The problem lies in business schools and degrees like the MBA.
Check out the faculty list at Harvard Business school [link below]. I randomly looked at profiles of 14 of them and not a single one had real world business experience. If there are any who do have real world experience, it's often superficial.
To carry on this article's analogy, business schools are the Catholic church of 1500: incestuous, detached, and self-serving.
I went to business school (top European) as part of my engineering degree.
They actually do make a point of mentioning that there's more than one philosophy of management. For instance, in the Germanic world, it's common to promote managers from the ranks of whatever business is being managed, whereas it's a bit of an anglo thing to have a "manager" who is somewhat business agnostic.
But of course there's a problem. If you tell people they need specific experience in the car industry to be a car industry manager, or as a software dev to manage devs, then WTF are you doing in a business school? Especially as an undergrad? You gonna manage the student bar?
So then when it comes to all the case studies, you have to kid yourself that what happened to Betamax in the 1980s is going to be relevant to you in 2016. It's interesting to read all this historical "strategy" stuff, but the students I hung out with (being engineers, technically competent and skeptical of BS) tended to see them as something akin to a history class. Sure there are lessons, but a lot of it is just interpretation and conjecture. Nothing in it with the rigour of an engineering course.
As to why MBAs are useful, it seems it's really a question of signalling. If you pay a few hundred grand in fees, rent, and opportunity cost to do an MBA, you probably have some motivation. And there is some value in generic management; not every line of business requires deep technical knowledge, and those are fine for hiring some guy who's happy to work long hours and fly around a lot. It's a problem for something like software dev though.
Business shcool, as best i can tell, have elevated the operations of a widget factory to a religion. And thus MBAs everywhere attempt to turn every institution they are put to manage, into an assembly line to fit their religion.
Observe the insanity in health care, where patients are not people but raw materials to be put through the medical factory and turned into a finished, aka healed, product at the other end.
You see this same thing happening at law schools as well.
If you look at the faculty of Harvard Law [1], many of the professors have not served in a professional capacity as lawyers.
In fact, many firms have to train their new associates in the actual practice of law because law school itself has become so detached from the reality of being a lawyer. [2]
I suspect this is part of a bigger problem, one that I continually see in the public service: people undervalue expertise. There's this strange belief that 'generalists' can do just about any task well. But I've never found that to be the case. In more than a few cases I've seen 'generalists' make a complete hash of something, but because they don't have sufficient domain-specific knowledge they don't actually realise how bad a job they've done.
I wonder if this is why people are sometimes dismissive of MBAs. These people are essentially training to be future leaders and senior executives of large organisations. But how can they possibly make any sort of rational decisions, or build functional systems of work, if they have no specific understanding of the work being done? I've been thinking about this kind of thing a lot, and I've realised why these types of managers love using buzzwords: it's a way of sounding knowledgeable without actually knowing anything, and it minimises the risk of being dragged in to a discussion on specifics.
I don't think the ridiculousness of what they preach matters all that much. It's more about linking the network of power brokers than it is about perpetuating the neoliberal religion.
Horrible idea of course, but I wonder if there are companies who pick CEOs randomly from new MBA graduates and pay them an extremely high salary with no stock options or other incentives.
* Business is more competitive than ever. But in reality, we have more monopolies and duopolies than ever. Peter Thiel's "Zero to One" is all about how to achieve monopoly. Businesses in the US hate competing on price. Without strong antitrust enforcement, which the US hasn't had in decades, the number of players decreases until there's no price competition. How many Internet providers can you choose from in the US? How many in the UK or Germany?
* We live in an age of entrepreneurialism. But the big companies are making all the money. The Economist writes: "A large number of businesspeople who were drawn in by the cult of entrepreneurship encountered only failure and now eke out marginal existences with little provision for their old age." All YC applicants should read that.
* Business is getting faster. They compare the fast rise of the automobile. Electricity and aircraft were also deployed faster than the Internet. Progress in the first 50 years of aviation zoomed like the semiconductor industry. Then in the late 1960s, it was all done - the Concorde, the Boeing 747, the SR-71, and the Saturn V had all flown. Everything since then has been a minor improvement.
