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Management theory is becoming a compendium of dead ideas

254 points by fraqed 10y ago

daxfohl 10y ago
So is physics. Perhaps this is already the next middle ages without realizing it.
known 10y ago
TOP-DOWN: Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate and deceive others), Narcissism (egotism and self-obsession), Psychopathy (the lack of remorse and empathy), Sadism (pleasure in the suffering of others);
jtcond13 10y ago
"Business books are basically romance novels for men. Silly fantasies, terrible writing, large type, cheap paper and one good idea per book" - Benedict Evans https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/140900879879520256 https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/140900879879520256
jkraker 10y ago
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.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  They should have added: 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.
- adekok 10y ago
  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".
  - monocasa 10y ago
    > 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. To be fair, while I've absolutely seen what you're talking about, I've also seen a slightly different phenomenon get blamed for that. Part of a manager's job IMO is to remove systemic paralysis. Some times that means making a totally arbitrary decision just so people move forward. Even if it turns out it was the wrong solution to whatever problem, just making the decision and allowing people to explore the problem space from different directions can have some value.
    - adekok 10y ago
      I know a number of people in the military, and there's a lot to be said for asserting command presence. Where it doesn't matter what the orders are, just that someone is there giving clear orders. I've rarely seen that in managers. The issue I was talking about above was that managers really can think of themselves as "better" or having "secret knowledge" that enables them to lord it over the peasant engineers. I have ethical issues with such an attitude. People are people, no matter how small.
      - cerrelio 10y ago
        My company's style is a culture of consensus. No one really "gives orders," because that's too aggressive, and someone might feel hurt. I find it fucking awful. If there's disagreement about something, usually another person is brought into the mix for "input," ad infinitum. This happens until the issue becomes a non-issue or a disagreement over a new issue occurs. I might disagree with someone if they ordered me to do something I think is wrong, but I actually admire them for making a decision. There's nothing worse than making no progress because no one has the balls or authority to say "there's contention over this issue, but I think X is the best course."
cjf4 10y ago
>Management theories are organised around four basic ideas, repeated ad nauseam in every business book you read or business conference you attend, that bear almost no relation to reality. This a weak premise whose scant evidence is primarily composed of pop business airport books. And the idea that the vast, diverse, and nebulous world of management can be distilled to four ideas is a joke.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- staticautomatic 10y ago
  Perhaps you could provide a more intellectually substantial reply.
- moxious 10y ago
  I thought it was a fair distillation. Any distillation of a field is bound to be incomplete, but what do you think it was missing?
anotherhacker 10y ago
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. Harvard Busisness school faculty: http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/browse.aspx http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/browse.aspx
- digi_owl 10y ago
  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.
  - amorphid 10y ago
    <sarcasm>Us MBA's have stuff figured out. When I run your code through my mean-time-between-failures Excel spreadsheet analyzer, I can predict with 95% confidence how long it will be before programs running your code will crash. I'm also able to manage you as a knowledge worker, because like you, I am a developer; I wrote one of the VB macros in my previously mentioned spreadsheet. Lastly, you'll benefit from my ethics & morality training, as it's not clear to me that you have a strong enough foundation in how to make decisions that impact the lives of others. Before you return to your station on the digital assembly line, can you help me figure out how to check my voicemail? The red light on my VOIP phone -- do you know what VOIP stands for? -- has been on for a month.</sarcasm>
    - forgetsusername 10y ago
      >Before you return to your station on the digital assembly line, can you help me figure out how to check my voicemail? The red light on my VOIP phone -- do you know what VOIP stands for? -- has been on for a month Your "story" sounds like it has a cliche MBA as well as a cliche IT guy, the latter of whom believes they're oh-so-smart for having technical knowledge that others don't. Both are jerks.
pg_is_a_butt 10y ago
how about stop hiring people who require managers? you're all idiots.
CapitalistCartr 10y ago
The best business advice I've ever read was put out by the Scientologists. Not that they do a good job of following their own advice; but its good. They know how to be effective.
- iamdave 10y ago
  Such as....??
  - mirekrusin 10y ago
    it's full of bullshit and they did some bad things but there are some good points: - generally high moral standard and ethics are valued a lot - it pays back long term in business - focus on drug detox, exercise, being fit in general - you can argue it's not business advice but on the other hand it's very practical if you think about it - focus on understanding things, misinformation is very bad thing (like a sin) - state of flow - this is quite interesting in context of programmers - we all know it's there and it would be nice to be able to train yourself to go into this state when you want. IMHO you can't say it's good or bad, it feels more like opinionated, almost randomly, cherry picked things from religions, psychology etc. glued together with a book by sci-fi writer - some things will be correct, most not.
