9 ms·

The management myth (2006)

240 points by wtbob 10y ago

devonkim 10y ago
People interested in the topic of the great farce that is modern business management should read in Jeffrey Pfeffer's Leadership Bullshit that also criticizes the management industry as well as modern corporations' incentive structures for leaders that make the optimum choice for leaders to lie and deceive.
woodandsteel 10y ago
Companies hire M.B.A.'s and consulting firms because management is so hard. Alas, I think the fundamental reason for this is that the human psyche was designed by evolution to operate in small foraging bands, not large, hierarchical organizations, and it is really hard to get anything so unnatural to work very well.
- dilemma 10y ago
  My belief is that, after working in a couple of dysfunctional companies, organization design with proper work and communication processes, and effective management, is the "secret" to company success. Almost no one seems to understand what management is and that it is a job in itself, just like being a designer or engineer is. That being said, I've studied management and agree that as it's being taught it is indeed inane. Currently, I'm learning how to not manage a company by working as a grunt and being managed. I think this experience will be very valuable in the future as I intent to start a company.
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    Can you walk us through your idea of the daily work of a manager, since you say it's "a job in itself"? I understand that if you give a person a title and tell them to sit around for 40 hours a week and collect a paycheck, they'll invent ways to stretch that out, but in real terms, what are the daily objectives that a manager must address? How many people can one manage before they need to commit their attention 100% to management? 10 subordinates? 5? 1? Is someone not a "real manager" as long as they have time to do code work on the side? Is a manager who does code automatically less qualified than one that would ensure his managerial duties exclude any time for other pursuits? Is someone only a legitimate "manager" if they went to school for it? Can it be self-taught? I've had management positions before so I have my own answers to these questions, but I'm curious about yours.
  - 7952 10y ago
    > My belief is that, after working in a couple of dysfunctional companies, organization design with proper work and communication processes, and effective management,] These are principles that people generally agree with. However, applying them with force from the top can do more harm than good. You can have a couple of possible outcomes: * The process will be badly designed and ignored. * The process will be badly designed and not ignored. Designing good systems is very difficult and needs to be based on evidence.
- jldugger 10y ago
  There's many reasons to hire firms besides the one you defend. From the OP: > In one episode, when I got involved in winding up the failed subsidiary of a large European bank, I noticed on the expense ledger that a rival consulting firm had racked up $5 million in fees from the same subsidiary. “They were supposed to save the business,” said one client manager, rolling his eyes. “Actually,” he corrected himself, “they were supposed to keep the illusion going long enough for the boss to find a new job.”
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    I've witnessed this approach several times. Another variant That requires extra sociopath points is the double down strategy. In one case, the principal hired a big consulting firm to the tune of $10M, and created some crazy project that fucked up that part of the company badly. The principal sucked up to some industry group, got a big award, and subsequently got a big promotion and shoved some cannon fodder into his old job. Next step: cut off the funding oxygen, yank all of the consultants, and blame everything on the new people.
- tootie 10y ago
  They provide intellectual cover. When you're approaching some completely new line of business, any early decisions you make are bound to be educated guesses. Management consultants are paid to come in, act confident, make wild guesses with apparent certainty, and give you something tangible to show to your backers that you're taking the smartest path. It's simulataneously worthless and extremely valuable. My current project was strategized, scoped and planned by McKinsey before we even drew the first wireframe. They spent 6 months coming up with a framework that was completely wiped out in the next 6 months. They provided no tangible benefit to the finished project, but who knows if they would have even gotten budget approval without their magical slideshows and spreadsheets.
- given 10y ago
  http://www.discovery.org/a/130 http://www.discovery.org/a/130
ACow_Adonis 10y ago
Really, what can i say other than a good piece of writing that essentially matches my own conclusions and experience (and of course, I'm biased because I have the philosophy degree like the author and, now having worked for government and a big private corp, though I've not had the "pleasure" for working for a consulting firm, I have had the "pleasure" of working with them when hired by senior executives). I feel I need to comment just so this article generates some discussion/anecdotes. All I can really conclude is that it seems to me to be common practice to look to consultancy either when you: -don't know what you're doing and from a merit point of view probably shouldn't be in the job you're in -you just need temporary labor without the problems/responsibilities of permanent employees -you need to hide/cover-up/massage something -you have a friend at the consultancy and you just continually hire/swap jobs while managing other people's money/resources and funnel it to each other -or...possibly combined with all of the above, you need to hide your work/non-work behind a veneer of social prestige and acceptability: if profits increase, you take credit, if it fails (and if you actually measure whether it fails you'll be in the minority), well, you can't be blamed, I mean you hired the best consultancy...i mean...they have letters next to their names and everything (well, more commonly everything except experience in the business they're consulting about). But in this sense, the management class and consultancy are beginning to blend together: its just all about image, project confidence, never introspect or question or measure anything properly, don't hold them to account, and remember...and the end of the day its about networks, how much you get paid in fees and bonuses, and your next job. No one's going to investigate your claims of past success anyway since its all behind NDA's and corporate veils. Unfortunately, I don't know what kind of legal position I will be in if I actually talk about some of the...err..."interesting" experiences I've had, and the people in these industries obviously have to protect their reputations (since that's about all they have) so I'll just take a quick quote from the article: "As I plowed through my shelfload of bad management books, I beheld a discipline that consists mainly of unverifiable propositions and cryptic anecdotes, is rarely if ever held accountable, and produces an inordinate number of catastrophically bad writers. It was all too familiar. There are, however, at least two crucial differences between philosophers and their wayward cousins. The first and most important is that philosophers are much better at knowing what they don’t know. The second is money. In a sense, management theory is what happens to philosophers when you pay them too much."
maxxxxx 10y ago
For the last 4 years I have worked for the first time in my career as employee of a big corporation. The "managing class" of MBAs reminds me of the way a communist state like East Germany was run. Centralized decision making, information withholding, the desire to plan out everything for years, saying one thing while meaning the opposite, hanging up motivational posters "we are innovative" while squashing innovation, ignoring of inconvenient facts and so on. All that comes with the appearance of "management science" and its own insider language.
