From Mad Management to Man Management, Times 2, by Andrew Billen, Times 2, 9th March

This is the first time the blog has included an article about management from one of the upmarket dailies, because these are few and far between and are often of the shallow variety. This one is no different and only just scraped in to my chosen reviews.

My colleagues might suggest that I am not one to make this criticism but the article does suffer from an excess of cynicism. This is not in itself necessarily a bad thing but in this case the whole article seems to be a premeditated attempt to make fun of management theory. This is betrayed by two columns with headings such as management by cliché, management by acronym and management by numbers, which have no reference to the rest of the article. And the inclusion of leading thinkers like Porter and Deming with the implication that they are charlatans, does not help the author’s credibility.

The thesis of the article is the extent to which the recession is exposing management thinking as ‘jargon-filled sham’. This is a valid theme which could have generated some good argument if it had been backed up by facts and serious opinion, rather than by prejudice and shallow arguments. The author seems to have it in particularly for Tom Peters and ‘the pursuit of wow’ while failing to give him credit for first moving thinking away from hard analysis to the softer aspects of strategy with his first seminal book ‘In Search of Excellence’.

The article traces the development of management theory from its earliest days and quotes the influence of Harvard and its glittering alumni in driving much of the thinking. The author makes one valid point which I have never heard expressed so clearly before; how can an organisation whose whole ethos is based on the study of historical cases claim to equip managers for new situations that have never been encountered before? Our response at MTP - where we use the case method to some extent - is that we would claim to ‘teach out’ of the case and use it to encourage discussion of new situations that the client company might face. But at Harvard and other business schools with a similar ethos, my experience is that they teach deeply into the case and would not normally use it to highlight the specific future scenarios of their audience. I look forward to being challenged on this assumption!

After tracing the history the article tends to meander from one superficial view to another and I found myself agreeing with some points and not others, based on my own experiences and prejudices. I agreed with his view that the McKinsey idea of forced ranking and firing the bottom 10% every year is dangerous nonsense. But I could not agree with his opinion that Key Performance Indicators are invalid because they need good management to operate them.

The author does manage to find one piece of evidence to justify his cynicism, a consultant who left Gemini after co-authoring a book called ‘Transforming the Organisation’ and who now admits that it was all a con to generate consultancy business; anyone who has been in management consultancy will not be surprised by this. But to use this as evidence that all management thinking is a jargon filled sham is many steps too far. I like some cynicism but it should be informed and selective.