- philippnagel 10y ago
  Are you able to explain this magical piece of advice? (Perhaps: "Create a cult, not a business").
  - CapitalistCartr 10y ago
    No, that's what they did, not what they wrote. Their business books are detailed and thorough.
- CapitalistCartr 10y ago
  Just mentioning the Scientologists wrote something useful is no basis for downvoting. If you disagree or don't understand, say so.
milesf 10y ago
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.
- wmeredith 10y ago
  Any good sources you would recommend for mgmt 101?
  - milesf 10y ago
    I took an introductory management class back in the 1990's at a local technical institute. The teacher worked full-time and taught the course on the side. One of the most valuable courses I ever took. I don't have specific recommendations, but because managers are everywhere. I'd just ask around to people you know and see if they like their manager. You'll usually find one or two people who are liked by a large number of people. Then I'd save up about $5 and invite that person for coffee and ask them their story on how they got into management. If they do have a book to recommend, go with their recommendation. The reason for recommending a relationship over a book is because management is really all about people. Some management styles will work in some industries, but be completely useless in others. Sometimes a management style is good for some people and not others. If you really have no idea where to start, I'd recommend Dale Carnegie's "How To Win Friends and Influence People". Sorry that it's not hip, current, or trendy but people have pretty much been version 1.0 for many thousands of years now. Besides, it was first published in 1936 and is still being published. If you're cheap, just read the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influence_People https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influen...
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    I give every new manager working for me: "First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently" Everything in the book is based by longitudinal surveys done over several decades everywhere from Burger King to the Army to tech companies.
deleted 10y ago
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Animats 10y ago
The dead ideas: * 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 10y ago
  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.
  - pekk 10y ago
    "Exponential price drops" are less of a miracle when they are produced by large subsidies as well as dumping from the production side
blueprint 10y ago
All ideas are dead. Only true facts are alive.
- bardworx 10y ago
  Are you being sarcastic or silly? Seems troll-ish to me...
  - blueprint 10y ago
    People hear what they want to hear.
throw2016 10y ago
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.
mindcrime 10y ago
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.
calpaterson 10y ago
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.
- spangry 10y ago
  You might be interested to read about William Deming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming 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
  - calpaterson 10y ago
deleted 10y ago
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KirinDave 10y ago
The irony of this article in claiming that management theory is outdated is that it selects ideas that were ascendent 10 years ago pre-financial crash. The author should consider reading a book published after 2005. Not that I'm a huge fan of the genre, to be honest. Way too often I basically see management books arguing that domain skill in the subject managed is immaterial and I could not disagree more with that. Also, I'm curious what metrics he's assessing for "productivity growth is dismal in the west." It's precisely because of productivity growth that we can envision an economy where centralization and globalization are not inevitable forces.
no_wizard 10y ago
As someone who is a respected manager, according to anonymous surveys my managed peers take every year (and they are truly anonymous) as well as what I learned from the manager I came to most respect in my life and still go to to this day even though he isn't any more, I think what makes good management particularly effective is a few things. Before I list them out and explain though, I just want to add one caveat: This isn't applicable for everyone, and certainly not every industry, and everyone's situation is different and it can be hard to relay some idea's perfectly in text so I'm going to do my best. With all that said, here's a little background as well. I manage a team of folks who are in charge of IT infrastructure and deployment. Mobile devices, servers, VPNs, virtualization setups, as well as database administration and some non-customer facing coding to keep everything going, all the way down to the desktop setups for employees. I work with maybe 30 people underneath me and there can't be more than 100 of us all together. Each of my 30 team members are tasked with different tings in accordance to the rough outline i speak to above. Now, to the good bits 1) If i learned anything, from being the manager to before that, its a really really simple thing. Don't ever forget where you came from. Ever. I often will think about making a decision - some big, some small - and I remind myself 'What would my reaction be if i wasn't a manager, but underneath me? How would I react to this? Positive? Negative? Why?' I find that