"Parenting and Management: being great at one makes one great at the other."

What makes a great manager?  What makes a great parent?  The good news is that answering one answers both at the same time.  The hard news is that answering one of them requires answering both at the same time.  This makes it highly recursive and interdependent - where the definition of great manager is "see great parent," and the definition of great parent is "see great manager." 

Starting off, we know intuitively some signs of a great manager or parent.  Below is a partial common sense list.

The last column is a translation into economic terms more capable of being reduced into a numeric key performance indicators.  These sample signs are generally universally accepted.  They lead to such viewpoints as provided by Lukianoff and Haidt (2018) The Coddling of the American Mind.  Lukianoff and Haidt's work provides a wonderful opportunity to question and to examine our assumptions on what exactly is great management and parenting. 

The main points of The Coddling of the American Mind can be summarized thusly:

Parents and teachers (as in loco parentis) are letting emotions contaminate their duties and becoming overprotective of their students.  The ensuing coddling is having a detrimental effect on students' abilities in group work, critical logic, and rationalism skills.  They list current news examples including campus shout-downs of controversial speakers and social media "graffiti" postings that led to "safe spaces" and "trigger warnings" and a polarized atmosphere of more fear.  This leads to future adults becoming withdrawn and unengaging for fear of litigation, employment termination, and of becoming ostracized. 

The authors backgrounds' being in free speech, social psychology, and business, there is a marked emphasis on discounting emotions.  There is a sense of Voltaire/Patrick Henry's "…defend to the death your right to [speak freely]…" regardless of how the listener may feel about it.  The assumption underlying their perspective is that the modern environment is becoming increasingly complicated, emotionally fraught, polarized, and litigious.  Managers, teachers, and parents are to blame.  

Now we come to Occam's Razor.  Socrates once believed that books prevent critical thinking - because they may unduly bias the reader towards legacy concepts.  Today we might call that phenomenon "group think."  Set aside all these assumptions about management, parenting, and their causes and effects for a moment and trim the non-essential chaff.  Below are the key defining characteristics for great parenting and great management in simple, reductionist, and concrete words.

A great parent makes future parents.

A great manager makes future managers.

This definition is true to its recursive, feedback reasoning.  From a parent perspective, it rings true to its biological underpinnings.  A great organism reproduces organisms.  A great parent is engaged, fun, helps with homework, and trains the kids to be socially moral citizens.  These are all generally valid.  But the unassailable key is to ensure the child can develop to become another parent.  If the parent developed far enough to become a parent, then it necessarily follows that anyone doing as the parent would - copying their values, their skills, and their essence - also thrives.  Great parents produce their replacements and expansions who would make decisions as they would.  The metric would therefore not be of arbitrary "rightness" or "smartness" but of concrete similarity.

Similarly for the management perspective, business is about growth.  A great business provides a valuable product - definable in business-speak as a good or service that adds value by attracting a buying price in excess of its production costs.  Pursuant to that goal, the great manager makes the business fun, establishes great morale, and provides leadership direction.  These are vaguely valid.  But the unassailable key point is to generate the economy of scale by providing continuity of production and sales over the long term.  Great managers produce a line of proteges to become their replacement and expansion to make decisions as they would.  That is the essence of product branding that matches buyers with sellers.  It reduces risk and enhances trust as the buyer knows what they will get. 

Armed with this concrete and focused perspective, one can clearly define what is not great management and parenting.  Greatness has no competition with the future generations.  There is no tie to the status quo.  There is no wasted attention searching for individual, ego-centric achievement to justify staying in place.  There is instead understanding that the environment is in constant flux.  A great parent shares everything to make new parents - and in so doing, develops into a grandparent.  A great manager shares everything as part of the team to make new managers - and in so doing, develops into a senior executive manager.

The present reports on the apparent lack of student group work, critical logic, and rationalism skills leading to campus shout-downs, social media graffiti, the need for safe spaces and trigger warnings in a polarized atmosphere are real as per Lukianoff, Haidt, and others.  The first step is to understand why is this happening? 

Technology has introduced one single profound change these past 5 centuries, past 5 decades, and past 5 years.  It has not been in philosophy, or physics, or chemistry, or artificial intelligence.  The single most profound advancement has been in transportation - for the first time in known history, masses of people can travel quickly and safely to anywhere in the world.  Knowledge of each others' actions and influences can spread near instantaneously. 

Much has been written about excessive communications and coddling allowing unprecedented activity monitoring.  (Racz, et. al. 2015; LeMoyne & Buchanan, 2011; Hesse, et. al., 2017)  Perhaps frontline emotions and "Fast Thinking" (Kahneman, 2011) do preclude group work, critical logic, and rationalism skills.  Perhaps they do cause increasing depression, lack of self-control, and social media graffiti postings.  So without preconception and prejudice, what is a great manager or parent to do?

Point 1: understand what is in scope of great management and parenting.  It is not possible to change the environment.  It is only the choice to share our knowledge and skills of how to handle the environment so they stay true to themselves. 

Point 2: emotions, fast thinking, and lack of logical responses are part of what makes our environment.  In financial risk control, an asset that has perfectly zero historic volatility - as close a proxy for reasoned, rational, logical behavior - leaves the owner vulnerable to a "Black Swan" event.  In adverse weather driving, drivers in sunny California are at risk of skidding off the roads in light snow.  There is no stopping snow.  There is sharing how to react and condition to it.

To emotionally coddle or not to coddle that is not the question.  Everything the current and next generation of parents and managers do will be monitored and broadcast instantaneously such that everyone might be privy to every word and action.  The eyes of the world are watching.  In effect, the entire world coddles, micromanages, and helicopter parents.  A directly coddling parent or university is merely preparing the students for what to expect going forward. 

From a neuroscience angle, the neural structures support this assertion of connecting to the environment.  Contrary to popular belief, the limbic system is not necessarily a maladaptive vestigial structure that inappropriately inserts emotions that have no place in today's world and so must be suppressed.  Rather, the limbic system is central for memory formation (we know this because removal of the limbic system hippocampus results in profound anterograde amnesia).  Several prior colleagues also worked on the hippocampus's role in spatial maps (e.g. grid and place cells).  Following up, Montagrin, Saiote, & Schiller (2017) explored its role in social mapping.  Their findings showed that the limbic system maps social memory by recognizing social peers, power and influence, dynamic social hierarchies, and adaptive social transmission.  Active suppression of limbic systems rapidly leads to maladaptive social behavior.  Under this interpretation, emotions, coddling, social media, lack of critical logic, and the like may be the instruments of power and influence.  Instead of repressing them, great management and parenting would indicate the need to use them.  As in the legal system, facts and logic are the supporting peripheral, but the convincing the jury is the central core.  Connecting with the jury is key.  A great manager or parent establishes the core connectivity over time by grooming the next generation's connectivity ad infinitum.