1. AMBITION IS THE LAST REFUGE OF THE FAILURE Oscar Wilde
The Ironic Manager
Richard J Badham
Professor of Management
email richard.badham@mgsm.edu.au .

3. www.ironicmanager.com

4. THE CONTEXT
Desperately seeking ‘Enterprise’ and
‘Engagement’ yet….
• Formal Organizations: taking it out!
– Organisational Esperanto and Emotional
Lobotomy
– Organisational Schizophrenia and Manic
Depression
• Greedy Institutions: forcing it back in!
– McManagement and emotional
engineering
– Branding and the Expressive
Organisation

6. THE IRONIC MANAGER
The IRONIC MANAGER The DELUDED MANAGER
is one who: is one who:
sees the organisational • misunderstands and
•
world for what it is, misrepresents the
organisational world,
• performs ineffectively,
• learns to perform
effectively within it, & and, ultimately,
• finds meaning in this • fails to find meaning in
state of affairs. this state of affairs.
(S)he is the consummate (S)he is the consummate
player, but a ‘serious dupe, whether serious or
player’ . flippant.

7. THINKING!
• ‘Most men would die rather than
think. Many do.’
Bertrand Russell
• ‘The unexamined life is not worth
living for man.”
Socrates

8. THE DELUDED MANAGER
• THE INSTITUTIONAL IMPERATIVE
“In business school I was given no hint of the imperative’s
existence and I did not intuitively understand it when I
entered the business world. I thought then that decent,
intelligent, and experienced managers would automatically
make rational business decisions. But I learned over time
that isn’t so. Instead, rationality frequently wilts when the
institutional imperative comes into play.”
(Warren Buffet, 1989)
• THE INSTRUMENTAL FALLACY
“Someone who is a victim, or an example, of the
instrumental attitude to management sees the people under
him as the instruments with which he has to carry out his
job, to execute his plans. Each has a separate role,
perhaps a separate skill, and it his his job as manager to
use it as a good carpenter uses his saw and chisel and
plane and drill to turn the idea in his head into a final result.
In the same way he sees himself as one of the instruments
of his superior manager, being applied to the larger task as
he applies his subordinate to the smaller one.”
(Anthony Jay, 1971: 32-33)

9. THE DELUDED MANAGER
• The religion of rationality
• The irrationality of rationality
• The revenge of the non-rational

11. THE IRONIC GAZE: viewing or perceiving
….one who sees the world for what it is!
• Situational irony
“A condition of affairs or events of a
character opposite to what was, or
might naturally be, expected. A
contradictory outcome of events as
if in mockery of the promise and
fitness of things.”
(Oxford English Dictionary, 1979: 484)

12. THE IRONIC GAZE
• ‘Expecting the unexpected’
• ‘Coping with unintended
consequences’
• ‘Wrestling with ‘paradox’

13. THE IRONIC GAZE: ‘Janusian’ Thinking
• ‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is
the ability to hold two opposed ideas
in mind at the same time and still
retain the ability to function’
F Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack Up, 1936
• ‘The person who can’t ride two
horses doesn’t deserve to be in the
bloody circus’
Former TU leader

15. THE IRONIC PERFORMANCE: acting or practicing
……one who can perform effectively in the world!
• Verbal irony
“A figure of speech in which the intended
meaning is the opposite of that
expressed by the words used; usually
taking the form of sarcasm or ridicule in
which the laudatory expressions are used
to imply condemnation or contempt.”
Socratic irony
•
‘Dissimulation, pretence; esp. in
reference to the dissimulation of
ignorance practiced by Socrates as a
means of confuting an adversary.”
(Oxford English Dictionary, 1979: 483/4)

17. THE IRONIC PERFORMANCE
• Leadership and rhetoric
– Irony and community a virtuoso
performance
– beyond ‘cheerful robots’ and
‘dragons of despair’
• Communication with multiple
audiences
– the ‘Wink’ or ‘I can heartily
recommend the Gestapo to anyone’
(Freud)

19. THE IRONIC TEMPER: living or meaning
….and finds meaning in this state of affairs!
• A disposition, character or philosophic
stance towards the world (an ‘ironist’).
• An observer of situational irony, and a
deployer of verbal and Socratic irony.
• Variously viewed as humane and
liberal or negative and cynical.
• For some, it is an engaged ethos, a
disciplined (‘tempered’) grappling with
practical uncertainty and metaphysical
doubt.
• For others, it is a form of radical
negativity or disengagement, ridiculing
all beliefs and values.

21. THE IRONIC TEMPER
• the ‘sweet spot between arrogance and
despair’
(Kanter, Rosabeth Moss, 2005, Confidence, p.13)
• “Beyond the yellow brick road of naivete
and the muggers lane of cynicism, there is
a narrow path, poorly lit, hard to find, and
even harder to stay on once found. People
who have the skill and perseverance to
take that path serve us in countless ways.
We need more of these people. Many
more.”
(Kotter, John, 1985, Power and Influence, p.xx)

23. THE CONTEXT: Bread and Circuses
• Circuses:
– Principled infidelity and the
sergeant major ethos
• Bread:
– High velocity leadership on the
edge of chaos
– Mediators in a plural world

24. CONCLUSION: SEEING THINGS THROUGH
• Thinking things through
– wrestling with ambiguity and
paradox
• Feeling things through
– coping with ambivalence and
uncertainty
• Acting things through
– winning a contact sport