my best manager did this all the time, and it really showed because he was one of us before he was a manager (for my company this is typical, we don't get a lot of outside management for our group that hasn't at least had some experience on the basics of what we do). The reason for this is to me obvious, in that you will better understand the actual core of your decisions affects this way. Its easy to forget all this in the day to day, but its a huge one. Specifically, it has benefited in that some changes that came down from those who manage me, were immediately rejected because I was able to articulate, in a way they could understand, why the new change would be bad. For instance, they wanted to take away our hands-on Lab for testing new technologies (this is a good part of what we do, to keep up on things) and go to a more virtual one. In theory this seems okay, there's a lot of companies that do this (Cisco, itpro.tv, VMware, all have these kinda things) but I made the case that no, have it hands on, with good training attached to the hands on labs, was a more effective on the whole, and it cost less, because we could dedicate a rotation of people to learn something, teach it to the team, and then the team gets to test it, and they rotate into to teaching back, until we feel the technology is well covered to at least a 'intermediate' level for all members on our team. With the virtualization, this was lost, and they had to pay more for the licenses. It ended up being better for us because we could just get labs setup, get documentation/official manuals/training material, learn it, and teach it over the course of x weeks to everyone else, and they could then come in to the lab when there was allotted time, break stuff, fix stuff etc. and round it went. 2) One of the best things I ever learned as well, is that if someone or someone's is designated as a point of contact, they should be treated as such for a project. For instance, if I designated Steve the networking guy as my point of contact for network related projects that I need someone to oversee, I essentially report to him, with some exceptions, instead of him reporting to me about the project. This gives them freedom, and gets them into a position where they can also learn good managing skills or at least, focus on big picture things for awhile. I don't micro manage, I philosophically meet my team half way. If things that we have as objectives are being met, and are exceeding expectations, then i give more leeway. I will always stick up for them if they in turn do good work, and the more good work that is produced, the more freedom I'm willing to allow. This has created a huge win for the company as well, as our team is small, but incredibly productive. 3) Don't try to sanitize feedback. This isn't a 'be a jerk' card, but team members who want to improve honestly like feedback, and give it to them honestly. Good and bad. One thing old managers i know used to do is never talk about the things I did well - to reinforce those things, is the purpose - but only talk about how we could improve. My best manager, and a skill i keep as well, is whenever I do check in with my team in a 1 on 1 way, we talk about what they're doing that is amazing and great, and then we talk about area's of imrovement, and relate it back to 'so these are your core strengths, how can you apply what makes these your core strengths to these problems?" that really gives people a lot of motivation in my experience 4) If you make a commitment to someone, meet it, obviously huge unexpected things aside that you can't plan for, this generally is huge. Not forgetting say, asking upper management for x thing on their behalf (our company works this way a lot, though we're trying to change that). or even just follow up when you say you will. If you do miss it, explain why, honestly, and then go from there 5) Training is important. invest in your team, your team invests in you, and that makes for a great company to work for, have as a client, and essentially helps you grow. It took our company some time to realize this, but now they're full on. 6) Rotate their roles, but don't push overly hard for people to do what they don't like unless there really is a specific reason. and I'm not talking about ' I don't like putting notes together detailing these implementations'. There are musts in every job, and enforce those across the board. I'm talking more 'okay, so, you been doing the networking for like a year, year and half, are you okay, burned out, want to try something new?' this lets people pick up new skills, maintain those skills, and apply their previous work experience on your team in different ways. We're team 'swiss army' internally for this reason :) and my headcount is smaller than the next guys, but we're always rated one of the top teams. I think this has a lot to do with it. (out of 4 teams, granted) 7) you can be of great value as a manager if you learn to filter what is actually nessacary and what isn't from upper management before talking to your team about their goals/expectations. See my example on the virtual labs. My team didn't know that was even a consideration until another manager in the same meeting mentioned it to their team. by that time, it was dead, and my team was grateful they didn't have to waste time thinking about it. 8) If someone is bad hire, and your team isn't working because of this, don't be afraid to do something about it. you're a manager, sometimes doing hard things like firing someone or moving them into a different position they're more skilled for is something you need to recongize early. this goes along with my next point.... 