* Globalisation is both inevitable and irreversible. The Economist comments "In 1880-1914 the world was in many ways just as globalised as it is today; it still fell victim to war and autarky." The causes of World War One are worth studying. Nobody really wanted it, and it happened anyway. Before WWI, Germany's biggest trading partner was France.
Some things are moving fast, though; solar comes to mind as an excellent example of an area with exponential price drops. At any given time, some things are improving fast, and most things are improving slowly or not at all.
My feeling is that there are a lot of basic tech improvements just on the horizon, we start figuring out more ways to bring machine learning into hard fundamental problems of industrial design, medical diagnosis, and so on.
Which of course leads to inevitable discussions of displaced highly skilled labor; it's not clear that the areas of fast improvement will lead to a good distribution of positive outcomes, as we've discussed here so many times before...
On the whole, though, I agree with the other three points.
"But the big companies are making all of the money" is tautological, because we define big companies by how much money they make. All of the startup unicorns you'd probably call at this point "big companies" but only because of how much money they make (and spend).
I feel like, in general, your comment cherry picks examples, and falls victim to the recall bias.
I'd say "advanced management theory" may be dying, but I don't even see basic 101 management theory being acknowledged in many organization. Things like "don't have one person report to two or more people" are violated all the time and result in predictable chaos and problems.
I'm reminded of the story of garbagemen strike that brought New York City to their knees, while the Irish Banking Crisis caused only a blip because people turned to alternative forms of currency. Real managers provide real value solving real problems, and are well liked by their employees. Unfortunately most management nowadays is awful, and needs to be pruned.
<sarcasm>As an MBA who discussed (but didn't have time to read) a case study on programming, I know it's not possible to expect you to do complete a task in less time than it will take. After all, maybe you've heard the expression "nine women can't make a baby in one month". I'm not an idiot.
Hoever, my research has revealed that one woman can develop 1-to-N babies in a single node. And one man can help instantiate 1-to-N babies in multiple nodes. This is why I'm a fan of diversity hiring. As you can see, I have a strong understanding of message passing, concurrency, parallelism, the actor model, and multiple inheritance.
Now, given that we've established that I understand what you do, allow me, and all of your other bosses, give you an immutable set of instructions for you to process in that finite state machine you call a job.
Now that we're on the same page, can you show me how to use BitTorrent? I want to download the last season of Game of Thrones. My 401K includes an S&P 500 index fund, which owns shares of Time Warner, which owns HBO. So it's like I already own that content. Also, how do I erase my browser history? I accidentally visited a website with pop up ads, and my browser is filled with porn. Don't worry about the downloads those ads were triggered though, as I can delete those files myself.</sarcasm>
"Business books are basically romance novels for men. Silly fantasies, terrible writing, large type, cheap paper and one good idea per book" - Benedict Evans
These four theories don't seem to be the four most popular in management theory...in my opinion a rough list of those would be something like: Porter-style competitive advantage, Toyota-style operations (agile/just-in-time), everything in modern finance and disruptive vs incremental technology (in the strict Christensen sense).
The professionalisation of management surely has problems but it's important to at least characterise the prevailing orthodoxy accurately...and this article does not.
He was brought in by MacArthur during the post-WW2 occupation of Japan to help get their industry running again. You can see some of the seeds of TQM/The Toyota Production System in his management philosophies.
His management theories are interesting to me because of the emphasis placed on leadership, and the success and failure of systems of production being almost entirely their responsibility (he claimed around 85% of production variance was due to systemic factors i.e. entirely within managerial control).
