#Business Analogy 016 - Jim Collins Bus - Full Metal Alchemist - Oceans Eleven - Composition Fallacy & The Soul of Organizations, Businesses & Startups

At any point of time one must have a rough idea about where they want to go and what they want to be!

FULL METAL ALCHEMIST - THE FORBIDDEN HUMAN TRANSMUTATION

The Elric Brothers, Edward Elric and Alphonse Elric are great Alchemists.

They plan to revive their dead mother using their alchemy skills and transmutation abilities. Human Transmutation is forbidden in Alchemy but the kids overcome by the love of their mother, in a desperate attempt to revive their mother start the human transmutation.

They carefully evaluate all the ingredients of a human body to the last ounce.

35 litres of water

20 kgs of carbon

4 litres of ammonia

1.5 kgs of lime

800 gms phosphorous

250 gms salt

100 gms nitre

80 gms sulphur

7.5 gms of Flourine

5 gms of Iron

3 gms of silicon

and 15 trace elements

(Cut some slack, it is an anime i.e. fiction, not real chemistry)

They add all the ingredients into the equation and start the transmutation.

They account for all the elements in the body but they forget the most important ingredient of a human body the SOUL.

This mistake would cost Alphonse his entire body, and Edward loses a hand and a leg.

A soul for a soul, in exchange of a human soul the reaction starts consumes the soul of Alphonse.

The first rule of alchemy is equivalent exchange, you can’t get something without first giving something else of equivalent value in return.

But Edward Elric, in a desperate last move, manages to save the soul of his brother by binding it to an armor nearby the experiment and for this he wagers an arm and a leg, literally.

The brothers revive their mother, but what comes out is a body without a soul, called a HOMUNCULUS - soul less human.

This begs the question - Why are we discussing about fictional characters from Anime?

Full Metal Alchemist, (at least for me) is as good as it gets, as good as ANIME could be made. I was and still am a fanboy of this great Anime.

Though the anime is inconsequential at this point, the mistake that the ELRIC brothers made i.e. assuming that a life is merely the sum of parts i.e. the elements cost them their souls and limbs. The assumption that you can construct life with merely the chemical ingredients is a grave mistake. Life starts with a soul, the soul then builds the rest of the body around it. You cannot start with the physical form!

The order is critical, there is path dependence!

I have seen this same mistake being committed time and again inside organizations, inside startups, inside business.

JIM COLLINS BUS - First the People then the Direction?

Jim Collins in his book Good to Great or in his other works, talks about his theory. Let’s call it JIM COLLIN’S BUS for the lack of imagination.

First Who, Then What—get the right people on the bus—is a concept developed in the book Good to Great.

Those who build great organizations make sure they have the right people on the bus and the right people in the key seats before they figure out where to drive the bus. They always think first about who and then about what. When facing chaos and uncertainty, and you cannot possibly predict what's coming around the corner, your best "strategy" is to have a busload of people who can adapt to and perform brilliantly no matter what comes next. Great vision without great people is irrelevant.

This is absurd out right. Infact this is a recipe for disaster! Finding great people who have no common theme or thread or common goals is like herding a bunch of cats.

No great organization is built by finding people first and then deciding where to go.

The leader should first decide where to go and only then find the people who wish to go there, and are passionate about the goals.

This resembles the folly in thought that matches Elric brothers’ alchemy. The soul first and then the body. Without the soul a body would simply be a HOMONCULUS.

Assembling a team of great people and getting them onto a bus is similar to finding pure metals that form the constituents of a human body and throwing them into the the Alchemy Circle.

The team thus produced using JIM COLLINS BUS, will be nothing more than a HOMONCULUS a soul less machine.

Great Talent without a purpose is a body without a soul or a genius without any passion, a rebel without a cause.

Jim Collins wrote two books, two block buster hits in the business world

BUILT TO LAST & GOOD TO GREAT.

Here is the methodology-

We will observe great companies that stood the test of time i.e. that survived and thrived, old established companies in the stock market and then We will find common traits among these companies and we will then carve them in stone or in business books as 10 commandments of good and great companies.

But both the books aged like fresh milk i.e they rotted to death!

