Business Strategy: Managing Uncertainty, Opportunity, and Enterprise

by J.C. Spender

I feel a connection between Barnard’s executive thinking and classical rhetoric’s rhetorical practice. Barnard’s three modes of human knowing are those of Aristotle’s modes re-expressed in modern language. Ethos is the domain of the social, the recognition that there is something beyond the Self that counter-balances the Self’s goals against communitarian goals. Logos is the domain of physics and mathematics (formal language), the belief that things are constructed logically, that cause and effect can be related rigorously. Pathos is the domain of psychology, of feelings, emotion, and ultimately action. Barnard argued the executive had to develop a good understanding of the social, physical, and psychological subsystems to prepare for the synthesizing act that would bring the organizational system into being.