Some of his 'deadly diseases' seem particularly relevant in this thread. I've seen many MBA/MPA trained managers makes these errors:
The "Seven Deadly Diseases" include:
- Lack of constancy of purpose
- Emphasis on short-term profits
- Evaluation by performance, merit rating, or annual review of performance
- Mobility of management
- Running a company on visible figures alone
- Excessive medical costs
- Excessive costs of warranty, fueled by lawyers who work for contingency fees
"A Lesser Category of Obstacles" includes:
- Neglecting long-range planning
- Relying on technology to solve problems
- Seeking examples to follow rather than developing solutions
- Excuses, such as "our problems are different"
- The mistaken belief that management skills can be taught in classes
- Reliance on quality control departments rather than management, supervisors, managers of purchasing, and production workers
- Placing blame on workforces who are only responsible for 15% of mistakes where the system designed by management is responsible for 85% of the unintended consequences
- Relying on quality inspection rather than improving product quality
So a select group of industries, including airlines, have seen a lot of consolidation - you're going to use that as an argument that we aren't in an era of hypercompetition. Sorry, not buying it.
And that's even more true because the airline example is actually flawed. Not all consolidation reduces competition. Look at the past few years, where Delta bought Continental and American and US Airways merged. You'd say that the number of "major" carriers dropped by two. Fine... now look at the Alaska Airlines / Virgin America merger... arguably Alaska is now on the cusp of becoming a "major" carrier, which can compete with the likes of American, Delta, United and Southwest.
So it was consolidation, but did it make things more or less oligarchical? The answer isn't as straight-forward as you might think. Likewise, the acquisition of Airtran by Southwest may actually have created my competition by giving Southwest more planes, gates, and routes - including their first few international routes.
None of this is to say that "management theory" is complete, perfect, or even useful. But this article fails to convince me that it's all just "dead ideas" either.
"The backlash against globalisation points to a glaring underlying weakness of management theory: its naivety about politics. Modern management orthodoxies were forged in the era from 1980 to 2008, when liberalism was in the ascendant and middle-of-the-road politicians were willing to sign up to global rules. But today’s world is very different. Productivity growth is dismal in the West, companies are fusing at a furious rate, entrepreneurialism is stuttering, populism is on the rise and the old rules of business are being torn up. "
It is worrisome how much people pay for books that teach things that are plainly wrong. They mention Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat” but there are a lot of others they could have listed. For the last 40 years there has been almost constant rhetoric from business writers about the way that business was becoming more and more competitive, and yet the numbers show that exactly the opposite was happening: new business creation has been in decline since the 1970s, and consolidation means that business has become less and less competitive for the last 40 years. Monopolies have become more common. Patent laws and copyrights have been extended to make monopoly easier. It is true that if you are trying to start a new business, the situation has become increasingly bleak since the 1970s, so from the point of view of someone just starting out, things have become harder, and perhaps some people mean that when they say "things are more competitive". But that isn't the competition of one business against another, that's the competition of one worker against another. We should be clear about our terminology.
The four dead ideas according to the article:
1) Business is more competitive that ever.
2) We live in an age of entrepreneurialism.
3) Business is getting faster.
4) Globalization is inevitable and irreversible.
Also Managers know better than you, and are generally better people, and more capable than you, because of some secret "management" skills.
I've seen engineers promoted to management, who suddenly drink the kool-aid that they're "better" than the engineers they worked beside a month ago. Now that they're managers, they know better.
The sheer infantilization of the rank and file by managers is appalling, and wide-spread. Such as hiring an expert in the field, and then ignoring everything they say.
Good organizations say "Look, I know that's the best way to solve the problem, but the customer doesn't have time or money for that, so we need something else".
Bad organizations say "You're just an engineer, and wouldn't understand the trade-offs inherent in customer interaction".
0) Management is independent of any particular firm. You can "bring in" managers or managerial ideas from the outside, impose them from the top down, and any given firm will not only continue functioning, but function much better.
The evidence shows that good management is intimately tied-up with the particular circumstances of each firm, and with obtaining information about firm operations from the bottom up.
This article is a strawman. These are more characteristic of pop business books and motivational speakers than it is of anything I've encountered in my actual business degree. I'm learning about concepts like liquidity versus profitability and the difference between cellular and functional manufacturing layouts. This is looking at a couple of popular books on business and claiming it in some way represents serious business research and education.
