The Art of Judgment: A Study of Policy Making by Geoffrey Vickers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Aesthetics of Bossiness

Geoffrey Vickers was one of the great thinkers about management in the 20th century. Having left Oxford without a degree in order to enlist, he received the Victoria Cross in WWI, played a key organisational role during WWII, was a senior British civil servant and an advisor to business in Europe and North America,

I met Vickers in 1978 when he spent some time with the Social Systems Science Center at the Wharton School of The University of Pennsylvania. He had developed, quite independent of any academic affiliation, a remarkable theory of decision-making which is presented in the Art of Judgement.

The essential concept of this theory is that of ‘appreciation’, by which he means the ability to understand the real intent, the purpose, of those with whom one works or negotiates. These intentions are more frequently than not unstated. They may even be unconscious on the part of the people involved. Nevertheless such intentions can be discerned and, as it were, brought to the surface to be discussed, and possibly altered.

For Vickers, there are two sorts of managerial decisions: operational decisions that cover the routine tasks, emergencies, and foul-ups that occur in any organisation; and policy decisions which are those that concern the criteria set for operational decision-making. It is these latter decisions in which appreciation is of critical importance.

Vickers recognises, and makes his recognition explicit in the title, that appreciation is an aesthetic activity. That is, it has to do with the choice of the standard by which success, improvement, in short, value is to be measured. Once this criterion is established within a business in its various components, most operational decisions are obvious. When such a criterion is absent, chaos tends to reign.

Establishing a unified criterion of value is not an easy task. I can certainly attest to the almost pathological drive in corporate boardrooms to avoid the articulation much less the discussion of what such criteria might be. Mission statements, strategies, action plans, all tend to become irrelevant when an accountant, or financial theorist establishes some arbitrary criterion by fiat - especially when people then get paid on the basis of it. Enron is the classic example of a company run into the ground by unchallenged measures of value.

Having said that, the world of business and governmental organisation is still catching up with Vickers’s thought. Since he wasn’t an academic he left no ‘school’ to publicise and develop his ideas. Since he was never the chief executive of a large company, he carried little weight with the big publishers of business wisdom. And, I suspect, since he was English, he was too reserved and self-effacing to promote his work. Some of us however remember his genius. Others can discover it still in the Art of Judgment.

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