TopMBA Management Greats: James March

The work of James March, a pioneer of organizational decision-making, has often been more widely recognized among his peers than the general public.

In a 2003 Harvard Business Review 2003 poll asking their ‘most influential living management thinkers and business intellectuals’ to name their own greats and chief influences, James March finished second only to Peter Drucker in nominations for the accolade of the  ‘gurus’ guru’.

March, who earned his PhD at Yale back in 1953, spent much of his career as part of the faculty at Stanford where he would humbly inform his classes that, “I am not now, nor I have ever been, relevant.” Since 1995 he has held the title of professor emeritus at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

However, it was before this that two of his most seminal works were published. Organizations (with Herbert Simon, 1958) and A Behavioral Theory of the Firm (with Richard Cyert, 1963) were written with fellow core members of the Carnegie School, based at Carnegie Mellon University.

The Carnegie School was an economics intellectual movement of the 1950s and 1960s that was later deemed an integral part of the ‘freshwater school’ for challenging conventional approaches to macroeconomics research and in particular, to organizational decision-making and the theory of the firm.

Organizational decision-making a popular thread throughout James March’s work

In both his research and teaching, James March transcended disciplines. In his time, he took classes on topics as far-reaching as organizational psychology, behavioral economics, leadership, models in social science, computer simulation and statistics as well as, more unusually, revolutions, rules for killing people and friendship according to the Harvard Business Review.

However, organizational decision-making was a theme in which he was especially interested. That of identifying the underlying influences behind the decision-making process and how issues of leadership, risk orientation and organizational politics can impact upon its outcome. 

One understanding March came to was that in organizational decision-making, managers doesn’t always opt for the most ‘rational’ decision, as they will be necessarily constrained by both human and organizational limitations – in much the same way in which a consumer might knowingly choose the ‘satisfactory’ ahead of the ‘best’ when making a purchase.

The regard in which he is held notably led John Padgett, a professor at the University of Chicago, to write in the journal Contemporary Sociology that “March is to organization theory what Miles Davis is to jazz.”

It has also seen him invited to join numerous prestigious institutions in the US and abroad. For instance, he is a member of the US advisory body, the National Academy of Sciences as well as the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and one of just 175 foreign members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences – best-known for the academic committees which select the winners of the Nobel prizes in economics, chemistry and physics.

Leadership lessons through classic literature

For all the plaudits James March has received in social sciences, he has also found time to delve into poetry as well as to point out the leadership lessons that could be found in works of classic literature – a pedagogical methodology that he went on to help put onto film as both writer and narrator.

He considered it difficult to apply serious scholarship to the concept of leadership, arguing that a deeper understanding can sometimes emanate from the pages of great literature. For example, he finds George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan an excellent resource of leadership lessons for discussing how those deemed as ‘great leaders’ throughout history have often trodden a fine line between genius and madness, while others were simply derided as heretics in their own time.

His leadership lessons from literature are furthered by the two films, in which James March looks at the heroic figures and myths contained within Tolstoy’s War and Peace and the passion and idealism displayed by Cervantes’ Don Quixote.  On Quixote, March says, “We live in a world that emphasizes realistic expectations and clear successes. Quixote had neither. But through failure after failure, he persists in his vision and his commitment. He persists because he knows who he is.”

Although March retired from his hugely popular discussion classes before the turn of the century, the baton of fusing literature with leadership lessons has passed to Joseph L. Badaracco, a professor of business ethics at Harvard Business School.

After relinquishing his teaching duties, March was later asked to explain his opening gambit to Stanford students in denying his own relevance in an interview for the Harvard Business Review. Known to be a strong believer in respecting the value of academic and experiential knowledge as two very separate entities, he replied, “If there is relevance to my ideas, then it is for the people who contemplate the ideas to see, not for the person who produces them.”

Stanford faculty image source.