Business schools (and MBA programs) were an interesting experiment: can you abstract away the most important parts of a business away from what that business actually produces? Empirically, the answer appears to be no. It's understandable that such an experiment would take place. But now that we have an answer, we should stop pretending that the value produced by business schools is sufficient to justify their existence.
As auganov pointed out, a lot of the BA curriculum is inter-disciplinary and the content is largely generic (barring specializations such as finance/ops etc). Nowadays, anybody can access this knowledge for free for little/no cost. Hence, IMO its not really the content or even the lectures that make MBA schools sell (something which I think even they admit openly).
Most people go for the 'network' and the validation that the school gives you. So no matter how outdated their curriculum gets, as long as
a) their current alums promote and guide future ones (shouldn't be any problem)
b) They are able to continuously source smart people
c) Nobody comes up with a better alternative system to identifying future leaders
These schools should have no problem.
======
IMO, (a) will never be a problem for these schools. The supply of smart undergrads/students is also assured given our innate inertia, FOMO and the perceived lack of growth in non-mba fields as we grow older.
Thus, (c) i.e. somebody coming up with a better metric/validation mechanism to source top leaders should be the biggest concern for these schools.
The lack of formalism and accountability in the curriculum (specially in the softer subjects) means that it's unlikely any one finding/study/trend can deal a major blow to these institutions. For every Enron, they can cite a Jack Welch.
tl;dr: Slow gradual change/reflection is unlikely to change these schools much. Disruption is what's needed.
A CEO is supposed to be a leader, someone who can inspire. What we instead are management ranks filled with opportunists and short termists who have spend the last 20 years in management with a single idea - outsourcing.
This is a management class who skate along looking for the next opportunity to rinse repeat the same playbook. There is no leadership or imagination here.
There is a crisis of leadership, a crisis of accountability, an elitist club who look out for each other and extreme compensation with parachutes even for failure.
The whole field of management has not delivered a single good idea, its taken individuals who go against the wind to show a glimpse of the possibilites leaving in their wake the tedious industry of management courses and case studies as magic formulas for success that outside of their original context have no chance of replication.
Holy cow! Did anyone else see the comments section on the actual article? Dumpster Fire is a term that gets banted about a lot, but that part of the site is surely flaming raw sewage. My god, is that what my uncles see as 'informed' readers? Jesus, the Economist could really use some more heavy handed mods.
I wonder why they thought this article was newsworthy. It's news to no one that most business books are empty of thought. The same goes for many MBA programs. So yes, we should ignore management theory, but for the reasons given in this article, we should ignore the Economist.
It's not even clear that the four ideas cited in the magazine are actually prevalent in management theory. The piece itself did almost nothing to substantiate that.
One of the best books on management theory is War and Peace. The central idea in war is simply that good lieutenants are more useful and more rare than the sycophants and adjutants who circle the chiefs of staff.
I pose the question as a middle manager who feels those above are doing a worse job than I could, what would I do to show I am senior management material. One of those things feels like it should be 'get an MBA'. But as others have said, maybe this is just paying the price for entry to the club. On the other hand, I see plenty of senior managers who have got their positions from 1) being in the job below when the senior left or 2) social connections and have few of the soft skills or technical skills that would make them a decent manager. At least MBA's give the appearance of a meritocracy!
[+] [-] anotherhacker|9 years ago|reply
Check out the faculty list at Harvard Business school [link below]. I randomly looked at profiles of 14 of them and not a single one had real world business experience. If there are any who do have real world experience, it's often superficial.
To carry on this article's analogy, business schools are the Catholic church of 1500: incestuous, detached, and self-serving.
Harvard Busisness school faculty: http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/browse.aspx
[+] [-] lordnacho|9 years ago|reply
They actually do make a point of mentioning that there's more than one philosophy of management. For instance, in the Germanic world, it's common to promote managers from the ranks of whatever business is being managed, whereas it's a bit of an anglo thing to have a "manager" who is somewhat business agnostic.
But of course there's a problem. If you tell people they need specific experience in the car industry to be a car industry manager, or as a software dev to manage devs, then WTF are you doing in a business school? Especially as an undergrad? You gonna manage the student bar?