- jostmey 10y ago
  Universities and Hospitals are infected with them. Like full blown infestation.
  - Amygaz 10y ago
    Yep! But his is not like an autoimmune disorder (e.g. type 1 diabetes). It's more like an acquire disease (i.e. type 2 diabetes), for which we fully understand how to prevent and alleviate, but somehow do not implement the necessary measures.
    - marblar 10y ago
      Guess whose job it is to implement the necessary measures.
      - lostlogin 10y ago
        Let's sort that at the preliminary scoping meeting before assigning it a team at the next quarterly.
    - popmystack 10y ago
      This comment is exactly what's wrong with the general hackernews community. You couldn't be more off base.
      - 10y ago
xyzzy4 10y ago
Management is sort of like dating, in that there are so many complexities and hidden variables that you have to go by instinct and experience. I don't see how it can be taught well in school. Try to use empathy and don't make enemies, I guess. Be careful about what you say to both your manager and underlings.
autokad 10y ago
to say philosophy majors are better managers than mbas already shows that the person doesnt know what an mba is. mbas can go any number of directions, and while one clearly does not need an mba to be a good manager, most (actually all) mbas I know that did go into management are much better at it than the philosophy majors I know. Edit: I also wanted to say that the management classes I did take were super interesting. Management 101 is more like a psychology class than I would have expected. Also, I'm pretty sure the author got an MBA between 2008 and 2010
- stephengillie 10y ago
  After taking management courses at a local community college, I was underwhelmed by the management courses at my state university's Top 15 Management College. The community college had courses on interpersonal management techniques, and the purpose of a manager in a company. (Hint: It's to find and remove a worker's blockers, not to brow-beat lazy workers.) Though designed for front-line supervisors and other low-middle management, it was some of the best management education I've ever received. I was stunned not to find any similar courses at the higher level.
  - iofj 10y ago
    I am a consultant, usually not in management, and management is about actually participating and propping up, rationalizing, and preventing the firm from dying confronted with management dictats such as: > Our firm wasn’t about bureaucratic control and robotic efficiency in the pursuit of profit. It was about love. As opposed to bursting out in laughter. I'll admit: I failed on this one.
    - iofj 10y ago
      What I found works best is that you assume that successful managers are just lucky. Treat them like an addicted gambler and you will be successful. More of what they think made them successful, never pointing out the odds and the fact that you'd expect people to succeed on occasion with pure randomness. Treat them like they know best and never pin them down demanding a response from them, because they don't have an answer, just "work" to create an answer. Yes technical people who bubble up are an exception to this for the first few years of being manager but it doesn't last.
tacos 10y ago
No love for the typical MBA consultant here, but one thing they seem to have over the philosophy crowd? Brevity. Good lord this post needs an editor.
- mrep 10y ago
  He also needs to read some economic textbooks (finance and accounting wouldn't hurt either).
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Accounting would likely help much more than the other two...
- ktRolster 10y ago
  His review of the literature is old too, with his primary sources being nearly a century old. If he had done a more comprehensive review, he would have found much of value. For example, there is no doubt that management philosophies from Japan (like ZQC or the Toyota way) have had an influence on American production. Is that all imaginary? Because US auto quality seems to have improved significantly as a result.
  - tacos 10y ago
    Deming! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming
  - stdbrouw 10y ago
    That's kind of the point, though, he's showing the roots of modern management practices go back to that era.
    - ktRolster 10y ago
      That's fine for a history lesson, but it's not very useful for supporting his thesis that management theory is useless. Using the same technique, you could show that chemistry is useless by showing that the roots of modern chemistry go back to alchemy. What a useless bunch of fluff that stuff was!
bobsil1 10y ago
Set a philosopher to catch a bullshitter. Nice.
hardmaru 10y ago
Check out this recent article from The Economist: Nothing special: MBAs are no longer prized by employers http://www.economist.com/whichmba/nothing-special-mbas-are-no-longer-prized-employers http://www.economist.com/whichmba/nothing-special-mbas-are-n... I think this is just the beginning of a much longer trend in management reform.
- Amygaz 10y ago
  That article doesn't look at if or how a MBA brings value. It mainly points out that a MBA is not a differentiating factor in easily finding a high-paying job, unless it was acquired from a highly regarded MBA program anymore. The reason being that, since MBA programs are money makers for their teaching institutions, they expanded like any rabbit population would do without predation, and with rabbits also getting into the Matrix, since you can earn a MBA from the cozy cushion of your pillow in your bedroom.
digi_owl 10y ago
The basic thing about the MBA is that it boils down the inner workings of a widget factory to generic parts. This is all well and good when your inputs are chips or bolts, but when they are humans things break down fast.
mixmastamyk 10y ago
From Ben Rich's biography, about Harvard Business School: 2/3 HBS == BS.
xivzgrev 10y ago
"In my experience, for what it’s worth, consultants monitored the progress of former clients about as diligently as they checked up on ex-spouses (of which there were many). " Former consultant here. That is 100% true - the metric of success is whether clients buy more work, not how successful your recommendations were (and there can be many reasons to buy consulting services beyond they produced successful strategies)
- bla2 10y ago
  What are other reasons?
  - slgeorge 10y ago
    Access to skills, networks or resources you don't have. For any significant decision it can be valuable to get a different perspective. It can also be a way of protecting confidentiality. Lets say that you are deciding whether to sell a business unit, or to ramp up investment to try and break through. - Skills benefit: creating the financial models is something many companies don't do all the time. Using an external consultant may also benefit as they may know current industry valuations. - Network benefit: They might know other people in the segment who would be interested in your business unit. (for product development this is a better benefit). Counter-argument, it's part of managements job to know about the industry so your own network should be enough. - Resource benefit: The whole team is busy so bringing in external resource to consider the problem lets internal resource keep focusing on existing business. The counter-argument is that if this is the most important thing to do then existing resource should be focusing on it. - Different perspective: Someone coming from the outside who's not part of your group think. You can sometimes get access to real expects - counter argument is that they're often not real specialists, you have to test. - Protecting confidentiality: You may not want it known that you're considering selling the unit. Consultants can act as a natural firewall. Tends to be more useful if you're looking at an external purchase - since in my example they'd have to crawl through the numbers of the unit and that makes it obvious. The benefit no-one talks about: - CYA: it's a tough decision and may turn out to be wrong. Helps to have "blah blah international consultancy says that X market will do Y and recommended as follows ...". Counter-argument: get some integrity. In fairness it can help to bolster an argument to have external 'calls to authority'.
