What Bricolage Means for You

An article in by Ted Baker, Timothy G. Pollock and Harry J. Sapienza, writing in  , makes the case that bricolage, the use of found materials, is important in both art and leadership. Re-analyzing the famous Moneyball case example of the Oakland A's baseball club in the United States, Baker et al., say that General Manager Billy Beane's success was less due to Sabermetrics and statistics (to which it is normally attributed) than to bricolage. Sabermetrics may be a useful tool, but it was accepting the reality that he must work with the materials (players) available that transformed Beane's leadership of the A's. A posting by Nathan Kontny on the Signal vs. Noise blog links to Baker et al., and brings in a parallel story of the origins of Banana Republic, the global clothing brand, also about bricolage as a leadership tool.We are often in schools where we hear the following about constraints:

• If only we had an endowment ...
• If only we had a newer/larger/nicer building ...
• If only we had our own playing fields ...
• If only we had more affluent parents ...
• If only we had a better head of school ...

We understand that there are very real constraints on most private, independent schools. In the overwhelming majority of these instances, there is very little to be done in the near term that will lift any of the constraints; rather, the leadership challenge is about bricolage, or working with the materials at hand. That is a leadership quality that gets far too little attention by search committees and executive coaches.