So then when it comes to all the case studies, you have to kid yourself that what happened to Betamax in the 1980s is going to be relevant to you in 2016. It's interesting to read all this historical "strategy" stuff, but the students I hung out with (being engineers, technically competent and skeptical of BS) tended to see them as something akin to a history class. Sure there are lessons, but a lot of it is just interpretation and conjecture. Nothing in it with the rigour of an engineering course.
As to why MBAs are useful, it seems it's really a question of signalling. If you pay a few hundred grand in fees, rent, and opportunity cost to do an MBA, you probably have some motivation. And there is some value in generic management; not every line of business requires deep technical knowledge, and those are fine for hiring some guy who's happy to work long hours and fly around a lot. It's a problem for something like software dev though.
[+] [-] digi_owl|9 years ago|reply
Observe the insanity in health care, where patients are not people but raw materials to be put through the medical factory and turned into a finished, aka healed, product at the other end.
[+] [-] danielrhodes|9 years ago|reply
If you look at the faculty of Harvard Law [1], many of the professors have not served in a professional capacity as lawyers.
In fact, many firms have to train their new associates in the actual practice of law because law school itself has become so detached from the reality of being a lawyer. [2]
[1] http://hls.harvard.edu/faculty/index.html?s=15
[2] http://mobile.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/business/after-law-scho...
[+] [-] spangry|9 years ago|reply
I wonder if this is why people are sometimes dismissive of MBAs. These people are essentially training to be future leaders and senior executives of large organisations. But how can they possibly make any sort of rational decisions, or build functional systems of work, if they have no specific understanding of the work being done? I've been thinking about this kind of thing a lot, and I've realised why these types of managers love using buzzwords: it's a way of sounding knowledgeable without actually knowing anything, and it minimises the risk of being dragged in to a discussion on specifics.
Then again, who doesn't love synergy?
[+] [-] canadian_voter|9 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Voltaires-Bastards-Dictatorship-Reaso...
[+] [-] anotherarray|9 years ago|reply
MBAs and their professors simply replicate and regurgitate an ideology that is outside their own awareness and control.
Lutheranism itself is more to blame than the whole faculty of HBS and SBS combined.
It's a problem of universals, not individuals.
[+] [-] crdoconnor|9 years ago|reply
I don't think the ridiculousness of what they preach matters all that much. It's more about linking the network of power brokers than it is about perpetuating the neoliberal religion.
[+] [-] yuhong|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|9 years ago|reply
* Business is more competitive than ever. But in reality, we have more monopolies and duopolies than ever. Peter Thiel's "Zero to One" is all about how to achieve monopoly. Businesses in the US hate competing on price. Without strong antitrust enforcement, which the US hasn't had in decades, the number of players decreases until there's no price competition. How many Internet providers can you choose from in the US? How many in the UK or Germany?
* We live in an age of entrepreneurialism. But the big companies are making all the money. The Economist writes: "A large number of businesspeople who were drawn in by the cult of entrepreneurship encountered only failure and now eke out marginal existences with little provision for their old age." All YC applicants should read that.
* Business is getting faster. They compare the fast rise of the automobile. Electricity and aircraft were also deployed faster than the Internet. Progress in the first 50 years of aviation zoomed like the semiconductor industry. Then in the late 1960s, it was all done - the Concorde, the Boeing 747, the SR-71, and the Saturn V had all flown. Everything since then has been a minor improvement.
* Globalisation is both inevitable and irreversible. The Economist comments "In 1880-1914 the world was in many ways just as globalised as it is today; it still fell victim to war and autarky." The causes of World War One are worth studying. Nobody really wanted it, and it happened anyway. Before WWI, Germany's biggest trading partner was France.
[+] [-] sdenton4|9 years ago|reply
My feeling is that there are a lot of basic tech improvements just on the horizon, we start figuring out more ways to bring machine learning into hard fundamental problems of industrial design, medical diagnosis, and so on.
