CONCEPT
Quixote as Organizational Leader
March's four-decade engagement with Cervantes' knight as a model for leadership under irreducible ambiguity — the figure who acts with total commitment in a world he does not fully understand, whose persistence is the only form of integrity available to a creature that must act before it knows.
March taught Don Quixote at Stanford for years, not as a literary curiosity but as a model for organizational leadership. The figure is disciplinary scandal: a rigorous formal modeler insisting that the most important things about leadership cannot be captured by models, that the knight who charges windmills illustrates a structural feature of decision-making under ambiguity that rational-choice theory cannot see. When the situation is genuinely uncertain, when the correct interpretation is unknowable in advance, the quality of the decision cannot be evaluated by its outcome. A good decision that produces a bad outcome was still a good decision. The quality resides in the process, not the result — in the range of alternatives considered, the tolerance for ambiguity maintained throughout, the willingness to act with total commitment to a vision the actor does not fully understand.