Dwolb 10y ago
A point-of-view from the essay is the author dislikes employees who can't think critically. The big issue I have with the piece is that poor critical thinking skills isn't an issue with only MBAs. Every field and every degree has a spectrum of people with poor critical thinking skills to good critical thinking skills. So yes, dumbly putting up a client-facing diagram of a 5 forces analysis might be pretty stupid, but knowing to think about the role government might play in the firm's ability to capture profits is good practice. Similarly in hardware, blindly following a manufacturer's board layout is dumb too if you don't understand the specific needs of your application and how the schematic and board might change.
- dilemma 10y ago
  Inability to think critically or be creative often come as a result of management. Positions are too narrowly defined, so operators lack context for their work. Without information, you literally can't think at all.
  - RobertKerans 10y ago
    To put slightly positive spin on that, is being uncreative not a benefit in management? In my experience, those that are creative (although that's a pretty nebulous term) seem to, as a rule, be fairly—deeply uncomfortable in management positions, because creativity is curtailed - more prosaic organisational skills are more important.
  - wallace_f 10y ago
    >Inability to think critically or be creative often come as a result of management. Unfortunately, in my experience management does not want you to think critically. They want you to do what you are told. From the article: >... the science of handling pig iron is so great and amounts to so much that it is impossible for the man who is best suited to this type of work to understand the principles of this science, or even to work in accordance with these principles, without the aid of a man better educated than he is. This is so accurate a description of management in my experience. Unfortunately, I have not always worked for the best companies, but I don't know if it's the same at the best places.
aryehof 10y ago
I'm somewhat unclear why management consultants are hired. 1. Is it to help management solve problems they can't themselves solve? 2. Is it to show and teach how to manage? 3. Is it to help improve the management process and organizational structure?
- refurb 10y ago
  You missed the most important reason! To have an "objective outsider" look at a business issue in an "unbiased" way. Please note my quotation marks. When I was a consultant, the purpose of hiring us ranged from a temporary extra pair of hands to the above. Most projects were somewhere in between. In terms of the "unbiased view", every single company knew what they should do. These were smart people. However, internal politics prevented them from getting the ok from leadership. So, you hire an outside consulting firm and when someone says "that's a bad idea" you hold up the McKinsey deck and say "these smart guys think it's the right decision". Works nearly every time.
  - enraged_camel 10y ago
    It works the other way around too: consultants make very convenient scapegoats, which allow managers and executives to push for change (via the consultants they hire) without risking their own neck.
    - digi_owl 10y ago
      You get a fuckton of this in government as well. Want to do something, but you know the public will riot if you propose it? Hire some big name consultancy to write a report that basically deliver the same message, but now with an air of clinical objectivity...
    - wallace_f 10y ago
      This thread of thoughts is the reality I have seen first hand. Management consultants are simply there for often political reasons. Sometimes as an extra pair of hands, but often not. In addition to the reasons given, it was also sometimes as simple as inept ivory tower management having lost faith in group and deciding they needed to hire real pros to come in and fix things. Another one: Management never wants to point the finger at themselves. They hire some real pros to come in and lay down what went wrong. I hated that job--swimming in bullshit all day every day. I have so many ridiculous stories I've experienced in my short time doing that kind of work that I don't think the average person would believe.
jomamaxx 10y ago
You don't take an MBA to learn how to manage people. An MBA teaches you about the fundamentals of business and organizations: Finance, economics, microeconomics, marketing, accounting, management accounting, and a lot of stuff in between. MBA's are 'business wonks' - they may or may not make good leaders or managers. The tool of the software developer is code, the tool of the MBA is a spreadsheet or an analysis framework. It's not remotely about people skills.
singingfish 10y ago
Good article. Presumably because I did something bad in a previous life I apparently have a PhD in information systems management (fortunately these days I make my living by bending computers to do my will instead). The whole field is infested with ideology. One reason I'm a failed academic is because of the whole prioritisation of convention over a logical evaluation of the actual problem space. Because I prioritised the latter over the former (and my subfield was especially ideological) I worked more slowly than those making convention-based shortcuts. On the other hand my thesis was accepted with spelling mistake corrections required only :P. Also I was unaware of Taylor's fudging of his data. Nobody ever draws attention to that, and presumably when I was reading the originals I skimmed that part due to looking for specific information which never made it into later write-ups as I couldn't make it relevant enough to my narrative (thus I never re-read the originals).
- ktRolster 10y ago
  I apparently have a PhD in information systems management I honestly didn't know that was possible.
  - singingfish 10y ago
    yep, baffles me as well. Also the fact that it got through with spelling mistake corrections only :o
- singingfish 10y ago
  Mintzberg's work on the structure of organisations, and what's been built on top of it on the other hand is quite interesting. Glouberman and Mintzberg's followup work on organisational structure in healthcare is pretty good too (wrong but good). Glouberman is a philosopher too which fortuitously makes things relevant to the OP. They make a differentiation between cure (doctors) versus care (nurses). I'm feel that computer hackers are rather like doctors and nurses in that regard. High levels of professional autonomy and prioritisation for the doctor level hackers (e.g. I've been given Dr House level free reign to diagnose and cure a system that's been sick for at lest the last two-ish years, and nobody else has been able to work out what's wrong with it). Junior devs are more like nurses, working under direction to treat symptoms to make the patient better but where the architectural considerations are less important. We currently have a Clinical Nurse Specialist level hacker trying to bolt some new behaviour on top of a very sick subsystem (written back in the day when nobody knew what they were doing). I'm interested to see what he makes of it - he already dismissed extending the subsystem out of hand, and justifiably so, so I'm looking forward to seeing his next decisions.
mwfunk 10y ago
The article looked familiar, and it turns out that I had read the author's book on the same subject published several years later. It goes into a lot more detail about the author's personal experiences in the management consulting business, plus much more history WRT MBA programs and where the whole concept of management as a standalone discipline came from. It's not my field so I don't know how fair the criticisms were. Still, it was a really interesting window into an area that overlaps quite a bit with the tech industry. Anyhoo, the book that emerged from this article is "The Management Myth: Debunking Modern Business Philosophy": https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002PQ7B72/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002PQ7B72/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