9) if your team members come to you saying somehting about how they are being treated by others, take it at face value, look into it, and have their back. Always. Always. Always. Never dismiss this. I had an incident where someone was being discriminated against based on their sex by an older team mate who i think just had it in their head from a different time what the role of that person was and wasn't, and I had recently assigned them as a project lead. I didn't tell them to deal with it, I looked into it, asked a trusted colleague to talk to some folks about it (not revealing the nature, just said 'Hey man, could you do me a favor? coud you ask around and get a feel for what people are getting a vibe about person x? I want some imparitialness to this' Idk if that violates policy in HR or not, but for me it worked well, i squashed it quickly and made it VERY clear what isn't tolerated on my team in a short amount of time, but it also came down to the person who was saying things that were considred sexist didn't realize what they had going on was just a reflection of insecurities. Sometimes you're being the psychologist therapist and working them through those feelings so they can understand what happened. I didn't end up having to separate them or fire anyone in this case, because that person came to an understanding and the person in charge separately was okay working from a clean slate as long as it didn't continue, once they understand what triggered what. Now they both work together extremely well and are both happy. Anyways, that's my experience. I'm no lawyer, no MBA, and your mileage may vary, esp. on that last bit, but these are some representations and guidelines i follow often.
projectileboy 10y ago
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.
- tacostakohashi 10y ago
  The existance of serial entrepreneurs suggests that empirically, perhaps the answer is yes, it just can't be taught in business schools.
  - projectileboy 10y ago
    That's a really good point. Would suggest the most important quality for success is leadership, and that it can't be taught.
    - dilemma 10y ago
      It's possible that leadership cannot be taught, but it can be observed and learnt.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
c3534l 10y ago
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.
swimorsinka 10y ago
I would have liked to see a discussion of "maximizing shareholder value".
deleted 10y ago
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vonnik 10y ago
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. One of the second best ideas about management is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_leadership 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.
nunez 10y ago
I think MBAs are the MCSEs of the business world; you can't get into certain (high paying) jobs without them despite their value being questionable...
jimnotgym 10y ago
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!
maverick_iceman 10y ago
If management theory have no value then why MBA grads from top schools are so high in demand? This is not a rhetorical question, I'm genuinely curious as I've wondered about this for a long time.
- chadcmulligan 10y ago
  I've always thought there are two sorts of management - keep things going style and make new stuff mode. MBA's are directed at keeping things going - fitting into middle management, warring with other MBA factions, fighting over internal politics etc. You need an MBA for this because you know the language, it's a very unique language and to get respect from the current incumbents you need to know the language. It has nothing to do with making new things (in general), these are stories they like to tell themselves, but I think in general it's not correct. The other sort of business is making new things, here business school knowledge comes in handy but it's not a big part of the answer - you can learn this stuff on the fly. More so I think knowing too much MBA stuff can be detrimental cause it interferes with your gut feelings. If having an MBA was useful then every startup would have an MBA, like every middle manager has an MBA, qed. So MBA's in short MBA's are in high demand because they teach you the rules of the game that all the other MBA's know. Does it have much to do with business itself? Well some of it imho edit: you could say an MBA contains the rules of engagement. but having an MBA doesn't make you a great general, and street fighters never bother to learn the rules.
maverick_iceman 10y ago
http://abstrusegoose.com/380 http://abstrusegoose.com/380
lkrubner 10y ago
The conclusion is exactly correct: "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.
sudshekhar 10y ago
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.
Balgair 10y ago
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.
andyidsinga 10y ago
this: "The theorists’ third ruling idea is that business is getting faster. There is some truth in this. Internet firms can acquire hundreds of millions of customers in a few years. But in some ways this is less impressive than earlier roll-outs: well over half of American households had motor cars just two decades after Henry Ford introduced the first moving assembly line in 1913. And in many respects business is slowing down. Firms often waste months or years checking decisions with various departments (audit, legal, compliance, privacy and so on) or dealing with governments’ ever-expanding bureaucracies. The internet takes away with one hand what it gives with the other. Now that it is so easy to acquire information and consult with everybody (including suppliers and customers), organisations frequently dither endlessly."
jaypaulynice 10y ago
I think business school is already disrupted with startup accelerators like YC. It's a matter of time before they realize it. Some accelerator programs even want a tuition. I've pondered this a lot thinking what I would learn to go to business school, but problem is that you can't get funding to start a company, but you can get funding to attend business school. Hence why business schools exist now. But 10-15 years from now this will change.

