Can We Learn To Be Wise?

 

Half an hour on the phone with Professor Mike Thompson and my mind is racing with big ideas of the ‘self’, ‘spirituality’ and ‘stewardship’. 

 

A management theorist, Professor Thompson is currently the Director of the Centre for Leadership and Responsibility at the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS).  This department falls under the umbrella of ‘Corporate Governance’, an area that has ballooned in the wake of the ‘Financial Crisis’ and the resulting concern about poor oversight at the helm of so many financial institutions.

 

Professor Thompson has multiple degrees as well as hands-on business experience of running a sustainable branding agency and a toy retailer, setting up the Hub (London’s first flexible office space) and advising a varied mix of entrepreneurs and corporate managers.  

 

But his passion for helping others, whether business students or business leaders, is what Professor Thompson says he enjoys the most. He likes to “help complex people and complex organisations understand more about wisdom”, also the theme of a book he’s just edited - “Wise Management in Organisational Complexity” - due to be published next month. 

 

Wisdom, Professor Thompson reminds us, is different to knowledge. Many knowledgeable people often make unwise choices – he cites Lance Armstrong’s web of doping deceit or Raj Rajaratnam’s securities fraud (the NYC hedge fund manager sentenced to 11 years imprisonment), as two examples of the vulnerabilities of the very smart.  

 

Professor Thompson’s more specific definition is that “wisdom is the practice of insight by an individual based on knowledge and perception which results in disinterested and just judgments that are respected by others”.

 

It is in this context – an insightful individual making judgments respected by the outside world - that Professor Thompson teaches his MBA students to become wiser leaders. Through pragmatic and real-life case studies (ranging from corporate finance fiascos to airline sex scandals) he encourages students to think of themselves as tomorrow’s ‘wise’ leaders and reflect on how they might react in situations of fraud, whistle-blowing and board politics.  

 

MBA students are self-selecting ambitious leaders of the future and Professor Thompson challenges them to consider “who are you becoming when you embark on a career that may lead to you becoming a CEO of a business?”

 

And whilst you’re embarking on that career, are you becoming someone that you’re not? The gap between who we really are and the suit we wear, “The Suited Monk” is a motif that Professor Thompson believes will be commonplace in Europe soon. Coined by one of his business partners, Raf Adams, the Suited Monk is now the topic of hundreds of self-discovery workshops across China. 

 

Underpinned by the simple idea that we have an ego of social identity (the ‘suit’) as well as a sense of whom we really are inside (the ‘monk’), Raf Adams warns of the stress caused when the suit and the monk diverge.  

 

It’s a theme rooted in ancient Greek philosophy as well as the modern psychology of Freud and Jung, not to mention numerous coffee-table flicks from ‘The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari’ to ‘The Alchemist’ – we all want to discover our inner self nowadays! 

 

Professor Thompson feels that it’s an essential part of the MBA curriculum and that learning to manage stress between our inner and outer selves is important in management.  He asserts that if you adopt the role of an observer in a crisis situation you can make better decisions. Here are some of his other practical tips:

It is this power of observation that has arguably led Professor Thompson on his, somewhat unconventional, career journey. He believes his career has been “determined by my sense of finding out who I am as a person and watching the way that life and the universe presents opportunities”.

 

He admits to being a “maverick” and claims to have only ever applied for one job. He’s worked for a fun mixture of organisations ranging from the UK's biggest independent toy retailer “The Entertainer” to the European Spirituality in Economic Society (SPES) forum. 

 

At SPES, Professor Thompson was involved in research looking at the spiritual identity of the individual within the complex economic environment we live in. His work at SPES focused on trying to counter-balance our economic sense of wellbeing versus our inner sense of spirituality. Moving to CEIBS, his most recent academic posting, Professor Thompson has shifted his research area to a wider exploration of ‘wisdom’ and what it really means to the individual and to managers. 

 

Perhaps those most in need of wise thinking are aspiring entrepreneurs, the fastest growing segment of CEIBS students – as many as 1/3 of Professor Thompson’s class would like to set up their own companies after their MBA. China poses an attractive backdrop, with plenty of opportunities to raise capital and innovative in a growing market. 

 

Professor Thompson feels that entrepreneurs have the freedom to make a personal difference in the world, something that’s not easy in a big company. He believes people find it hard to ‘self-actualise’ (hence the propensity for Suited Monks) in corporate life.

 

But not everyone can be an entrepreneur, says Professor Thompson, who would not describe himself as one. Having worked closely with risk takers – Raf Adams (who built an entire company around a book) or Dean Sanders (the founder of GoodBrand) to name a couple – he believes that entrepreneurs possess a “really unique DNA dynamic, the instinct to take an opportunity and invest when other people haven’t seen an opportunity – or other people are full of too many ‘rational’ reasons not to do something…”

 

However, Professor Thompson thinks entrepreneurs do need the right people around them to be successful and he’s observed how they tend to have a trusted group who walk with them: “wise and respected stewards who call the entrepreneur to account”.  

 

This ‘maverick’ management professor enjoys being a steward to several entrepreneurs,  whilst dividing his time between China and the UK and between corporate life and academia. We wonder where Mike Thompson’s path of self-discovery will take him next!