Bear's Poem

I recently finished the book The Junction Boys by Jim Dent.  Honestly, I have mixed feelings about the story.  The book tells the story of legendary college football Paul "Bear" Bryant's first season as head coach at Texas A&M University in 1954.  He had recently left a successful head coaching stint at the University of Kentucky, where he had coached for eight seasons with an overall record of 60-23-5, finishing in 1950 as the champions of the Southeastern Conference and defeating the number one ranked Oklahoma Sooners in the Sugar Bowl that year.  The team finished his last season at Kentucky with a record of 7-2-1.  

The Texas A&M head coaching position was a huge step down.  He inherited a team that finished tied for last place in the Southwestern Conference with an overall record of 4-5-1.  The book tells the story of Coach Bryant's preseason training camp that was held in the small Texas town of Junction.  He wanted to hold his camp away from the media and away from the Texas A&M alumni.  The camp started with 115 players, but only a small handful (barely enough to field a football team) lasted through the 10 grueling days of "two-a-day" practices (I use the quotes because practices would last several hours and often into the night).  Players would literally try to escape from camp in the middle of the night by sneaking away and walking to the local bus station.  Players practiced despite being severely injured.  The coaching staff wouldn't let the players drink water during practice.  One player almost died from heat stroke.

By the end, the players had earned Coach Bryant's respect.  The team would finish the 1954 season with an overall record of 1-9.  The team greatly improved in subsequent seasons, winning the Southwestern Conference championship following the 1956 season.  Bryant left Texas A&M after the 1957 season for the head coaching job at his alma mater, the University of Alabama, where he would coach for the next 25 years, becoming the all-time leader in total wins (323) and national championships (6).  And yet, when it was all said and done, Coach Bryant would say that the 1954 1-9 Texas A&M team was his favorite.

Admittedly, the ends don't always justify the means, though Coach Bryant would clearly disagree on this point.  I will also say that Coach Bryant wasn't alone in restricting access to water during football practices.  Most coaches felt that letting the players drink water would make them "soft" (and surprisingly, despite all we know about heat stroke, that sentiment didn't change until all that long ago).  

What I do admire about Coach Bryant is that he didn't just hold his players to a high standard.  He also held himself to a high standard.  The book ended with a poem that Coach Bryant apparently kept with him and read almost every day.  The poem was written by Heartsill Wilson and is called "The Beginning of a New Day."  

I think the sentiment of the poem says a lot about how Coach Bryant led his life.  Here is the poem:

This is the beginning of a new day.

God has given me this day to use as I will.

I can waste it or use it for good.

What I do today is very important

because I am exchanging a day of my life for it.

When tomorrow comes, this day will be gone forever,

leaving something in its place I have traded for it.

I want it to be a gain, not a loss—good, not evil.

Success, not failure, in order that I shall not regret

the price I paid for it.

Incidentally, Paul Bryant was nicknamed "Bear" because of something that happened when he was a teenager.  He went to the Lyric Theatre in his hometown of Fordyce, Arkansas where anyone who was willing to wrestle a bear and last a full minute would win a dollar (which was a lot of money back then).  Bryant wrestled the bear, but the owner and the bear escaped without paying. As the University of Alabama put it, "He didn’t get the buck but he got a nickname."

The end of bureaucracy?

I wrote a post this past November about Future Shock by Alvin Toffler (see the post, "Future Shock").  Toffler first coined the term "future shock" in an article "The future as a way of life" in Horizon magazine in 1965.  He used the term in this context "to describe the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time."  That change can be technological, cultural, or social in nature.  He wrote, "If agriculture is the first stage of economic development and industrialism the second, we can now see that still another stage - the third - has suddenly been reached."

As Toffler described it, society was (at least at that time of his book) just entering an entire new period or age, which he called the super-industrial society, which others have similarly labeled, the Information Age, post-industrial society, and post-modernism.  A post-industrial society has a number of important and defining characteristics, which include:

1. The economy undergoes a transition from the production of goods to the provision of services.

2. Knowledge becomes a valued form of capital.

3. Through technological advancements (e.g. automation) and globalization, both the value and importance of manual labor decline, while at the same time the need for professional knowledge workers (e.g. engineers, scientists, software developers, analysts) increases.