yuhong 10y ago
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.
- Amygaz 10y ago
  I think you may have the beginning of experimental setup to test the hypothesis that the value brought by a MBA is not different than zero.
miraj 10y ago
I am a bit perplexed. I think there is a mechanism to prevent duplicate postings on HN?! Wonder what happened to the filter? I posted this same article earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11928990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11928990
sbarski 10y ago
Brilliant article. I only wish I'd read it 10 years ago...
wallace_f 10y ago
>… the science of handling pig iron is so great and amounts to so much that it is impossible for the man who is best suited to this type of work to understand the principles of this science, or even to work in accordance with these principles, without the aid of a man better educated than he is. That is the most accurate description of MBAs and anyone involved in selling management consulting and advice. It boils down to is "it's complicated, you need an expert." Don't ask why, you'll learn your lesson quick enough: "we're smarter than you, and we're really good at expressing it." In fact, that seems to be the primary skill required in this field: expressing that 'we're smarter than you.' I don't believe for a second the selection process at the most prestigious consulting firms is biased towards undergrad institution prestige for any other reason. Plenty of firms looking for great engineers/developers will hire a great candidate with a degree from a less-than-prestigious undergrad. I've never even heard of that in consulting and finance (I'm sure there's some exceptions, but I bet they're few and far between, and probably due to personal connections).
kfk 10y ago
Well, I did study BA 1.5 years (for free in DK) and I have mixed feelings. From one end, it's just what the author says as there is a lot of fluff floating around. From another end, though, we did a lot of field studies, which included inferencial statistics, that focused on teaching how to properly test theories. Look, the business world is full of complex issues that need research, humans are difficult. The problem with MBAs is that they don't take BA research very seriously - they pretend to teach academic papers just by reading the abstracts and the easy material. Core competency is actually a great line of research, unfortunately by the time it reaches those doing an MBA it has been stripped of all the useful parts and it has become a mere slogan.
Annatar 10y ago
The article confirms my own suspicions and experience: management is the art of selling bullshit, and being a deterrent rather than help (which it is supposed to be, and bills itself as). The most disturbing (and correct in my observation) thought in the article is that there is now a new ruling class. And when I think about it, the management ruling class is like an octopus, like mafia, with connections and tendrils everywhere: it does not matter whether one is competent or benevolent, as long as one is well connected, the rest of the management mafiosos will always find "a slot" for one of their buddies and shove them somewhere to be a parasite in a company, parasite to the workers and society at large. And while they might be the ruling class at the moment, like a metastized cancer of society, now that we are aware of their presence, I say: nothing lasts forever. Bullshit cannot defeat logic, because problems are real, and bullshit cannot solve problems, only logic and knowledge can.
- dvdcxn 10y ago
  There must always be bullshit for logic to prevail over. There must always be...bureaucracy.
mactitan 10y ago
The first myth of management is that it exists. http://www.murphys-laws.com/murphy/murphy-technology.html http://www.murphys-laws.com/murphy/murphy-technology.html
- Amygaz 10y ago
  That list is funny. My preferred line is the first one: "Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence". It applies to so many behaviors in various fields. Then there is one I am not sure I agree with, it really depends on what "level of management" means: "The degree of technical competence is inversely proportional to the level of management". In my experience, technically-challenged engineers, but who somehow end up with management/supervision roles, also s.ck at that too, big time, so much that you'd wish there was a universal law against it.
mannykannot 10y ago
I agree up to a point, but I doubt any successful business was run by managers who communicated in the style of Heidegger.
SmellTheGlove 10y ago
10 years later, this article still holds up. It's not necessarily the MBA that's at fault, but it is a degree handed out by too many institutions to students with too little experience to benefit from it. The MBA has become a career changer degree, rather than a supplement to people with solid leadership credentials - and the reason is obvious, once you have a track record, you don't need the degree, so schools have found a way to collect the tuition somewhere else. And the curricula don't vary as greatly across schools as the marketing materials would lead you to believe. I am biased. I did some time in a large consultancy. I also chose a JD over an MBA precisely because it was different than the subject matter and way of thinking that I was exposed to on a daily basis at my employer and clients. So to a large degree, I agree with Stewart's position. Every Fortune 500 is pushing for "different perspectives" and "out of the box thinking" - and they pursue it through diversity. However, they hire the same consultants as the rest of their peers and advance individuals with the same degree from the same schools as everyone else. The hired diversity and diverse perspectives wash out somewhere in the middle management ranks. I'm now a director at a fortune 500 and I don't fit the profile at all. There are zero people in my peer group with backgrounds like mine, which is fine. But there are zero people in my peer group with backgrounds similar to mine (meaning non-traditional degrees and work experience) and that probably isn't fine. Naturally, the corporate initiatives are the same as what every other large corporation has done over the last decade - and it's funny because we tend to go last, and still don't learn from the mistakes of other companies. I suppose we don't even hire the good MBAs.
hacknat 10y ago
It is interesting that the most successful founders of companies are almost always domain experts in their field, or, at least, have spent time in the trenches of their domain. Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, Ellison, Page, and Brin all studied CS. Jobs had Woz, and is the exception that proves the rule (Jobs was maniacally product obsessed). Jack Welch was an Engineer. The list goes on and on. Of all the topics that pop up on Hacker News the fact that MBAs are not useful to founding companies or creating new products seems to be a sentiment we share very little controversy over. Yet why have MBA types come to dominate the ranks of the startup scene? I used to think that this trend wan't a big deal, but now I'm becoming convinced that MBA types cannot, generally speaking, found successful companies.
- kps 10y ago
  William Hewlett and David Packard, for a textbook example of a company built by engineers and then plundered by administrators.
- simonswords82 10y ago
  > Yet why have MBA types come to dominate the ranks of the startup scene? Have they? I wasn't aware that MBAs were infiltrating the startup scene? Would be interested to hear about some examples. Edit: I totally agree that MBAs shouldn't be let anywhere near a startup.

