3 ms·
As much as I think poorly of much of the "soft science", there's no reason that there can't be such a thing as management science. I think that we in the news.
by tjic 17y ago
As much as I think poorly of much of the "soft science", there's no reason that there can't be such a thing as management science.
I think that we in the news.yc culture all agree that the following is a good approach to take to assertions and thesis floated about how to run a company, no?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
Elements of scientific method
* 3.1 Characterizations
* 3.2 Hypothesis development
* 3.3 Predictions from the hypothesis
* 3.4 Experiments
* 3.5 Evaluation and improvement
* 3.6 Confirmation
- davidw 17y agoThe problem is running any kind of controlled experiment. There are oodles of variables involved. Granted, there are probably a few situations where something useful might be gleaned, but I just don't buy the idea of management as a science.
- eries 17y agoThere are similar problems in astronomy, cosmology, geology - and yet, we can still do science in those fields. Management science is hard, but management mythology is worse.
- nivi 17y agoMaybe it's really 'management engineering'. The application of science and math to the practice of building businesses.
- camccann 17y agoDomains of scientific inquiry can be roughly considered along two axes: ability to partition the world into context-free discrete objects, and ability to test predictions by direct intervention. The former includes the type of abstract simplifications that people laugh at physicists for ("consider a spherical cow in a vacuum..."); the latter refers to the naive concept of the scientific method as an iterative "hypothesize, experiment, repeat" approach. Physics sits far in the "easy" corner, which is why it's the shining city-on-a-hill ideal of scientific success. Cosmology and the like are way down the "non-intervention" axis, where testing is awkward. Down the context-heavy axis are things like biology, studying systems that can't be neatly decomposed. In the far "difficult" corner, both analysis and testing are sufficiently difficult that constant vigilance is necessary to prevent the entire field from being overrun by convincing-sounding bullshit. Evolutionary biology is the only obvious success story I can think of in this quadrant, and even that has been intermittently plagued by dubious ideas (e.g., the "group selection" fallacy). To take something like "management science", and do actual science is not just hard, it's fantastically difficult and requires a level of clear-thinking rational discipline far beyond the demands of most fields.
- philwelch 17y agoThere's also applying the scientific method to what you do--A/B testing against different web designs for instance.