Which of course leads to inevitable discussions of displaced highly skilled labor; it's not clear that the areas of fast improvement will lead to a good distribution of positive outcomes, as we've discussed here so many times before...
On the whole, though, I agree with the other three points.
[+] [-] dimino|9 years ago|reply
I feel like, in general, your comment cherry picks examples, and falls victim to the recall bias.
[+] [-] milesf|9 years ago|reply
I'm reminded of the story of garbagemen strike that brought New York City to their knees, while the Irish Banking Crisis caused only a blip because people turned to alternative forms of currency. Real managers provide real value solving real problems, and are well liked by their employees. Unfortunately most management nowadays is awful, and needs to be pruned.
[+] [-] amorphid|9 years ago|reply
Hoever, my research has revealed that one woman can develop 1-to-N babies in a single node. And one man can help instantiate 1-to-N babies in multiple nodes. This is why I'm a fan of diversity hiring. As you can see, I have a strong understanding of message passing, concurrency, parallelism, the actor model, and multiple inheritance.
Now, given that we've established that I understand what you do, allow me, and all of your other bosses, give you an immutable set of instructions for you to process in that finite state machine you call a job.
Now that we're on the same page, can you show me how to use BitTorrent? I want to download the last season of Game of Thrones. My 401K includes an S&P 500 index fund, which owns shares of Time Warner, which owns HBO. So it's like I already own that content. Also, how do I erase my browser history? I accidentally visited a website with pop up ads, and my browser is filled with porn. Don't worry about the downloads those ads were triggered though, as I can delete those files myself.</sarcasm>
[+] [-] scandox|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmeredith|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jtcond13|9 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/140900879879520256
[+] [-] calpaterson|9 years ago|reply
The professionalisation of management surely has problems but it's important to at least characterise the prevailing orthodoxy accurately...and this article does not.
[+] [-] spangry|9 years ago|reply
He was brought in by MacArthur during the post-WW2 occupation of Japan to help get their industry running again. You can see some of the seeds of TQM/The Toyota Production System in his management philosophies.
His management theories are interesting to me because of the emphasis placed on leadership, and the success and failure of systems of production being almost entirely their responsibility (he claimed around 85% of production variance was due to systemic factors i.e. entirely within managerial control).
Some of his 'deadly diseases' seem particularly relevant in this thread. I've seen many MBA/MPA trained managers makes these errors:
The "Seven Deadly Diseases" include:
- Lack of constancy of purpose
- Emphasis on short-term profits
- Evaluation by performance, merit rating, or annual review of performance
- Mobility of management
- Running a company on visible figures alone
- Excessive medical costs
- Excessive costs of warranty, fueled by lawyers who work for contingency fees
"A Lesser Category of Obstacles" includes:
- Neglecting long-range planning
- Relying on technology to solve problems
- Seeking examples to follow rather than developing solutions
- Excuses, such as "our problems are different"
- The mistaken belief that management skills can be taught in classes
- Reliance on quality control departments rather than management, supervisors, managers of purchasing, and production workers
- Placing blame on workforces who are only responsible for 15% of mistakes where the system designed by management is responsible for 85% of the unintended consequences
- Relying on quality inspection rather than improving product quality
[+] [-] badsock|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mindcrime|9 years ago|reply
And that's even more true because the airline example is actually flawed. Not all consolidation reduces competition. Look at the past few years, where Delta bought Continental and American and US Airways merged. You'd say that the number of "major" carriers dropped by two. Fine... now look at the Alaska Airlines / Virgin America merger... arguably Alaska is now on the cusp of becoming a "major" carrier, which can compete with the likes of American, Delta, United and Southwest.
So it was consolidation, but did it make things more or less oligarchical? The answer isn't as straight-forward as you might think. Likewise, the acquisition of Airtran by Southwest may actually have created my competition by giving Southwest more planes, gates, and routes - including their first few international routes.
None of this is to say that "management theory" is complete, perfect, or even useful. But this article fails to convince me that it's all just "dead ideas" either.
