John C. Beck, Author, Professor and Visionary: Archive

Top five breakthroughs in business education

Twenty-five years ago, I was among a group of Harvard MBA students who presented a petition to the school’s faculty. The proposal which was almost unanimously supported by the students, had the distinction of being rejected by the faculty without a dissenting vote. We weren’t asking for easier grades, or more days off, or better teachers. We wanted more group projects. We all felt we learned...

Aug 18th

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Roger: uniquely individualistic

“I fought against my mother my entire life. I did not want to be – could not be – who she wanted me to be. She was a stunning woman – Miss Kingston Jamaica – and was accustomed to getting her way. Almost any man would do her bidding. Any man, except me. She had two problems on that front with me. First, I was her son – thus, fairly resistant to her charms. Second, I was gay – thus, fairly...

Jul 25th

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BoonLi wants equality

“My mother was never allowed to take the exams to go to college. She never got over that. I’m sure I bore the brunt of her disappointment. I would have never received a scholarship to Oxford without her. Many parents push their kids. But with her, there was a kind of desperation in the pressure. Everyday I felt that if I didn’t study harder, life would never be fair to me. That if...

Jul 20th

Sally does Stability

“Running a farm is a constant cycle of financial ups and downs – fertilizer, equipment and better bulls are very expensive – everything depends on weather and markets. Overlay that with my parents’ natural emotional mood swings and you can understand how I never knew, when I woke up in the morning as a child, if it was going to be a good day or a bad day. It all culminated when my father and...

Jul 11th

Dave relies on Belief

“I suppose all of my priorities in life are actually based on my belief in God. I make my decisions based on what my religion teaches me. WWJD – “what would Jesus do?” is my guiding principle in life. It is the basis of everything.” “Sure, I was in the business world for 30 years and you can get sidetracked a lot during your career. I was a salesman, and a darn good one. In my line of work,...

Jul 9th

Roy and Joy

“Why would I go to work every day if I wasn’t having fun on the job? Wouldn’t I look for something else to do? I’m even busier now that I’m retired than I ever was when I was working, so I need to make sure what I’m doing is more fun than ever. Why wouldn’t I do that?” Sometimes Roy’s questions sound like the careful rhetoric of a preacher. At other times, they come across slightly defensive. ...

Jul 6th

Faye: The Good of Society

“There is nothing in the world that is as important to me as my family. I believe that family will last forever and that kinship bonds that we create on this earth will last with us forever throughout the eternities.” “It would be wrong for me to say that my Heavenly Father isn’t the most important being in my life… of course He is. But I don’t know where I’d be without my husband and my family...

Jun 25th

Chanthol: The Good of Growth

“Why do you keep saying the house is so big?” Chanthol asks with an air of exasperation. “There are much bigger houses in America. Yes, this is big in Cambodia, but nothing like the houses that you have in your country.” “When we have guests or family visiting it is nice to have so much room. But at night, my wife and I often sleep in our daughter’s room. So we can all be close to each other. ...

Jun 18th

Lynn: a life lived for the Good of Life

One of Lynn’s earliest memories is of a casket. Her brother Jimmy had been such an exciting playmate for the three older girls in the family. Then one day with no warning, there was a little tiny casket. Lynn can’t remember Jimmy being sick, but he had been, and she and her sisters ended up all dressed in black. Their playmate was gone. As she grew up, Lynn put that trauma behind her. She...

Jun 15th

Introduction to Eight Great

Good people disagree often — and sometimes violently. This fact bothers me … and not just because of the “violently” part. At a very deep level, it seems irrational that people who are trying to be good would be disagreeing in the first place. In the middle of a disagreement — where I firmly and fundamentally believe that only one option is clearly “correct” — it’s a lot easier to believe that...

Jun 4th

The End of Perfect?

While I was living in arguably the best hotel in Singapore for a year, I mustered my courage, approached the manager and finally told him that I thought there were some things that this hotel and staff could learn from Japanese hoteliers. I expected anger, but I got resignation. He told me: “My friends who own and manage hotels around the world accept that we will never match Japanese hotels in...

