weekend junket is not going to engage those people who had to stay at work and keep the engines ticking over while you live it up at a 5 star resort. A good vision emerges from the views and goals of the team. A good leader develops it in conjunction with his staff, not isolated from them. It needs to be relevant and contextual to everyone who is supposed to sign up to it - something they can relate to and aspire to. It does not contain the word "Synergy".
Leadership is not prescriptive (or proscriptive). It varies according to the people in your team and the work that they are doing. It does not come out of a book.
On the other hand 'fake it until you make it' does work - just be prepared for people to laugh at your attempts along the way; and don't believe everything you read.

Learning and understanding

In the last post I mentioned that I seem to learn things differently to most people. I found this description which seems to sum it up. I have always found it easier to get things straight in my own mind if I imagine describing them to others. It was something that I used to do mentally while out running as a teenager - a form of mediation.
One immediate consequence that occurs to me would be that this should also make one a better teacher but I am not sure this worked for me. While I have done quite of bit of teaching (tutoring/lecturing/instruction whatever you want to call it), I am not certain that I am particularly good at it. Once I understand the concept and can explain it to my own satisfaction, I have too little patience with others that have not yet caught on. I think my wife can probably vouch for this :-)
In terms of learning, I suppose I consider the approach of  'do more and more problems until you become familiar with the way of solving it' to be a bit brute force. It is hammering the information into the students minds and holding it there until it stops falling out. I prefer a little more finesse and try to work out how the technique or information fits with what I already know, perhaps adjusting mental models along the way, until there is a space to place the learnings where it will take root.
I am sure that good teachers approach things this way - although I haven't actually thought about it until recently so I haven't taken notice about how I was taught. However, it does require the teacher to understand the topic *in depth* themselves before trying to pass it on. It also requires the student to be willing and able to adjust their mental view of the world to incorporate the new knowledge.
Perhaps I can see why it is not such a common approach.