[+] [-] lkrubner|9 years ago|reply
"The backlash against globalisation points to a glaring underlying weakness of management theory: its naivety about politics. Modern management orthodoxies were forged in the era from 1980 to 2008, when liberalism was in the ascendant and middle-of-the-road politicians were willing to sign up to global rules. But today’s world is very different. Productivity growth is dismal in the West, companies are fusing at a furious rate, entrepreneurialism is stuttering, populism is on the rise and the old rules of business are being torn up. "
It is worrisome how much people pay for books that teach things that are plainly wrong. They mention Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat” but there are a lot of others they could have listed. For the last 40 years there has been almost constant rhetoric from business writers about the way that business was becoming more and more competitive, and yet the numbers show that exactly the opposite was happening: new business creation has been in decline since the 1970s, and consolidation means that business has become less and less competitive for the last 40 years. Monopolies have become more common. Patent laws and copyrights have been extended to make monopoly easier. It is true that if you are trying to start a new business, the situation has become increasingly bleak since the 1970s, so from the point of view of someone just starting out, things have become harder, and perhaps some people mean that when they say "things are more competitive". But that isn't the competition of one business against another, that's the competition of one worker against another. We should be clear about our terminology.
[+] [-] jkraker|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adekok|9 years ago|reply
I've seen engineers promoted to management, who suddenly drink the kool-aid that they're "better" than the engineers they worked beside a month ago. Now that they're managers, they know better.
The sheer infantilization of the rank and file by managers is appalling, and wide-spread. Such as hiring an expert in the field, and then ignoring everything they say.
Good organizations say "Look, I know that's the best way to solve the problem, but the customer doesn't have time or money for that, so we need something else".
Bad organizations say "You're just an engineer, and wouldn't understand the trade-offs inherent in customer interaction".
[+] [-] eli_gottlieb|9 years ago|reply
0) Management is independent of any particular firm. You can "bring in" managers or managerial ideas from the outside, impose them from the top down, and any given firm will not only continue functioning, but function much better.
The evidence shows that good management is intimately tied-up with the particular circumstances of each firm, and with obtaining information about firm operations from the bottom up.
[+] [-] c3534l|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] projectileboy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tacostakohashi|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sudshekhar|9 years ago|reply
Most people go for the 'network' and the validation that the school gives you. So no matter how outdated their curriculum gets, as long as
a) their current alums promote and guide future ones (shouldn't be any problem)
b) They are able to continuously source smart people
c) Nobody comes up with a better alternative system to identifying future leaders
These schools should have no problem.
======
IMO, (a) will never be a problem for these schools. The supply of smart undergrads/students is also assured given our innate inertia, FOMO and the perceived lack of growth in non-mba fields as we grow older.
Thus, (c) i.e. somebody coming up with a better metric/validation mechanism to source top leaders should be the biggest concern for these schools.
The lack of formalism and accountability in the curriculum (specially in the softer subjects) means that it's unlikely any one finding/study/trend can deal a major blow to these institutions. For every Enron, they can cite a Jack Welch.
tl;dr: Slow gradual change/reflection is unlikely to change these schools much. Disruption is what's needed.
[+] [-] throw2016|9 years ago|reply
This is a management class who skate along looking for the next opportunity to rinse repeat the same playbook. There is no leadership or imagination here.
There is a crisis of leadership, a crisis of accountability, an elitist club who look out for each other and extreme compensation with parachutes even for failure.
The whole field of management has not delivered a single good idea, its taken individuals who go against the wind to show a glimpse of the possibilites leaving in their wake the tedious industry of management courses and case studies as magic formulas for success that outside of their original context have no chance of replication.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nunez|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daxfohl|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Balgair|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vonnik|9 years ago|reply
It's not even clear that the four ideas cited in the magazine are actually prevalent in management theory. The piece itself did almost nothing to substantiate that.
One of the best books on management theory is War and Peace. The central idea in war is simply that good lieutenants are more useful and more rare than the sycophants and adjutants who circle the chiefs of staff.
One of the second best ideas about management is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_leadership
The main job of managers is to make the lives and tasks of competent individual contributors go more smoothly.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jimnotgym|9 years ago|reply