254 points by fraqed 10y ago

So is physics. Perhaps this is already the next middle ages without realizing it.

known 10y ago

TOP-DOWN: Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate and deceive others), Narcissism (egotism and self-obsession), Psychopathy (the lack of remorse and empathy), Sadism (pleasure in the suffering of others);

jtcond13 10y ago

"Business books are basically romance novels for men. Silly fantasies, terrible writing, large type, cheap paper and one good idea per book" - Benedict Evans https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/140900879879520256 https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/140900879879520256

jkraker 10y ago

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.

eli_gottlieb 10y ago
They should have added: 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.
adekok 10y ago
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".
- monocasa 10y ago
  > 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. To be fair, while I've absolutely seen what you're talking about, I've also seen a slightly different phenomenon get blamed for that. Part of a manager's job IMO is to remove systemic paralysis. Some times that means making a totally arbitrary decision just so people move forward. Even if it turns out it was the wrong solution to whatever problem, just making the decision and allowing people to explore the problem space from different directions can have some value.
  - adekok 10y ago
    I know a number of people in the military, and there's a lot to be said for asserting command presence. Where it doesn't matter what the orders are, just that someone is there giving clear orders. I've rarely seen that in managers. The issue I was talking about above was that managers really can think of themselves as "better" or having "secret knowledge" that enables them to lord it over the peasant engineers. I have ethical issues with such an attitude. People are people, no matter how small.
    - cerrelio 10y ago
      My company's style is a culture of consensus. No one really "gives orders," because that's too aggressive, and someone might feel hurt. I find it fucking awful. If there's disagreement about something, usually another person is brought into the mix for "input," ad infinitum. This happens until the issue becomes a non-issue or a disagreement over a new issue occurs. I might disagree with someone if they ordered me to do something I think is wrong, but I actually admire them for making a decision. There's nothing worse than making no progress because no one has the balls or authority to say "there's contention over this issue, but I think X is the best course."

cjf4 10y ago

>Management theories are organised around four basic ideas, repeated ad nauseam in every business book you read or business conference you attend, that bear almost no relation to reality. This a weak premise whose scant evidence is primarily composed of pop business airport books. And the idea that the vast, diverse, and nebulous world of management can be distilled to four ideas is a joke.

deleted 10y ago
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staticautomatic 10y ago
Perhaps you could provide a more intellectually substantial reply.
moxious 10y ago
I thought it was a fair distillation. Any distillation of a field is bound to be incomplete, but what do you think it was missing?

anotherhacker 10y ago

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. Harvard Busisness school faculty: http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/browse.aspx http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/browse.aspx

digi_owl 10y ago
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.
- amorphid 10y ago
  <sarcasm>Us MBA's have stuff figured out. When I run your code through my mean-time-between-failures Excel spreadsheet analyzer, I can predict with 95% confidence how long it will be before programs running your code will crash. I'm also able to manage you as a knowledge worker, because like you, I am a developer; I wrote one of the VB macros in my previously mentioned spreadsheet. Lastly, you'll benefit from my ethics & morality training, as it's not clear to me that you have a strong enough foundation in how to make decisions that impact the lives of others. Before you return to your station on the digital assembly line, can you help me figure out how to check my voicemail? The red light on my VOIP phone -- do you know what VOIP stands for? -- has been on for a month.</sarcasm>
  - forgetsusername 10y ago
    >Before you return to your station on the digital assembly line, can you help me figure out how to check my voicemail? The red light on my VOIP phone -- do you know what VOIP stands for? -- has been on for a month Your "story" sounds like it has a cliche MBA as well as a cliche IT guy, the latter of whom believes they're oh-so-smart for having technical knowledge that others don't. Both are jerks.

pg_is_a_butt 10y ago

how about stop hiring people who require managers? you're all idiots.