240 points by wtbob 10y ago

People interested in the topic of the great farce that is modern business management should read in Jeffrey Pfeffer's Leadership Bullshit that also criticizes the management industry as well as modern corporations' incentive structures for leaders that make the optimum choice for leaders to lie and deceive.

woodandsteel 10y ago

Companies hire M.B.A.'s and consulting firms because management is so hard. Alas, I think the fundamental reason for this is that the human psyche was designed by evolution to operate in small foraging bands, not large, hierarchical organizations, and it is really hard to get anything so unnatural to work very well.

dilemma 10y ago
My belief is that, after working in a couple of dysfunctional companies, organization design with proper work and communication processes, and effective management, is the "secret" to company success. Almost no one seems to understand what management is and that it is a job in itself, just like being a designer or engineer is. That being said, I've studied management and agree that as it's being taught it is indeed inane. Currently, I'm learning how to not manage a company by working as a grunt and being managed. I think this experience will be very valuable in the future as I intent to start a company.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  Can you walk us through your idea of the daily work of a manager, since you say it's "a job in itself"? I understand that if you give a person a title and tell them to sit around for 40 hours a week and collect a paycheck, they'll invent ways to stretch that out, but in real terms, what are the daily objectives that a manager must address? How many people can one manage before they need to commit their attention 100% to management? 10 subordinates? 5? 1? Is someone not a "real manager" as long as they have time to do code work on the side? Is a manager who does code automatically less qualified than one that would ensure his managerial duties exclude any time for other pursuits? Is someone only a legitimate "manager" if they went to school for it? Can it be self-taught? I've had management positions before so I have my own answers to these questions, but I'm curious about yours.
- 7952 10y ago
  > My belief is that, after working in a couple of dysfunctional companies, organization design with proper work and communication processes, and effective management,] These are principles that people generally agree with. However, applying them with force from the top can do more harm than good. You can have a couple of possible outcomes: * The process will be badly designed and ignored. * The process will be badly designed and not ignored. Designing good systems is very difficult and needs to be based on evidence.
jldugger 10y ago
There's many reasons to hire firms besides the one you defend. From the OP: > In one episode, when I got involved in winding up the failed subsidiary of a large European bank, I noticed on the expense ledger that a rival consulting firm had racked up $5 million in fees from the same subsidiary. “They were supposed to save the business,” said one client manager, rolling his eyes. “Actually,” he corrected himself, “they were supposed to keep the illusion going long enough for the boss to find a new job.”
- Spooky23 10y ago
  I've witnessed this approach several times. Another variant That requires extra sociopath points is the double down strategy. In one case, the principal hired a big consulting firm to the tune of $10M, and created some crazy project that fucked up that part of the company badly. The principal sucked up to some industry group, got a big award, and subsequently got a big promotion and shoved some cannon fodder into his old job. Next step: cut off the funding oxygen, yank all of the consultants, and blame everything on the new people.
tootie 10y ago
They provide intellectual cover. When you're approaching some completely new line of business, any early decisions you make are bound to be educated guesses. Management consultants are paid to come in, act confident, make wild guesses with apparent certainty, and give you something tangible to show to your backers that you're taking the smartest path. It's simulataneously worthless and extremely valuable. My current project was strategized, scoped and planned by McKinsey before we even drew the first wireframe. They spent 6 months coming up with a framework that was completely wiped out in the next 6 months. They provided no tangible benefit to the finished project, but who knows if they would have even gotten budget approval without their magical slideshows and spreadsheets.
given 10y ago
http://www.discovery.org/a/130 http://www.discovery.org/a/130

ACow_Adonis 10y ago

Really, what can i say other than a good piece of writing that essentially matches my own conclusions and experience (and of course, I'm biased because I have the philosophy degree like the author and, now having worked for government and a big private corp, though I've not had the "pleasure" for working for a consulting firm, I have had the "pleasure" of working with them when hired by senior executives). I feel I need to comment just so this article generates some discussion/anecdotes. All I can really conclude is that it seems to me to be common practice to look to consultancy either when you: -don't know what you're doing and from a merit point of view probably shouldn't be in the job you're in -you just need temporary labor without the problems/responsibilities of permanent employees -you need to hide/cover-up/massage something -you have a friend at the consultancy and you just continually hire/swap jobs while managing other people's money/resources and funnel it to each other -or...possibly combined with all of the above, you need to hide your work/non-work behind a veneer of social prestige and acceptability: if profits increase, you take credit, if it fails (and if you actually measure whether it fails you'll be in the minority), well, you can't be blamed, I mean you hired the best consultancy...i mean...they have letters next to their names and everything (well, more commonly everything except experience in the business they're consulting about). But in this sense, the management class and consultancy are beginning to blend together: its just all about image, project confidence, never introspect or question or measure anything properly, don't hold them to account, and remember...and the end of the day its about networks, how much you get paid in fees and bonuses, and your next job. No one's going to investigate your claims of past success anyway since its all behind NDA's and corporate veils. Unfortunately, I don't know what kind of legal position I will be in if I actually talk about some of the...err..."interesting" experiences I've had, and the people in these industries obviously have to protect their reputations (since that's about all they have) so I'll just take a quick quote from the article: "As I plowed through my shelfload of bad management books, I beheld a discipline that consists mainly of unverifiable propositions and cryptic anecdotes, is rarely if ever held accountable, and produces an inordinate number of catastrophically bad writers. It was all too familiar. There are, however, at least two crucial differences between philosophers and their wayward cousins. The first and most important is that philosophers are much better at knowing what they don’t know. The second is money. In a sense, management theory is what happens to philosophers when you pay them too much."

maxxxxx 10y ago

For the last 4 years I have worked for the first time in my career as employee of a big corporation. The "managing class" of MBAs reminds me of the way a communist state like East Germany was run. Centralized decision making, information withholding, the desire to plan out everything for years, saying one thing while meaning the opposite, hanging up motivational posters "we are innovative" while squashing innovation, ignoring of inconvenient facts and so on. All that comes with the appearance of "management science" and its own insider language.