None of the companies that were listed in these business books survived a decade. After the book is published almost all of them perished, the proof lies in the pudding.

No Team should be created without a purpose in mind.

All the team should be aligned with a singular purpose, a common goal which is the driving force and the soul of the team or a company.

I have seen this behaviour not just in big MNCs but also in small startups, where talent is hired not for their motivations or their alignment with the vision of the company but merely for the skills and the experience. This is a recipe for bankruptcy.

So if this isn’t how teams are built then how are teams supposed to be built?

They are supposed to be built with purpose, OCEANS 11 STYLE.

OCEANS 11 - First decide the heist & then assemble the team of specialists

A Master Class of building teams is shown in the OCEAN’S SERIES.

Daniel Ocean is fresh out of jail but this time he wants to do a Heist, yet again.

Of course he has a solid plan but he can’t do it alone.

Breaking into the vault requires careful coordination of 11 steps.

Each step requires an expert, so he goes on a shopping spree to find these 11 experts.

Here are the 11 team members carefully chosen and assembled with the sole purpose of a Heist, to loot three Las Vegas Casinos

1. Danny Ocean (George Clooney) – The mastermind and leader of the group, recently released from prison and planning the heist.

   

2. Rusty Ryan (Brad Pitt) – Danny's right-hand man and co-leader of the group, responsible for training and managing the crew.

   

3. Linus Caldwell (Matt Damon) – The pickpocket and expert at blending in, tasked with crucial sleight-of-hand during the heist.

   

4. Reuben Tishkoff (Elliott Gould) – The wealthy financier who bankrolls the heist due to his grudge against the casino owner.

   

5. Basher Tarr (Don Cheadle) – The munitions expert, skilled in explosives and creating diversions.

   

6. Frank Catton (Bernie Mac) – A casino insider who works as a dealer, providing inside information and access.

   

7. Virgil Malloy (Casey Affleck) – One of the Malloy brothers, the drivers and mechanics. Virgil helps with the logistics and provides distraction.

   

8. Turk Malloy (Scott Caan) – The other Malloy brother, working with Virgil on driving and creating distractions.

   

9. Livingston Dell (Eddie Jemison) – The electronics and surveillance expert, responsible for hacking into the casino's security systems.

   

10. Yen (Shaobo Qin) – A Chinese acrobat and contortionist, also known as "The Amazing Yen," who is small enough to fit into tight spaces, including the casino vault.

    

11. Saul Bloom (Carl Reiner) – The veteran con artist, playing an elderly, wealthy businessman who helps infiltrate the casino.

Well I will not delve into the details of the action heist but here is the lesson,

Daniel Ocean decides the Heist first, and the assembles the team.

He does not assemble the team first and then decide the heist!

This combination of expert makes sense only for this heist, for this casino and for this occassion. Once this heist is over the entire team is disassembled and they go on their own ways.

A new team is recruited again for OCEAN 12, a 12 member team and OCEANS 13, a 13 member team for different heist.

Some of the team members might repeat but no two heists are exactly the same.

DON’T PLACE THE CART BEFORE THE HORSE

JIM COLLINS BUS will soon run into a cliff, since all the experts sitting in the right seats will never agree on any single direction or a consensus, because the team has never been built fit for a purpose, instead it was built based on skill.

Here are a few philosophical dilemmas related to the horse and cart

Do you hire a chef and then decide the menu of the restaurant? Or do you decide the menu first and then search for a good chef that can cook the items in the menu?

Do you hire the orchestra first and then organize the symphony according to their skills or do you decide the symphony and then head hunt for the orchestra?

Would you hire the artists first and then write a script for them or do you write the script and then take auditions for the script?

WHERE IS THE BUS GOING?

Defining & Communicating Purpose with Vision, Mission, Strategy & Roadmap

The most important question that the JIM COLLINS BUS does not care to answer is

“Where is the bus going?”

After some time in the journey every expert will eventually ask.

"AHEM! Where are you taking us?” looking at the CEO in the driver’s seat.

The Driver replies “I was waiting for you to ask that very same question, Let’s park the bus and decide where we want to go”

This takes me back to ALICE IN WONDERLAND

If you don’t know where you are going, then any road will get you there.

