THORNTON A. MAY
The Caveman in the
Executive Suite
My thinking
on executive
identity has
meandered
as far back as
our hunter-
gatherer
forebears.
I’VE BEEN THINKING A LOT about executive identity, and that’s what came to mind when I read David Weinberger’s online bio page. The always amusing and very smart author of Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the
Thornton A. May is
author of The New Know:
Innovation Powered by
Analytics and executive
director of the IT
Leadership Academy
at Florida State College
in Jacksonville. You
can contact him at
thorntonamay@aol.com
or follow him on Twitter
(@deanitla).
Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room has more
than one take on who he is. Two are from his left
brain (one is full of hype, and the other is “
relatively hype-free,” he says), and a third take comes
from his right brain (this one isn’t completely
nonlinguistic, he notes, because we have yet to
develop “tactile and aromatic plugins”).
What really resonated for me, though, was his
“no brain” self-characterization: “Him write good.
Him help companies do stuff. Him smell OK.”
That’s because my thinking on executive iden-
tity has meandered as far back as our hunter-gath-
erer forebears. (I’m a futurist, but deeply steeped
in the past.) In Thoughtful Foragers: A Study of
Prehistoric Decision Making, Steven J. Mithen
shows us not only how clever paleoarchaeologists
are when “interviewing” long-dead decision-
makers. He also demonstrates how position in the
prehistoric workplace hierarchy was a function of
prowess in the primary value-producing activities
of the era (food-gathering). Stone Age executives
were chosen entirely on merit.
For much of human history, that wasn’t the
case. Nearly zero flexibility and extremely limited
progress were the hallmarks of century after
century. In the Middle Ages, and during other
epochs, identity (position in society) was a function of blood — you were born either a noble or a
peasant — and what you did was a function of tradition. In feudal societies, there was (outside the
occasional fairy tale) very limited social mobility.
In fact, because one’s identity was so closely
tied to one’s immutable social role, the Middle
Ages gave rise to many of the family names used
today in the Western world. Villagers would refer
to others by their occupation, which is how we got
all those Hoopers, Coopers and Smiths.