Apr 10th

Japan's greatest good: Life

It is hard to say there is one country that necessarily epitomizes a focus on “life” as its Greatest Good. Every country is about the protection and lives of its people. Every society comes into being – at least in part – as a haven where the strong can protect the weak and everyone looks out for each other. So why would I go and choose Japan as a place where the emphasis is more on Life than on...

Mar 12th

The 8 Great and Change (how do we become something...

Maybe I always thought that change was an important component of leadership … I really can’t remember any more. But, I do remember the moment when my current appreciation for the link between the two became really clear to me. For four years as a graduate student, I was a research assistant to John Kotter at Harvard Business School. He was interested in what made leaders into leaders and wrote and...

Feb 21st

What will Egypt become?

For thirty years, the greatest Good of the government of Egypt has been Stability. To preserve the safety and well-being of the country and the region, Hosni Mubarak and his top team have argued against change in these last weeks as they have for decades previously. My research has shown that there are Eight Great Goods that any nation bases its top-level decisions on. There is nuance in every...

Feb 9th

Decisions and the 8 Great Goods

If you examine studies done on organizational culture and decisions, the two are highly correlated. From corporations to government organizations to hospitals to fire fighters, study after study shows that culture has a huge impact on decisions in organizations. Decision-making is the clear realm of the leader in any human group. It is the most explicit role of leadership. Attention will focus on...

Feb 9th

Organizational Culture and the Eight Great Goods

As you can see from the stories about Harvey and Ivan in the post on Attention and Leadership, the focus of a CEO and the organization quickly morphs into culture. But culture is even longer lasting than attention. An individual or an organization can decide to pay attention to something new or different. It is not easy to switch at first because our “attention synapses” have learned to focus...

Jan 18th

Political rhetoric: why we can never be nice, but...

Every tragedy in every society leaves calls for changes in it’s wake: 9-11 changed air travel forever; Kennedy’s assassination changed the way that US presidents interact with the public; the Columbia space shuttle disaster changed the protocol for every subsequent space launch. Congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford’s shooting has everyone asking if there needs to be a change in our national discourse....

Jan 11th

Attention (where we focus)

The Eight Great Goods is all about where we (and our organizations) put attention. This article will make you a better, more focused leader. A good organization is a focused organization — one composed of people who know what they want to achieve and how to get there. A good leader is someone who can help the organization get that focus. Mission statements and Values statements are two tools that...

Jan 7th

ACDC Leadership

We’ve always been pretty damn proud of ourselves for our ability to organize big groups of people to complete a shared task. It is partly what separates us from the animal kingdom. The outputs of our most ambitious big projects have come to be known as the Wonders of the World. Rome ruled the Western World because of its ability to control large armies. Britain dominated the seas and maintained...

Jan 3rd

When Old Guys Tell Young Guys What To Do…

There is something to wisdom — and probably some very good reasons for old people to be in charge and expound on their hard-earned age-old learning. But sometimes we old guys are just wrong. A bunch of old guys in the US Senate right now are trying to block a change in the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy with that same age-old wisdom. (I use the term “guys” advisedly: all the...

Dec 1st

Eight Great Goods - the movie.... →

Want to understand why we misunderstand each other so often and so well? Watch….

Nov 25th

Fun for the whole family this Thanksgiving...... →

Try out this site with family and friends: www.great8it.com My hope is that it will help allay tensions and lead to some really cool discussions. Mostly have fun … and Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Nov 25th

Where higher education HAS to go... →

Nov 20th

Why Obama’s Cool Makes Blood Boil →

Seems like in a crisis we’d all want a leader who keeps a cool head and doesn’t get flustered. We’d want someone who is stoic, strong and can convince us that everything is going to be all right, right? Well… maybe not. In a really interesting study published in 2003 by Emily Butler and her colleagues, a test subject watching gruesome war films was asked to suppress her emotions so that a...

Nov 18th

My ten year old vision for a "phone wallet"... →

Ten years ago I coined the term “phone wallet.” I figured we’d all be paying for everything (in addition to storing family photos, keeping our address books and IDs) with our cell phones. A few attempts have been made at this payment system in Japan, but with a new Android operating system, we may actually see the phone wallet in the US!

