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Cargo Cult (background from Wikipedia).

A cargo cult appears in tribal societies in the wake of interaction with technologically advanced, non-native cultures. Focused on obtaining the material wealth of the advanced culture through magical thinking, religious rituals and practices, the cargo cult believes the wealth was intended for them by theirdeities and ancestors.

“The most widely known period of cargo cult activity…was in the years during and after World War II. First, the Japanese arrived with a great deal of unknown equipment, and later, Allied forces also used the islands in the same way. Manufactured clothing, medicine, canned food, tents, weapons, and other useful goods arrived in vast quantities to equip soldiers. Some of it was shared with the islanders who were their guides and hosts. With the end of the war, the airbases were abandoned, and cargo was no longer being dropped.

In attempts to get cargo to fall by parachute or land in planes or ships again, islanders imitated the same practices they had seen the soldiers, sailors, and airmen use. They carved headphones from wood and wore them while sitting in fabricated control towers. They waved the landing signals while standing on the runways. They lit signal fires and torches to light up runways and lighthouses.

Cargo Cult Science.

In his 1974 Caltech commencement address, Richard Feynman compared examples of modern “science” to cargo cults, and called the phenomenon cargo cult science.  As I read the text of Feynman’s address again this weekend, I couldn’t help but to think of the similarities between what he was describing and so much of what I have seen and read in modern business management.

Cargo Cult [business] Management.

Why are most of the meetings you attend so worthless?  Perhaps those in leadership positions are themselves subject to the same thing from their managers and are simply replicating the same behavior?  ”It works for him and he is the CxO, so if I do it I will be CxO someday?”  Why do so many presentations contain so much content yet so little information?  In my experience, professionals are trying to fit the “proven” formula within the company (e.g., executive summary, lots of detailed text and charts to show you how smart you are, and a conclusion).  ”Jack does it that way and he’s successful, right?”  Trust me on this — the formula sucks.  Try telling a story instead.  Why do leaders hold so many all-hands meetings, yet neither inspire anyone nor communicate a byte of new information?  They are likely doing what they think other good managers do, based on some vague association they gleaned from an MBA case study, a business book, or even a story about Jack Welch on the news?  This is almost never the result of a single manager, but more often an organizational cancer which will eventually prove malignant.

Hit the BUSINESS section of your local bookstore for insights into why cargo cult management runs so rampant — it’s hard to find authors that understand the difference between causation and correlation.  Jim Collins’ Built to Last and Good to Great are two of the biggest piles of cargo cult crap out there — oh, and best sellers.  In Good to Great, Collins and his team of “researchers” examined historic stock returns of potentially “great” companies relative to a market index.  The research team took the top historic performers and then narrowed the list down further by looking for only those companies that did much better than their industry peers (e.g., if an entire industry did exceedingly well, the company was dropped).  They compared these “great” companies to companies with lower stock returns which are just “good.”  How did they compare the companies?  By reading news articles and doing interviews and “systematically” coding the results into “strategy, technology, and so forth.”  They then used all of this research to see patterns so that they could tell a story about how any manager could take a company from good to great.  It’s a great story, but would be more appropriately located in the FICTION section of the bookstore. 

What if aerospace engineers employed a similar analytical approach — look at historic data and use induction to find the answers in patterns gleaned from the data?  I’ll bet you that our airplanes would fly about as well as the one in the photo above.  Without the empirical testing (observational) part of the scientific method it’s quite hard to know if what you have is causation or correlation.

Entrepreneurship.

While there are examples of cargo cult entrepreneurship, startups run this way have a dramatically higher probability of running out of money.  Of course, as startups that survive earn the air-cover of a business with momentum they often allow inefficiency and bad management to creep into the system.  Or they were just lucky to begin with.

I believe that the biggest advantage a startup has over a big competitor is intellectual honesty.  Most of the entrepreneurs I know start their own companies or join startups in order to do what they wanted to do at their larger [previous] employers — to do something worthwhile.  Then they finally reach the conclusion that the only way to avoid cargo cult management is to start from the ground up.  This is particularly true of technical professionals who view intellectual honesty as core to their job.  How often do you hear business people poke holes in their own arguments the way engineers do?

Which brings us back to the last line of Feynman’s 1974 address:  

“So I have just one wish for you — the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom.”

Well said.