jostmey 10y ago
Universities and Hospitals are infected with them. Like full blown infestation.
- Amygaz 10y ago
  Yep! But his is not like an autoimmune disorder (e.g. type 1 diabetes). It's more like an acquire disease (i.e. type 2 diabetes), for which we fully understand how to prevent and alleviate, but somehow do not implement the necessary measures.
  - marblar 10y ago
    Guess whose job it is to implement the necessary measures.
    - lostlogin 10y ago
      Let's sort that at the preliminary scoping meeting before assigning it a team at the next quarterly.
  - popmystack 10y ago
    This comment is exactly what's wrong with the general hackernews community. You couldn't be more off base.
    - 10y ago

xyzzy4 10y ago

Management is sort of like dating, in that there are so many complexities and hidden variables that you have to go by instinct and experience. I don't see how it can be taught well in school. Try to use empathy and don't make enemies, I guess. Be careful about what you say to both your manager and underlings.

autokad 10y ago

to say philosophy majors are better managers than mbas already shows that the person doesnt know what an mba is. mbas can go any number of directions, and while one clearly does not need an mba to be a good manager, most (actually all) mbas I know that did go into management are much better at it than the philosophy majors I know. Edit: I also wanted to say that the management classes I did take were super interesting. Management 101 is more like a psychology class than I would have expected. Also, I'm pretty sure the author got an MBA between 2008 and 2010

stephengillie 10y ago
After taking management courses at a local community college, I was underwhelmed by the management courses at my state university's Top 15 Management College. The community college had courses on interpersonal management techniques, and the purpose of a manager in a company. (Hint: It's to find and remove a worker's blockers, not to brow-beat lazy workers.) Though designed for front-line supervisors and other low-middle management, it was some of the best management education I've ever received. I was stunned not to find any similar courses at the higher level.
- iofj 10y ago
  I am a consultant, usually not in management, and management is about actually participating and propping up, rationalizing, and preventing the firm from dying confronted with management dictats such as: > Our firm wasn’t about bureaucratic control and robotic efficiency in the pursuit of profit. It was about love. As opposed to bursting out in laughter. I'll admit: I failed on this one.
  - iofj 10y ago
    What I found works best is that you assume that successful managers are just lucky. Treat them like an addicted gambler and you will be successful. More of what they think made them successful, never pointing out the odds and the fact that you'd expect people to succeed on occasion with pure randomness. Treat them like they know best and never pin them down demanding a response from them, because they don't have an answer, just "work" to create an answer. Yes technical people who bubble up are an exception to this for the first few years of being manager but it doesn't last.

tacos 10y ago

No love for the typical MBA consultant here, but one thing they seem to have over the philosophy crowd? Brevity. Good lord this post needs an editor.

mrep 10y ago
He also needs to read some economic textbooks (finance and accounting wouldn't hurt either).
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Accounting would likely help much more than the other two...
ktRolster 10y ago
His review of the literature is old too, with his primary sources being nearly a century old. If he had done a more comprehensive review, he would have found much of value. For example, there is no doubt that management philosophies from Japan (like ZQC or the Toyota way) have had an influence on American production. Is that all imaginary? Because US auto quality seems to have improved significantly as a result.
- tacos 10y ago
  Deming! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming
- stdbrouw 10y ago
  That's kind of the point, though, he's showing the roots of modern management practices go back to that era.
  - ktRolster 10y ago
    That's fine for a history lesson, but it's not very useful for supporting his thesis that management theory is useless. Using the same technique, you could show that chemistry is useless by showing that the roots of modern chemistry go back to alchemy. What a useless bunch of fluff that stuff was!

bobsil1 10y ago

Set a philosopher to catch a bullshitter. Nice.

hardmaru 10y ago

Check out this recent article from The Economist: Nothing special: MBAs are no longer prized by employers http://www.economist.com/whichmba/nothing-special-mbas-are-no-longer-prized-employers http://www.economist.com/whichmba/nothing-special-mbas-are-n... I think this is just the beginning of a much longer trend in management reform.

Amygaz 10y ago
That article doesn't look at if or how a MBA brings value. It mainly points out that a MBA is not a differentiating factor in easily finding a high-paying job, unless it was acquired from a highly regarded MBA program anymore. The reason being that, since MBA programs are money makers for their teaching institutions, they expanded like any rabbit population would do without predation, and with rabbits also getting into the Matrix, since you can earn a MBA from the cozy cushion of your pillow in your bedroom.

digi_owl 10y ago

The basic thing about the MBA is that it boils down the inner workings of a widget factory to generic parts. This is all well and good when your inputs are chips or bolts, but when they are humans things break down fast.

mixmastamyk 10y ago

From Ben Rich's biography, about Harvard Business School: 2/3 HBS == BS.

xivzgrev 10y ago

"In my experience, for what it’s worth, consultants monitored the progress of former clients about as diligently as they checked up on ex-spouses (of which there were many). " Former consultant here. That is 100% true - the metric of success is whether clients buy more work, not how successful your recommendations were (and there can be many reasons to buy consulting services beyond they produced successful strategies)

bla2 10y ago
What are other reasons?
- slgeorge 10y ago
  Access to skills, networks or resources you don't have. For any significant decision it can be valuable to get a different perspective. It can also be a way of protecting confidentiality. Lets say that you are deciding whether to sell a business unit, or to ramp up investment to try and break through. - Skills benefit: creating the financial models is something many companies don't do all the time. Using an external consultant may also benefit as they may know current industry valuations. - Network benefit: They might know other people in the segment who would be interested in your business unit. (for product development this is a better benefit). Counter-argument, it's part of managements job to know about the industry so your own network should be enough. - Resource benefit: The whole team is busy so bringing in external resource to consider the problem lets internal resource keep focusing on existing business. The counter-argument is that if this is the most important thing to do then existing resource should be focusing on it. - Different perspective: Someone coming from the outside who's not part of your group think. You can sometimes get access to real expects - counter argument is that they're often not real specialists, you have to test. - Protecting confidentiality: You may not want it known that you're considering selling the unit. Consultants can act as a natural firewall. Tends to be more useful if you're looking at an external purchase - since in my example they'd have to crawl through the numbers of the unit and that makes it obvious. The benefit no-one talks about: - CYA: it's a tough decision and may turn out to be wrong. Helps to have "blah blah international consultancy says that X market will do Y and recommended as follows ...". Counter-argument: get some integrity. In fairness it can help to bolster an argument to have external 'calls to authority'.

