The Management Myth

The two philosophy courses I had in college left me with a chasing-my-tail feeling. Most philosophers could never seem to write clearly and get to the point, instead endlessly gnawing on a problem.

One thing you can say about philosophers, however, is that they have nothing to work with but ideas, so they become very good at detecting flaws in arguments. Matthew Stewart, author of The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting it Wrong got a Ph.D. in Philosophy before tripping into management consulting, and this left him uniquely suited to dissect this thing called "management" upon which we have heaped so much.

He intersperses the history of management with the story of his own experience in a consulting firm, and both come out looking pretty bad. Indeed, it appears that management "science," starting with Frederick Winslow Taylor (the "time and motion studies" guy) up to and including all the "gurus" like Peter Drucker, Tom Peters and the like, is stock full of charlatans who are happy to cherry-pick data (or just as often, make it up) and present it as science. What's dismaying is that the original business schools (Harvard and Yale) were founded, apparently, in response to Taylor's work and upon his principles -- virtually all of which have been since discredited and discovered to be based on sham data.

What all of the later "pioneers" of management learned from Taylor was not the "science" part of his feeble attempts to turn management into science, but rather his ability to manipulate his listeners into belief by telling a good story. All of the successors who have made their fortunes by "advancing" management have done so by telling good stories. With his philosophical discipline, Stewart produces hundreds of references to support his virtually complete destruction of business schools and management gurus.

For me, however, one of the most deeply disturbing passages came in the last chapter: "A recent study by the Aspen Institute appears to confirm that business school is, in fact, damaging to the moral fiber of students. Upon entering business school, the researchers found, students cherished noble ambitions to serve customers, create quality products, and otherwise contribute to the progress of humankind. By the time of their graduation, however, students were convinced that the only thing that matters is increasing shareholder value." Stewart suggests that many of our current problems may come from this corrupting influence of business schools.

The formula appears to be this: find out what people want to believe, then concoct a story and discover (or just make up) some data that supports that belief (Egads. This applies to far more than just management). They'll welcome you with open arms and pocketbooks. In Taylor's time, it was much easier to access this wealth where it was concentrated, and top-level business managers were ripe for the picking. Tom Peters discovered that, through mass media, he could reach the mass of middle managers and reap even greater rewards, producing "In Search of Excellence," his multi-million copy breakthrough book (a number of years later, most of the companies he put forward as "excellent" were in disarray, and one study showed that doing the opposite of his excellence principles produced better results. In a later book, Peters himself denigrates the idea of excellence. None of this has stopped him from writing books, nor people buying them).

The Management Myth