Contexttual It

LEADERSHIP & MANAGING PEOPLE

Contextual Intelligence

by Tarun Khanna

FROM THE SEPTEMBER 2014 ISSUE

W

hether as managers or as

academics, we study business

to extract learning, formalize

it, and apply it to puzzles we wish to solve.

That’s why we go to business school, why we

write case studies and develop analytic

frameworks, why we read HBR. I believe

deeply in the importance of that work: I’ve

PHOTOGRAPHY: STUDIO TOMÁS SARACENO, 2013

ARTWORK: TOMÁS SARACENO, POETIC COSMOS OF THE BREATH,

2013, HONG KONG, CHINA

spent my career studying business as it is

practiced in varied global settings.

But I’ve come to a conclusion that may surprise you: Trying to apply management practices

uniformly across geographies is a fool’s errand, much as we’d like to think otherwise. To be

sure, plenty of aspirations enjoy wide if not universal acceptance. Most entrepreneurs and

managers agree, for example, that creating value and motivating talent are at the heart of

what they do. But once you drill below the homilies, differences quickly emerge over what

constitutes value and how to motivate people. That’s because conditions differ

enormously from place to place, in ways that aren’t easy to codify—conditions not just of

economic development but of institutional character, physical geography, educational

norms, language, and culture. Students of management once thought that best

manufacturing practices (to take one example) were sufficiently established that processes

merely needed tweaking to fit local conditions. More often, it turns out, they need radical

reworking—not because the technology is wrong but because everything surrounding the

technology changes how it will work.

It’s not that we’re ignoring the problem—not at all. Business schools increasingly offer

opportunities for students and managers to study practices abroad. At Harvard Business

School, where I teach, international research is essential to our mission, and we now send

first-year MBA students out into the...