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Speaker A I'm Jerry Hunt and I'm an academic and I teach at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. And I got interested in Jack's work when I looked at studies done by academics and others mostly in business schools, and discovered not a lot of work done on organizational levels to try to explain things. And I'm interested in leadership and a leadership researcher might, for instance, just study whatever he or she was interested in in leadership and then put in level as an afterthought. Now, if you look back at the history of managerial levels, there is a history to it. Barnard talked about it in 1938 and some others, a few others have tracked it since then. Probably the best known approach is the Katsun Khan where they had three zones or three levels and they talked about the origination zone for structure, the interpolation zone for structure moving down and then the application zone for structure. And by structure they meant the kinds of things that Elliot Jacks is talking about. But at a much more generic level they also considered leadership very, very briefly and leadership was considered to be the discretionary behavior over and above what structure and other sources provided in the organization. And along about this same time we had a little bit of work done and it currently appears in organization behavior textbooks a lot, or management textbooks. And the argument was that there were three basic skills that managers were accountable for. There was a technical skill and a conceptual skill and an administrative skill and that as you moved up the organization, the technical got less important. The administration, well, administration or human skills were sometimes used there. The technical and human tended to become less important as you moved up the organization and the conceptual skills became more important. And then I was introduced to Jack, some of Jack's material, and Jack's seemed to me to be consistent with this but developed in much greater detail. And so what I then did after considering this for some time was to write a book on an extended levels approach to leadership. And the book intended to cover such things well, the book did cover such things as leadership and outcome variables and some ideas of why leaders might want to lead at the various levels with the argument being that the reason for wanting to lead was very important. And of course, I guess the first thing, Ken Craddock has made a yeoman's effort on that because I was amazed when I found out how much material there was. I don't think anybody knows there's that much material except Ken and now some of the people that will take time to go through his bibliography. It's an impressive piece of work and there is lots and lots and lots of stuff done, but it's very interesting. Most of that work is unknown among academics. It's like a black hole. It's gone down this black hole. But I knew that there must be more material than I was aware of when I got into this. But I was simply amazed when I looked at everything that Ken had. And so pretty obviously, we need to get across the point that this is not just some fly by night kind of thing. It's been going on for many years. It's been carefully developed and actually there's a fair amount well, there's a lot of written material on it now. There is a big difference, I think, in the clientele. Most of the work has taken place, it seems to me, anyway, as I look through this material at the consultant level, consultants are the ones who have been most interested in this. And so much of the literature, when you translate and so forth, is really primarily of interest to consultants, I think. But the material lends itself, especially now, the way the leadership field is developing to integration with leadership and other related efforts. And most of the people who would be interested in doing that are academics. And then we're back to the question. Of course, most academics are largely unaware of this literature. So the question then is what do we do about that? Can we get enough PhD students interested to begin to spread the word? And then we get into issues such as the students major advisors and the major advisors don't know very much about it or are not very interested in it, then it's difficult to get the doctoral students to follow up on it. You'd have to have a very unusual doctoral student who would swim upstream that way. In fact, it might be more than unusual and to make academics more aware of it. Of course, if you could get more academics to come to a conference like this, they would become more aware of it. Of course, one question is what are new organization forms? And of course, an academic's first reaction would be, well, this is not new, it's just hierarchical. But how can you weave hierarchical designs in with some of the newer, newer flatter designs? That's a key question. Try as they might, I don't think people are going to get rid of hierarchy. We get some new theory for a while and they say we don't have hierarchy anymore. But if after it functions for a while and you discover that you have to have some hierarchy now, hierarchy can be combined with other things, and you can certainly make the case that we've been too hierarchical or too bureaucratic, as the common lingo would have it, I guess. But even with complexity theory, which is a pretty advanced form of well, it's advanced in some ways and not advanced in others. But it would be in a business school and management people studying would find they find complexity theory pretty advanced and they're quite interested in it, but it's difficult to study. And the people who really have developed it have not in the past been very interested in management or organizations. And so we've had some conferences to get those people together, the complexity theory and the leadership people, and we've had two or three of those. And so there's a hard push to get that going. And one of the difficult things about it is it calls for I mean, to really do it and to treat it more than just metaphorically, you've got to learn the mathematics that are involved, and that calls for some effort. But once you learn it, then you can do all kinds of things that you can't do with more limited methods. Now, so that's one area of interest, and people are interested. And the complexity theorists are so extreme on this, they argue you don't even need hierarchy, that these things just emergent. The structures just emerge, right? And we say, yeah, well, structures will emerge, but you got to have some kind of guidance to get them to emerge the way you want them. That's now an issue in the literature, and if you have a conference on that, you can get people out for it and so forth. And what I use when I make my arguments is I use Jack's hierarchical notions and argue that that's one framework you can use to help ground the complexity theory stuff. There would be an opportunity there to have complexity theory and Jack's stuff brought together and emphasized more, and there's an opportunity for Jack's stuff to shine, because if you're looking at hierarchy, Jack's got he's got a good framework for hierarchy. See?