CapitalistCartr 10y ago

The best business advice I've ever read was put out by the Scientologists. Not that they do a good job of following their own advice; but its good. They know how to be effective.

iamdave 10y ago
Such as....??
- mirekrusin 10y ago
  it's full of bullshit and they did some bad things but there are some good points: - generally high moral standard and ethics are valued a lot - it pays back long term in business - focus on drug detox, exercise, being fit in general - you can argue it's not business advice but on the other hand it's very practical if you think about it - focus on understanding things, misinformation is very bad thing (like a sin) - state of flow - this is quite interesting in context of programmers - we all know it's there and it would be nice to be able to train yourself to go into this state when you want. IMHO you can't say it's good or bad, it feels more like opinionated, almost randomly, cherry picked things from religions, psychology etc. glued together with a book by sci-fi writer - some things will be correct, most not.
philippnagel 10y ago
Are you able to explain this magical piece of advice? (Perhaps: "Create a cult, not a business").
- CapitalistCartr 10y ago
  No, that's what they did, not what they wrote. Their business books are detailed and thorough.
CapitalistCartr 10y ago
Just mentioning the Scientologists wrote something useful is no basis for downvoting. If you disagree or don't understand, say so.

milesf 10y ago

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.

wmeredith 10y ago
Any good sources you would recommend for mgmt 101?
- milesf 10y ago
  I took an introductory management class back in the 1990's at a local technical institute. The teacher worked full-time and taught the course on the side. One of the most valuable courses I ever took. I don't have specific recommendations, but because managers are everywhere. I'd just ask around to people you know and see if they like their manager. You'll usually find one or two people who are liked by a large number of people. Then I'd save up about $5 and invite that person for coffee and ask them their story on how they got into management. If they do have a book to recommend, go with their recommendation. The reason for recommending a relationship over a book is because management is really all about people. Some management styles will work in some industries, but be completely useless in others. Sometimes a management style is good for some people and not others. If you really have no idea where to start, I'd recommend Dale Carnegie's "How To Win Friends and Influence People". Sorry that it's not hip, current, or trendy but people have pretty much been version 1.0 for many thousands of years now. Besides, it was first published in 1936 and is still being published. If you're cheap, just read the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influence_People https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influen...
- Spooky23 10y ago
  I give every new manager working for me: "First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently" Everything in the book is based by longitudinal surveys done over several decades everywhere from Burger King to the Army to tech companies.

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Animats 10y ago

The dead ideas: * 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 10y ago
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.
- pekk 10y ago
  "Exponential price drops" are less of a miracle when they are produced by large subsidies as well as dumping from the production side

blueprint 10y ago

All ideas are dead. Only true facts are alive.

bardworx 10y ago
Are you being sarcastic or silly? Seems troll-ish to me...
- blueprint 10y ago
  People hear what they want to hear.

throw2016 10y ago

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.

mindcrime 10y ago

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.

calpaterson 10y ago

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.

spangry 10y ago
You might be interested to read about William Deming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming 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
- calpaterson 10y ago

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KirinDave 10y ago

The irony of this article in claiming that management theory is outdated is that it selects ideas that were ascendent 10 years ago pre-financial crash. The author should consider reading a book published after 2005. Not that I'm a huge fan of the genre, to be honest. Way too often I basically see management books arguing that domain skill in the subject managed is immaterial and I could not disagree more with that. Also, I'm curious what metrics he's assessing for "productivity growth is dismal in the west." It's precisely because of productivity growth that we can envision an economy where centralization and globalization are not inevitable forces.

