Guru_ James March _ the Economist

4/24/2014 Guru: James March | The Economist

http://www.economist.com/node/14099644 1/4

Jul 24th 2009

Guru

James March

James March (born c

1928) is the gurus' guru, a man who once came second in just

such a poll to the incomparable Peter Drucker (Harvard Business

Review, December 2003; seearticle). An unostentatious academic

who spent most of his life on the faculty of Stanford University,

described by Harvard Business Review as a polymath whose career has

encompassed numerous disciplines he has taught courses

on subjects as diverse as organisational psychology,

behavioural economics, leadership, rules for killing people,

friendship, decision-making, models in social science,

revolutions, computer simulation and statistics. A polymath

indeed.

He is best known for his work on the behavioural theory of

organisations, working at one time with Herbert Simon

(see article), the definer of the idea of satisficing, with whom he

wrote a classic book, Organisations. In this, and in the book

he wrote with Richard Cyert, he developed a theory about the

boundedness of managers' behaviour. Just as consumers go

for the satisfactory rather than the best decision when

purchasing, so managers go for the less-than-rational decision

9Like



The protections forthe imagination areindiscriminate. Theyshield bad ideas aswell as good onesand there are manymore of the formerthan the latter. Mostfantasies lead usastray, and most ofthe consequences ofimagination forindividuals andindividualorganisations aredisastrous.

Related items

Guru: Kenichi Ohmae

Jul 17th 2009

Guru: C. Northcote

Parkinson

Jul 10th 2009

Guru: Taiichi Ohno

Jul 3rd 2009

when on the job, because they are necessarily restricted by

human and organisational limitations.

In a more recent paper, which he

entitled The Hot Stove Effect,

after Mark Twain's point that cats

who learn to avoid hot stoves

learn to avoid cold ones too,

March warned that the way in

which we learn to reproduce

success results, inevitably, in a

bias against both risky and novel

alternatives.

John Padgett, a professor at the

University of Chicago, wrote in

the journal Contemporary Sociology that

Jim March is to organisation

theory what Miles Davis is to jazz

March's influence, unlike that of any of his

peers, is not limited to any possible subset of

the social science disciplines; it is pervasive.

March has also written seven books of poetry

and made a film (called Don Quixote's

Lessons for Leadership). His background

notes to the film include a short prose poem:



Guru: Herbert Simon

Mar 20th 2009

Guru: Peter Drucker

Oct 17th 2008

Related topics

Harvard Business Review

Quixote reminds us

That if we trust only when

Trust is warranted, love only

When love is returned, learn

Only when learning is valuable,

We abandon an essential feature of our humanness.

His love of language has led him to create

some colourful metaphorsthe garbage-can

theory of organisational choice, for instance,

which defines an organisation as a collection of choices

looking for problems; issues and feelings looking for decision

situations in which they might be aired; solutions looking for

issues to which they might be the answer; and decision-

makers looking for work. Problems and solutions flow in and

out of the garbage can. Which problems get attached to which

solutions is largely a matter of chance.

Notable publications

With Simon, H., Organisations, John Wiley & Sons, 1958;

2nd edn, Blackwell, 1993

With Cyert, R., A Behavioural Theory of the Firm, Prentice

Hall 1963; 2nd edn, Blackwell Business, 1992

A Primer on Decision Making, Free Press, New York, and

Maxwell Macmillan International, Oxford, 1994

The Pursuit of Organisational Intelligence, Blackwell, 1999

More management gurus



This profile is adapted from The Economist Guide to

Management Ideas and Gurus, by Tim Hindle (Profile

Books; 322 pages; 20). The guide has the low-down

on more than 50 of the world's most influential

management thinkers past and present and over 100

of the most influential business-management ideas. To buy

this book, please visit our online shop.

Documents

Guru_ James March _ the Economist