Imagination, Self‐Knowledge, and Poise: Jim March’s Lessons for Leadership

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12536
• Published date: 01 December 2019
• Author: Gerardo Patriotta
• Date: 01 December 2019

© 2019 Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Imagination, Self-Knowledge, and Poise: Jim March’s

Lessons for Leadership

Gerardo Patriotta

University of Warwick

ABSTRACT James G. March was a founding father of modern organization theory, and arguably

its most eclectic scholar. His elegant writings, which were underpinned by a behavioural view of

organizations, spanned ambiguity and choice, rationality and decision-making, organizational

change, organizational learning, and institutional theory, among others. In this editorial, we

remember Jim March by reflecting on his lessons for leadership. It is structured into three parts,

each portraying a key aspect of contemporary leadership: imagination, self-knowledge, and

poise. March believed that these qualities were essential to leadership, and he embodied them to

the fullest.

Keywords: imagination, leadership, March, poise, self-knowledge

INTRODUCTION

Jim March’s unique approach to leadership was informed by a broader exploration of

the fundamental issues of life (March, 2003). In his view, the central problems of lead-

ership are inextricably linked to the ambiguities of human experience (March, 2009),

which imply that leaders often face situations that are less orderly, less comprehensible,

and less malleable than they are often portrayed to be in mainstream characterizations of

management and organizations. Ambiguity stems from the fact that the causal structure

of experience is complex, and that the everyday world we encounter is noisy (Patriotta,

2016). Hence the link between experience and reality is tenuous and subject to interpre-

tive flexibility. Furthermore, the qualities and actions of leaders are themselves ambig-

uous: there is ambiguity about priorities, there is ambiguity about outcomes and their

desirability, and there is ambiguity about who is responsible for outcomes (March and

Weil, 2005, p. 7).

Journal of Man agement Studi es 56:8 December 2019

doi:10. 1111/j om s.1 253 6

Address for reprints: Gerardo Patriotta, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL,

UK (gerardo.patriotta@wbs.ac.uk).