no_wizard 10y ago

As someone who is a respected manager, according to anonymous surveys my managed peers take every year (and they are truly anonymous) as well as what I learned from the manager I came to most respect in my life and still go to to this day even though he isn't any more, I think what makes good management particularly effective is a few things. Before I list them out and explain though, I just want to add one caveat: This isn't applicable for everyone, and certainly not every industry, and everyone's situation is different and it can be hard to relay some idea's perfectly in text so I'm going to do my best. With all that said, here's a little background as well. I manage a team of folks who are in charge of IT infrastructure and deployment. Mobile devices, servers, VPNs, virtualization setups, as well as database administration and some non-customer facing coding to keep everything going, all the way down to the desktop setups for employees. I work with maybe 30 people underneath me and there can't be more than 100 of us all together. Each of my 30 team members are tasked with different tings in accordance to the rough outline i speak to above. Now, to the good bits 1) If i learned anything, from being the manager to before that, its a really really simple thing. Don't ever forget where you came from. Ever. I often will think about making a decision - some big, some small - and I remind myself 'What would my reaction be if i wasn't a manager, but underneath me? How would I react to this? Positive? Negative? Why?' I find that my best manager did this all the time, and it really showed because he was one of us before he was a manager (for my company this is typical, we don't get a lot of outside management for our group that hasn't at least had some experience on the basics of what we do). The reason for this is to me obvious, in that you will better understand the actual core of your decisions affects this way. Its easy to forget all this in the day to day, but its a huge one. Specifically, it has benefited in that some changes that came down from those who manage me, were immediately rejected because I was able to articulate, in a way they could understand, why the new change would be bad. For instance, they wanted to take away our hands-on Lab for testing new technologies (this is a good part of what we do, to keep up on things) and go to a more virtual one. In theory this seems okay, there's a lot of companies that do this (Cisco, itpro.tv, VMware, all have these kinda things) but I made the case that no, have it hands on, with good training attached to the hands on labs, was a more effective on the whole, and it cost less, because we could dedicate a rotation of people to learn something, teach it to the team, and then the team gets to test it, and they rotate into to teaching back, until we feel the technology is well covered to at least a 'intermediate' level for all members on our team. With the virtualization, this was lost, and they had to pay more for the licenses. It ended up being better for us because we could just get labs setup, get documentation/official manuals/training material, learn it, and teach it over the course of x weeks to everyone else, and they could then come in to the lab when there was allotted time, break stuff, fix stuff etc. and round it went. 2) One of the best things I ever learned as well, is that if someone or someone's is designated as a point of contact, they should be treated as such for a project. For instance, if I designated Steve the networking guy as my point of contact for network related projects that I need someone to oversee, I essentially report to him, with some exceptions, instead of him reporting to me about the project. This gives them freedom, and gets them into a position where they can also learn good managing skills or at least, focus on big picture things for awhile. I don't micro manage, I philosophically meet my team half way. If things that we have as objectives are being met, and are exceeding expectations, then i give more leeway. I will always stick up for them if they in turn do good work, and the more good work that is produced, the more freedom I'm willing to allow. This has created a huge win for the company as well, as our team is small, but incredibly productive. 3) Don't try to sanitize feedback. This isn't a 'be a jerk' card, but team members who want to improve honestly like feedback, and give it to them honestly. Good and bad. One thing old managers i know used to do is never talk about the things I did well - to reinforce those things, is the purpose - but only talk about how we could improve. My best manager, and a skill i keep as well, is whenever I do check in with my team in a 1 on 1 way, we talk about what they're doing that is amazing and great, and then we talk about area's of imrovement, and relate it back to 'so these are your core strengths, how can you apply what makes these your core strengths to these problems?" that really gives people a lot of motivation in my experience 4) If you make a commitment to someone, meet it, obviously huge unexpected things aside that you can't plan for, this generally is huge. Not forgetting say, asking upper management for x thing on their behalf (our company works this way a lot, though we're trying to change that). or even just follow up when you say you will. If you do miss it, explain why, honestly, and then go from there 5) Training is important. invest in your team, your team invests in you, and that makes for a great company to work for, have as a client, and essentially helps you grow. It took our company some time to realize this, but now they're full on. 6) Rotate their roles, but don't push overly hard for people to do what they don't like unless there really is a specific reason. and I'm not talking about ' I don't like putting notes together detailing these implementations'. There are musts in every job, and enforce those across the board. I'm talking more 'okay, so, you been doing the networking for like a year, year and half, are you okay, burned out, want to try something new?' this lets people pick up new skills, maintain those skills, and apply their previous work experience on your team in different ways. We're team 'swiss army' internally for this reason :) and my headcount is smaller than the next guys, but we're always rated one of the top teams. I think this has a lot to do with it. (out of 4 teams, granted) 7) you can be of great value as a manager if you learn to filter what is actually nessacary and what isn't from upper management before talking to your team about their goals/expectations. See my example on the virtual labs. My team didn't know that was even a consideration until another manager in the same meeting mentioned it to their team. by that time, it was dead, and my team was grateful they didn't have to waste time thinking about it. 8) If someone is bad hire, and your team isn't working because of this, don't be afraid to do something about it. you're a manager, sometimes doing hard things like firing someone or moving them into a different position they're more skilled for is something you need to recongize early. this goes along with my next point.... 9) if your team members come to you saying somehting about how they are being treated by others, take it at face value, look into it, and have their back. Always. Always. Always. Never dismiss this. I had an incident where someone was being discriminated against based on their sex by an older team mate who i think just had it in their head from a different time what the role of that person was and wasn't, and I had recently assigned them as a project lead. I didn't tell them to deal with it, I looked into it, asked a trusted colleague to talk to some folks about it (not revealing the nature, just said 'Hey man, could you do me a favor? coud you ask around and get a feel for what people are getting a vibe about person x? I want some imparitialness to this' Idk if that violates policy in HR or not, but for me it worked well, i squashed it quickly and made it VERY clear what isn't tolerated on my team in a short amount of time, but it also came down to the person who was saying things that were considred sexist didn't realize what they had going on was just a reflection of insecurities. Sometimes you're being the psychologist therapist and working them through those feelings so they can understand what happened. I didn't end up having to separate them or fire anyone in this case, because that person came to an understanding and the person in charge separately was okay working from a clean slate as long as it didn't continue, once they understand what triggered what. Now they both work together extremely well and are both happy. Anyways, that's my experience. I'm no lawyer, no MBA, and your mileage may vary, esp. on that last bit, but these are some representations and guidelines i follow often.