Toffler predicted that the transition to the super-industrial society would occur much quicker than similar transitions of the past.  Whereas previous generations had experienced gradual transformation over time, the newer generations growing up in modern society were facing constant, rapid shifts in everything from family life to work to values (which is why those living through this rapid period of change would be subject to "future shock").  Toffler further suggested three key features of the super-industrial society - transience, novelty, and diversity.  

Toffler used the word transience to describe the impermanence and shortened lifespan of all things in the super-industrial society.  He said, "We are moving swiftly into the era of the temporary product, made by temporary methods, to serve temporary needs...Transience is the 'new temporariness' in everyday life...It results in a mood, a feeling of impermanence."  He used the word novelty to describe the unceasing (i.e. constant) introduction of new things - technology, lifestyles, and social arrangements.  He said, "The future will unfold as an unending succession of bizarre incidents, sensational discoveries, implausible conflicts, and wildly novel dilemmas."  Finally, Toffler referred to diversity as the multiplicity of choices available in work, lifestyle, consumption, and identity.  He further wrote that when all three - transience, novelty, and diversity - converge, "we rocket the society toward an historical crisis of adaptation.  We create an environment so ephemeral, unfamiliar, and complex as to threaten millions with adaptive breakdown.  This breakdown is future shock."

The management scholar Warren Bennis first coined the term adhocracy in his 1968 book, The Temporary Society: What is Happening to Business and Family Life in America Under the Impact of Accelerating Change.  Toffler further popularized the term in his book Future Shock, which came out just two years later.  Both Bennis and Toffler felt that the acceleration of change that we are experiencing in society, both then and certainly now, doesn't lend itself to classic bureaucracy.  Rather, adhocracy describes a more flexible, adaptable, and informal organizational structure without bureaucratic policies or procedures.  Toffler wrote, "If it was Max Weber who first defined bureaucracy and predicted its triumph, Warren Bennis may go down in sociological textbooks as the man who first convincingly predicted its demise and sketched the outlines of the organizations that are springing up to replace it."

Bureaucracies - at least according to Bennis and Toffler - are rigid, hierarchical, slow-moving, and centralized (in regards to power and authority), which means that they are best suited to stable, unchanging environments.  Adhocracies, on the other hand, are temporary, flexible, and adaptive.  They place an emphasis on creativity, innovation, and rapid decision-making through experimentation.  Whereas bureaucracies are strictly hierarchical, decision-making in an adhocracy is team-based, collaborative, and decentralized (can anyone say, "Deference to Expertise" or "Pushing Authority to Information"?).  Toffler believed that an adhocracy was essential for on an organization to succeed in a fast-moving, rapidly evolving super-industrial society.

All that being said, as Martin Reeves, Edzard Wesselink, and Kevin Whitaker at the Boston Consulting Group point out in their essay, "The end of bureaucracy, again?", the bureaucracy remains the dominant paradigm even now, almost sixty years after Warren Bennis and Alvin Toffler predicted the end of bureaucracy.  A number of management experts have proposed alternative paradigms, and in many cases, organizations have tried to re-structure around these alternative paradigms - see for example Frederic Laloux's teal organization, Brian Robertson's holacracy, or the concept of self-managed teams.  While attractive in principle, few organizations have successfully adopted these different models.  Reeves, Wesselink, and Whitaker suggest that the solution is somewhere in the middle.  The organizations that will be most successful, both now and in the future, will have elements of both the classic bureaucracy and adhocracy.  What that organizational structure will look like is not currently known.  Reeves, Wesselink, and Whitaker write, "The exact shape of these new models is still undetermined, but enterprising leaders are currently developing them."  Referring to the teal organization, holacracy, and others, they go on to admit, "We can see hints of a revolution that will likely affect all companies and sectors eventually."

So, are we about to see the end of bureaucracy as we know it?  Probably not.  But we will certainly see the continuing evolution of different organizational models and paradigms for many years to come.  Survival in this VUCA world will depend upon it.