I think people underestimate the importance of "culture clash" between *professional* cultures. People expect to make allowances for people of different ages, nationalities, or genders to have different perspectives, but less so for professional backgrounds.
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6. For engineers, it's very natural to think "let's improve our performance by tracking our metrics!" For some bench biologists, tracking is seen as a sign of disrespect, or taking away their autonomy to make scientific judgments.
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Peter Drucker noted that each profession has a "professional ethic" -- there is something it means to be a good nurse, a good lawyer, a good engineer, a good pilot, and the values each profession holds sacred are different.
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When people identify with their profession's ethic, they need to uphold that ethic in order to do work they're proud of -- in other words, to be fulfilled and motivated. Good management, says Drucker, encourages this.
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However, in an interdisciplinary organization, if any *one* professional ethic dominates, the organization might fail. This is why Drucker says decisions should be made by people whose "profession" is management itself -- i.e., MBAs.
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I'm not sure this works either; it can all too easily mean "the professional culture of managers/MBAs is the best and deserves to dominate all the others" or even "organizations should be run by those with loose moral standards". See the book Moral Mazes for a negative view.
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I'm more inclined to think that interdisciplinary work requires people to do "cultural exchange" and learn about different perspectives and learn to get over the initial frustration of clashing styles.
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I'm in favor of having strong moral boundaries -- stuff like "I will not knowingly harm a patient, I will quit or be fired first" -- but learn to tell the difference between those absolute commitments and professional conventions you could drop if necessary.
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End of conversation
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