projectileboy 10y ago

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.

tacostakohashi 10y ago
The existance of serial entrepreneurs suggests that empirically, perhaps the answer is yes, it just can't be taught in business schools.
- projectileboy 10y ago
  That's a really good point. Would suggest the most important quality for success is leadership, and that it can't be taught.
  - dilemma 10y ago
    It's possible that leadership cannot be taught, but it can be observed and learnt.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

c3534l 10y ago

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.

swimorsinka 10y ago

I would have liked to see a discussion of "maximizing shareholder value".

deleted 10y ago

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vonnik 10y ago

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. One of the second best ideas about management is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_leadership 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.

nunez 10y ago

I think MBAs are the MCSEs of the business world; you can't get into certain (high paying) jobs without them despite their value being questionable...

jimnotgym 10y ago

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!

maverick_iceman 10y ago

If management theory have no value then why MBA grads from top schools are so high in demand? This is not a rhetorical question, I'm genuinely curious as I've wondered about this for a long time.

chadcmulligan 10y ago
I've always thought there are two sorts of management - keep things going style and make new stuff mode. MBA's are directed at keeping things going - fitting into middle management, warring with other MBA factions, fighting over internal politics etc. You need an MBA for this because you know the language, it's a very unique language and to get respect from the current incumbents you need to know the language. It has nothing to do with making new things (in general), these are stories they like to tell themselves, but I think in general it's not correct. The other sort of business is making new things, here business school knowledge comes in handy but it's not a big part of the answer - you can learn this stuff on the fly. More so I think knowing too much MBA stuff can be detrimental cause it interferes with your gut feelings. If having an MBA was useful then every startup would have an MBA, like every middle manager has an MBA, qed. So MBA's in short MBA's are in high demand because they teach you the rules of the game that all the other MBA's know. Does it have much to do with business itself? Well some of it imho edit: you could say an MBA contains the rules of engagement. but having an MBA doesn't make you a great general, and street fighters never bother to learn the rules.

maverick_iceman 10y ago

http://abstrusegoose.com/380 http://abstrusegoose.com/380

lkrubner 10y ago

The conclusion is exactly correct: "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.

sudshekhar 10y ago

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.

Balgair 10y ago

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.

andyidsinga 10y ago

this: "The theorists’ third ruling idea is that business is getting faster. There is some truth in this. Internet firms can acquire hundreds of millions of customers in a few years. But in some ways this is less impressive than earlier roll-outs: well over half of American households had motor cars just two decades after Henry Ford introduced the first moving assembly line in 1913. And in many respects business is slowing down. Firms often waste months or years checking decisions with various departments (audit, legal, compliance, privacy and so on) or dealing with governments’ ever-expanding bureaucracies. The internet takes away with one hand what it gives with the other. Now that it is so easy to acquire information and consult with everybody (including suppliers and customers), organisations frequently dither endlessly."

jaypaulynice 10y ago

I think business school is already disrupted with startup accelerators like YC. It's a matter of time before they realize it. Some accelerator programs even want a tuition. I've pondered this a lot thinking what I would learn to go to business school, but problem is that you can't get funding to start a company, but you can get funding to attend business school. Hence why business schools exist now. But 10-15 years from now this will change.