Nov 17th

Data show more economic growth when top tax rate...

I was wondering if there is any statistical data to support the notion that the really rich need a lower tax rate to help get economic growth kick started. I found data for both top tax rates and GDP growth at http://www.truthandpolitics.org/top-rates.php and http://www.bea.gov/national/nipaweb respectively. I ran a simple correlation analysis between the highest tax rate and the highest tax...

Nov 15th

True Confessions of an Online Professor

I confess: I believe that online courses may actually be better than those in a classroom. This is not an easy conclusion for someone who has twenty years of classroom teaching experience. The online courses that I’ve led in the last few years take what would normally be a multiple-hour in-class business case discussions and turn them into a week-long online discussion board. I’ve been...

Nov 12th

Oh, for the Privacy of the Old Days ...

People seem really shocked that, what they believe to be, their “private activities and interests” on the internet are being tracked. There is a pretty widely held notion that our inalienable rights to privacy are being trashed by modern technology. What we forget is that for most of human history, a lack of personal privacy was actually the norm. In ancestral villages, if someone was a...

Nov 11th

How can a country composed of individualists be a...

As I’ve been studying the Eight Great Goods for more than a year now, I’ve discovered that not only are there examples of individuals around the world who put each of these eight great goods at the top of their personal lists of priorities in making a decision, but there are good national exemplars of each of the Goods. A nation’s greatest Good A nation’s culture is, of course, a major factor in...

Nov 3rd

How Shall We Be Good?

It is a question we don’t ask often enough. You think we would. Individuals ask it of themselves often. Many religions push us to consider personal good works. And I suppose that we naturally assume that all those individual contributions will add up to a collective good. The problem is that a lot of things that I think are “good” may actually be contradictory to what you think is “good.” ...

Nov 1st

Why Nations Work The Way They Don't

After 20 years of teaching MBA students and executives in eight business schools around the world, I recently took a professorship at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. While the school is based in Singapore, my students are from all over the globe. The national mix is not unlike the mix I had in my business school classes, but the discussions are completely different. It took me a while...

Oct 26th

drew3000 asked: I just read your post on how nations aren't actually competing against one another (even though some governments certainly act as through they do). Very good stuff. I've been reading Richard Wilkinson's "The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better" which points out that Japan has (among the wealthy nations) the lowest disparity between rich and poor,...

Oct 5th

Growth May No Longer Be Enough

A few years ago, I wrote a proposal for a book challenging the long-held notion that economic growth should be the main determinant of business and governmental success. My premise was simple: We live in a finite world. Sooner or later we will run out of sources of growth. Publishers were enthusiastically uninterested. That was in 2004: the world’s economies were recovering from the dot-com...

Oct 4th

One Year Left To Live →

New Year’s Eve When I was 33 years old, I made a new year’s resolution that changed my life. I resolved to live every day of that year as if I only had one year left to live. At first I thought the resolution would be: to live every day as if it was my last. But I’m pretty sure I’d just want to spend the last day of my life just being with friends and family. If they knew it was my last...

Sep 24th

Nations Don’t Really Compete

I recently turned down a job to be the Director of the Asia Competitiveness Institute in Singapore partly because I couldn’t figure out how countries (or regions) are really competing with each other. We have created a false analogy to business. In business, if you make soap and I make soap, we may be competing for the same buyer. But that is business. If I make government, and you make...

Sep 22nd

Honesty Is Such Lonely Word →

My internship at the American Embassy One summer when I was in college, I got a summer internship as the Assistant Systems Manager at the American Embassy in Tokyo. They had a Systems Manager, Mr. Itoh, but he really only spoke Japanese. And since some of the most important people in the Embassy were Americans who didn’t speak Japanese, they needed someone to teach them how to use the new...

Sep 17th

Good versus Good: The Arizona Immigration Law...

Imagine a room full of angry Arizonans discussing SB 1070—you know, the law that says government officials should inquire about the immigration status of any individual they think might be in the country illegally, and opens those officials to criminal penalties and civil lawsuits if they don’t. Some talk about family members lost; some tell of economic hardship, here (US) or there (Mexico); some...

Sep 8th