Dwolb 10y ago

A point-of-view from the essay is the author dislikes employees who can't think critically. The big issue I have with the piece is that poor critical thinking skills isn't an issue with only MBAs. Every field and every degree has a spectrum of people with poor critical thinking skills to good critical thinking skills. So yes, dumbly putting up a client-facing diagram of a 5 forces analysis might be pretty stupid, but knowing to think about the role government might play in the firm's ability to capture profits is good practice. Similarly in hardware, blindly following a manufacturer's board layout is dumb too if you don't understand the specific needs of your application and how the schematic and board might change.

dilemma 10y ago
Inability to think critically or be creative often come as a result of management. Positions are too narrowly defined, so operators lack context for their work. Without information, you literally can't think at all.
- RobertKerans 10y ago
  To put slightly positive spin on that, is being uncreative not a benefit in management? In my experience, those that are creative (although that's a pretty nebulous term) seem to, as a rule, be fairly—deeply uncomfortable in management positions, because creativity is curtailed - more prosaic organisational skills are more important.
- wallace_f 10y ago
  >Inability to think critically or be creative often come as a result of management. Unfortunately, in my experience management does not want you to think critically. They want you to do what you are told. From the article: >... the science of handling pig iron is so great and amounts to so much that it is impossible for the man who is best suited to this type of work to understand the principles of this science, or even to work in accordance with these principles, without the aid of a man better educated than he is. This is so accurate a description of management in my experience. Unfortunately, I have not always worked for the best companies, but I don't know if it's the same at the best places.

aryehof 10y ago

I'm somewhat unclear why management consultants are hired. 1. Is it to help management solve problems they can't themselves solve? 2. Is it to show and teach how to manage? 3. Is it to help improve the management process and organizational structure?

refurb 10y ago
You missed the most important reason! To have an "objective outsider" look at a business issue in an "unbiased" way. Please note my quotation marks. When I was a consultant, the purpose of hiring us ranged from a temporary extra pair of hands to the above. Most projects were somewhere in between. In terms of the "unbiased view", every single company knew what they should do. These were smart people. However, internal politics prevented them from getting the ok from leadership. So, you hire an outside consulting firm and when someone says "that's a bad idea" you hold up the McKinsey deck and say "these smart guys think it's the right decision". Works nearly every time.
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  It works the other way around too: consultants make very convenient scapegoats, which allow managers and executives to push for change (via the consultants they hire) without risking their own neck.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    You get a fuckton of this in government as well. Want to do something, but you know the public will riot if you propose it? Hire some big name consultancy to write a report that basically deliver the same message, but now with an air of clinical objectivity...
  - wallace_f 10y ago
    This thread of thoughts is the reality I have seen first hand. Management consultants are simply there for often political reasons. Sometimes as an extra pair of hands, but often not. In addition to the reasons given, it was also sometimes as simple as inept ivory tower management having lost faith in group and deciding they needed to hire real pros to come in and fix things. Another one: Management never wants to point the finger at themselves. They hire some real pros to come in and lay down what went wrong. I hated that job--swimming in bullshit all day every day. I have so many ridiculous stories I've experienced in my short time doing that kind of work that I don't think the average person would believe.

jomamaxx 10y ago

You don't take an MBA to learn how to manage people. An MBA teaches you about the fundamentals of business and organizations: Finance, economics, microeconomics, marketing, accounting, management accounting, and a lot of stuff in between. MBA's are 'business wonks' - they may or may not make good leaders or managers. The tool of the software developer is code, the tool of the MBA is a spreadsheet or an analysis framework. It's not remotely about people skills.

singingfish 10y ago

Good article. Presumably because I did something bad in a previous life I apparently have a PhD in information systems management (fortunately these days I make my living by bending computers to do my will instead). The whole field is infested with ideology. One reason I'm a failed academic is because of the whole prioritisation of convention over a logical evaluation of the actual problem space. Because I prioritised the latter over the former (and my subfield was especially ideological) I worked more slowly than those making convention-based shortcuts. On the other hand my thesis was accepted with spelling mistake corrections required only :P. Also I was unaware of Taylor's fudging of his data. Nobody ever draws attention to that, and presumably when I was reading the originals I skimmed that part due to looking for specific information which never made it into later write-ups as I couldn't make it relevant enough to my narrative (thus I never re-read the originals).

ktRolster 10y ago
I apparently have a PhD in information systems management I honestly didn't know that was possible.
- singingfish 10y ago
  yep, baffles me as well. Also the fact that it got through with spelling mistake corrections only :o
singingfish 10y ago
Mintzberg's work on the structure of organisations, and what's been built on top of it on the other hand is quite interesting. Glouberman and Mintzberg's followup work on organisational structure in healthcare is pretty good too (wrong but good). Glouberman is a philosopher too which fortuitously makes things relevant to the OP. They make a differentiation between cure (doctors) versus care (nurses). I'm feel that computer hackers are rather like doctors and nurses in that regard. High levels of professional autonomy and prioritisation for the doctor level hackers (e.g. I've been given Dr House level free reign to diagnose and cure a system that's been sick for at lest the last two-ish years, and nobody else has been able to work out what's wrong with it). Junior devs are more like nurses, working under direction to treat symptoms to make the patient better but where the architectural considerations are less important. We currently have a Clinical Nurse Specialist level hacker trying to bolt some new behaviour on top of a very sick subsystem (written back in the day when nobody knew what they were doing). I'm interested to see what he makes of it - he already dismissed extending the subsystem out of hand, and justifiably so, so I'm looking forward to seeing his next decisions.

mwfunk 10y ago

The article looked familiar, and it turns out that I had read the author's book on the same subject published several years later. It goes into a lot more detail about the author's personal experiences in the management consulting business, plus much more history WRT MBA programs and where the whole concept of management as a standalone discipline came from. It's not my field so I don't know how fair the criticisms were. Still, it was a really interesting window into an area that overlaps quite a bit with the tech industry. Anyhoo, the book that emerged from this article is "The Management Myth: Debunking Modern Business Philosophy": https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002PQ7B72/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002PQ7B72/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

yuhong 10y ago

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.

