The second annual MBM Summit was held this week in Atlanta, Georgia, and it was great to finally meet many of the folks who teach MBM around the world—especially those who do so in German, French, Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese.
Although we spent a lot of time talking about how hard it was to build an MBM culture, I couldn’t stop thinking about the first MBM class I ever attended as a sixteen year-old lab technician in Medford, Oklahoma (summer of 1994). Although by that time MBM had been simmering in Mr. Koch’s head for decades, the actual teaching of MBM to employees was pretty new. Looking back, those doing the teaching did a great job and really brought the lumber; it’s just that the lesson was heavy on straight shots of Hayek, von Mises, Polanyi, and Schumpeter. As these great thinkers often puzzle professors and graduate students, you can imagine the impact on a sixteen year-old kid and his colleagues involved in the storage and movement of gas liquids. Needless to say, the result was an excellent academic lesson that few people could understand, let alone conjure up ways to apply in their day to day jobs.
Now fast forward thirteen years to an MBM Academy I sat in on two weeks ago. Although the philosophy was the same—as was the invocation of the aforementioned great thinkers—the presentation was smooth, easy to understand, and peppered with teaching activities and examples of real life applications which did much to personalize the philosophy. Different employees from many different companies were nodding their heads in agreement and understanding, while the token few surly types who were obviously not happy to be there gradually got in to it and soon accepted the fact that this was worth their time.
I am in no way, shape, or form trying to disparage those who rolled out the first MBM classes for employees; they did a fantastic job and provided an ideal starting point. I just wanted to point out that as difficult as it is to build an MBM culture, those teaching MBM have done a tremendous job of refining and developing the courses over time. MBM Academy is light years ahead of where it was, and this is due to the people involved at every stage of the process. As employees leave academy today, they may not remember the philosophers’ names or who said exactly what, but they retain an understanding of philosophical principles that many academics take years to learn and, in many cases, often fail to completely wrap their heads around.
Understanding and applying MBM is not easy, but thanks to some of the tools painstakingly developed, I’d say the chances of eventually realizing a vibrant MBM culture are pretty good.
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