So in the JIM COLLINS but all the experts are in the bus and they have no clue where they are going.

How does the CEO define the purpose.

To Define purpose the CEO has some tools at his disposal, motivation, charisma, jargon, metrics, targets and other great stuff used to define bold vision statements and vision statements are some of the tools.

But once the vision and mission statements are defined, the CEO now has to define the strategy!

Strategy is the SOUL of the PLAN, it is the leverage of how the organization plans to win and get to where it wants to go.

Strategy is communicated using a Roadmap.

The Elric brothers created a Homunculus when they forgot to include the soul, but only included chemicals in their alchemy transmutation and lost a body and a few limbs.

Similarly when JIM COLLINS assumed that the organizations can be built by simply assembling the constituent teams of people without a purpose, he tool would create organizations that would run off a cliff sooner or latter. A soul less organization, a Homunculus startup or Business would cost the founders more than a limb.

The soul of an organization is its STRATEGY, its VISION & MISSION.

Without this soul, any organization is a mere homunculus.

FALLACY OF COMPOSITION

REDUCTIONISM vs WHOLISM

Before we conclude it would be wiser to do so by attributing a name to all of this madness and Chaos.

The false belief that WHOLE is exactly equal to the sum all the parts is known as REDUCTIONISM.

But due to two phenomenon known as Emergence and Synergy. System when they work in unison produce different effects.

But the fallacy of trying to understand the whole by putting all the pieces together is REDUCTIONISM.

The opposite of REDUCTIONISM IS WHOLISM.

This perspective holds that complex systems can be fully understood by analyzing their individual components, and that the behavior or properties of the whole system can be completely explained by summing up the parts.

In reductionism, there is an assumption that no new properties or behaviors emerge from the combination of parts, and thus, by breaking down a system into its constituent elements, one can fully explain and predict the behavior of the whole.

JIM COLLINS BUS, HUMAN TRANSMUTATION, are examples of REDUCTIONISM in action.

While OCEANS’11,12, 13, Symphony, millions of birds flying in the sky etc.. are example of WHOLISM.

NOTHING BUTTERY (Informal)

The whole is “nothing but” the sum of parts

Every Tollywood movie is “nothing but” five songs, a few comedy scenes and a fight or two.

The Human body is “nothing but”, some water, carbon, iron, sulphur and other elements in some combination. - ELRIC BROTHERS

An Organization is “nothing but” some skilled people in teams make to sit in a building on benches and desks. - JIM COLLINS BUS

This trail mix is “nothing but” peanuts, pretzels, and chocolate chips.

The mind is “nothing but” a series of chemical and electrical impulses in the brain.

Morality is “nothing but” a bunch of leftover remnants of natural selection.

The universe is “nothing but” a collection of atoms in motion, human beings are simply “(nothing but)” machines for propagating DNA and the propagating of DNA is a self-sustaining process. It is every living object’s sole reason for living. - Richard Dawkins.

In order to better spot this fallacy, whenever you hear or read a phrase like “nothing but” or “nothing more than” in an argument, this should immediately raise a red flag. While not all uses of these phrases are guilty of Reductionism, it can nonetheless be a sign that the fallacy could be at play. In short, pay special attention to whether or not some complex thing is being “explained away” by pointing out its simpler components.

REFERENCES

https://www.jimcollins.com/concepts/first-who-then-what.html

https://tomorrowtodayglobal.com/2011/12/09/good-to-great-to-gone-2/

https://melindacooksey.com/blog/f/buses---a-metaphor-story-1

https://neilbendle.com/people-buses-and-another-complaint-about-jim-collins/

https://thecalminvestor.com/the-enduring-myth-of-great-companies/

https://stephenlynch.net/jim-collins-bus-analogy-critique/

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/wheres-bus-going-chad-conrey

https://www.livingcompass.org/weekly-column/the-whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-the-parts

https://se-scholar.com/se-blog/2017/6/23/who-said-the-whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-the-parts

https://ses.edu/nothing-buttery/#:~:text=In%20order%20to%20better%20spot,fallacy%20could%20be%20at%20play.

https://slideplayer.com/slide/12174091/