046. Mats Alvesson: When Corporate Values Become Functional Stupidity

Instead of dealing with real organizational and cultural issues, leaders can often engage the organization in exercises around values that are at best meaningless or at worst lead to distrust and disillusion. A leading voice behind this criticism in Sweden is Professor Mats Alvesson, known for coining the term "functional stupidity". In this confronting and thought-provoking episode, Mats discusses how we can avoid functional stupidity and what it really takes to operate according to a set of principles we don't want to compromise.   Mats Alvesson is a management professor at Lund University, Sweden. He is interested in critical theory, qualitative research, and organizational studies. He has published numerous books, including The Stupidity Paradox (Profile, with A. Spicer), Managerial Lives (Cambridge University Press, with S. Sveningsson), Reflexive Leadership (Sage, with M. Blom & S. Sveningsson), and The Triumph of Emptiness (Oxford University Press). Mats' latest book, Return to Meaning (Oxford Univeristy Press, with Y. Gabriel & R. Paulsen) argues that we are currently witnessing not merely a decline in the quality of social science research, but the proliferation of meaningless research, of no value to society, and modest value to its authors - apart from securing employment and promotion.