Amygaz 10y ago
I think you may have the beginning of experimental setup to test the hypothesis that the value brought by a MBA is not different than zero.

miraj 10y ago

I am a bit perplexed. I think there is a mechanism to prevent duplicate postings on HN?! Wonder what happened to the filter? I posted this same article earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11928990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11928990

sbarski 10y ago

Brilliant article. I only wish I'd read it 10 years ago...

wallace_f 10y ago

>… the science of handling pig iron is so great and amounts to so much that it is impossible for the man who is best suited to this type of work to understand the principles of this science, or even to work in accordance with these principles, without the aid of a man better educated than he is. That is the most accurate description of MBAs and anyone involved in selling management consulting and advice. It boils down to is "it's complicated, you need an expert." Don't ask why, you'll learn your lesson quick enough: "we're smarter than you, and we're really good at expressing it." In fact, that seems to be the primary skill required in this field: expressing that 'we're smarter than you.' I don't believe for a second the selection process at the most prestigious consulting firms is biased towards undergrad institution prestige for any other reason. Plenty of firms looking for great engineers/developers will hire a great candidate with a degree from a less-than-prestigious undergrad. I've never even heard of that in consulting and finance (I'm sure there's some exceptions, but I bet they're few and far between, and probably due to personal connections).

kfk 10y ago

Well, I did study BA 1.5 years (for free in DK) and I have mixed feelings. From one end, it's just what the author says as there is a lot of fluff floating around. From another end, though, we did a lot of field studies, which included inferencial statistics, that focused on teaching how to properly test theories. Look, the business world is full of complex issues that need research, humans are difficult. The problem with MBAs is that they don't take BA research very seriously - they pretend to teach academic papers just by reading the abstracts and the easy material. Core competency is actually a great line of research, unfortunately by the time it reaches those doing an MBA it has been stripped of all the useful parts and it has become a mere slogan.

Annatar 10y ago

The article confirms my own suspicions and experience: management is the art of selling bullshit, and being a deterrent rather than help (which it is supposed to be, and bills itself as). The most disturbing (and correct in my observation) thought in the article is that there is now a new ruling class. And when I think about it, the management ruling class is like an octopus, like mafia, with connections and tendrils everywhere: it does not matter whether one is competent or benevolent, as long as one is well connected, the rest of the management mafiosos will always find "a slot" for one of their buddies and shove them somewhere to be a parasite in a company, parasite to the workers and society at large. And while they might be the ruling class at the moment, like a metastized cancer of society, now that we are aware of their presence, I say: nothing lasts forever. Bullshit cannot defeat logic, because problems are real, and bullshit cannot solve problems, only logic and knowledge can.

dvdcxn 10y ago
There must always be bullshit for logic to prevail over. There must always be...bureaucracy.

mactitan 10y ago

The first myth of management is that it exists. http://www.murphys-laws.com/murphy/murphy-technology.html http://www.murphys-laws.com/murphy/murphy-technology.html

Amygaz 10y ago
That list is funny. My preferred line is the first one: "Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence". It applies to so many behaviors in various fields. Then there is one I am not sure I agree with, it really depends on what "level of management" means: "The degree of technical competence is inversely proportional to the level of management". In my experience, technically-challenged engineers, but who somehow end up with management/supervision roles, also s.ck at that too, big time, so much that you'd wish there was a universal law against it.

mannykannot 10y ago

I agree up to a point, but I doubt any successful business was run by managers who communicated in the style of Heidegger.

SmellTheGlove 10y ago

10 years later, this article still holds up. It's not necessarily the MBA that's at fault, but it is a degree handed out by too many institutions to students with too little experience to benefit from it. The MBA has become a career changer degree, rather than a supplement to people with solid leadership credentials - and the reason is obvious, once you have a track record, you don't need the degree, so schools have found a way to collect the tuition somewhere else. And the curricula don't vary as greatly across schools as the marketing materials would lead you to believe. I am biased. I did some time in a large consultancy. I also chose a JD over an MBA precisely because it was different than the subject matter and way of thinking that I was exposed to on a daily basis at my employer and clients. So to a large degree, I agree with Stewart's position. Every Fortune 500 is pushing for "different perspectives" and "out of the box thinking" - and they pursue it through diversity. However, they hire the same consultants as the rest of their peers and advance individuals with the same degree from the same schools as everyone else. The hired diversity and diverse perspectives wash out somewhere in the middle management ranks. I'm now a director at a fortune 500 and I don't fit the profile at all. There are zero people in my peer group with backgrounds like mine, which is fine. But there are zero people in my peer group with backgrounds similar to mine (meaning non-traditional degrees and work experience) and that probably isn't fine. Naturally, the corporate initiatives are the same as what every other large corporation has done over the last decade - and it's funny because we tend to go last, and still don't learn from the mistakes of other companies. I suppose we don't even hire the good MBAs.

hacknat 10y ago

It is interesting that the most successful founders of companies are almost always domain experts in their field, or, at least, have spent time in the trenches of their domain. Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, Ellison, Page, and Brin all studied CS. Jobs had Woz, and is the exception that proves the rule (Jobs was maniacally product obsessed). Jack Welch was an Engineer. The list goes on and on. Of all the topics that pop up on Hacker News the fact that MBAs are not useful to founding companies or creating new products seems to be a sentiment we share very little controversy over. Yet why have MBA types come to dominate the ranks of the startup scene? I used to think that this trend wan't a big deal, but now I'm becoming convinced that MBA types cannot, generally speaking, found successful companies.

kps 10y ago
William Hewlett and David Packard, for a textbook example of a company built by engineers and then plundered by administrators.
simonswords82 10y ago
> Yet why have MBA types come to dominate the ranks of the startup scene? Have they? I wasn't aware that MBAs were infiltrating the startup scene? Would be interested to hear about some examples. Edit: I totally agree that MBAs shouldn't be let anywhere near a startup.