6 ms·

The Management Myth (2006)

103 points by clyfe 16y ago

Most of management theory is inane, writes our correspondent, the founder of a consulting firm. If you want to succeed in business, don’t get an M.B.A. Study philosophy instead By Matthew Stewart

toadi 16y ago
He wrote a good book: http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB10001424052970204313604574329183846704634.html http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB10001424052970204...
barry-cotter 16y ago
To summarize in English: Stewart started an unnamed firm, and tried to exit mid-bubble four years later; his partners didn't want to buy his equity, so he sued them. By the time he got his shares bought three years later the firm had imploded. http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2006/05/12/the_myth_of_the_5.html http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2006/05/12/the_myth_of_the... Here's a previous discussion with comments http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=581487 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=581487
- clyfe 16y ago
  The author of the article you provided calls "The Management Myth": "the article is disjointed, dull, obvious, smug, poorly written, and full of falsely-elevated faux philosophy chatter" plethora adjectives, but fails to bring any argument.
  - boredguy8 16y ago
    But still right.
    - jbooth 16y ago
      And still failing to bring any argument. I thought the article was really well written and had a number of good/interesting points. The fact that this guy saw the charade for what it was earlier than his partners but failed to find a sucker to buy his shares doesn't invalidate his point -- if anything, it strengthens it.
eitally 16y ago
tl;dr for my comment: I agree, with caveats, and have personal experience to back up my opinion. Not a bad article but nothing really new. As an undergrad I majored in public history & religious studies (wanted to be a museum curator) while supervising a digitization lab in the special collections library. I didn't have a clue what I wanted to do with my life after I realized I hated curatorial work, so I got a job through Manpower doing web design. Modern web technologies were still emergent then (1999) and I was able to keep abreast pretty well for a few years, until my interests moved more into project management and then actual team leadership. I've been successful so far and now direct about 60 great people worldwide. I've also had time to reformulate my career objectives and realized going back to school was a sensible thing to do, especially if I ever needed a piece of paper to validate my cv in this down economy. I chose a multi-disciplinary systems engineering program at NCSU and it's been a terrific experience that's meshed very well with my current role at work. This was a longwinded introduction to my main point: I see other people in both my masters program and other graduate fields at the university who have absolutely no experience in the real world. Not only that, they still tend to believe that the management track of an MBA is where the money is. They're going to be sorely disappointed when they graduate and realize no company worth it's salt is going to think twice about hiring a newly minted MBA that 1) has never worked a real job and 2) has no management experience. I'm starting to work with both my department head and others to help mentor and guest lecture for these students, and hopefully jolt them back to reality. This isn't to say that an MBA is useless, but an MBA should be a complement to one's work experience and is by no means a replacement. I completely agree with the author that a background in philosophy is often a better tool for a manager than an education in finance/management (still, too many companies lead by the Taylor style of gauging productivity and because Excel still runs the business world there's a strong tendency for managers to try to quantify performance based on metrics... the wrong metrics.).
- me2i81 16y ago
  "no company worth it's salt is going to think twice about hiring a newly minted MBA that 1) has never worked a real job and 2) has no management experience" It's a nice thought, and I suppose you could discount the vast majority of companies as not being worth their salt, but newly-minted MBAs from top schools seem to be doing just fine relative to the current economy.
singular 16y ago
I think the real management myth is the implicit mental model most managers out there (in my experience) make use of, based on ideas of what a worker is, sourced from the 18th/19th century - i.e. that they are a. doing an unpleasant job they'd rather not do and b. are likely to try to cop off as much as possible. This works well for factory jobs, but not so great for software development. From this derives all the stuff about dressing in uniform, good timekeeping (introduces discipline and routine), the need to see the workers doing what the manager understands to be work (i.e. coding window open, typing out code), it's what smacks down on anything perceived to be procrastination from a distance, what maintains a level of suspicion that the staff will, where possible, do as little work as they can get away with. This whole model seems to be (though almost always not quite consciously) the universally accepted approach most everywhere. That, combined with the fact that many IT managers are not technical themselves, results in a lot of the stupidities within the industry I think (especially so in internal IT). Software development is extremely sensitive to ability level and environment I feel, so the typical suspicion and focus on things utterly unimportant to the job itself really, really take away from the task itself. What is especially pernicious is the desire to see work as the manager defines it done, i.e. sitting down and coding. Software development consists of many things other than coding including planning, thinking about the problem, etc. and that attitude not only takes away from the process which actually results in good software, it promotes those developers who just sit there coding out crap and punishes those coders who want to think things through more clearly.
- dalore 16y ago
  The funny thing at our work is that we want to code and do our software development but the managers are the ones getting in the way, with things such as meetings, interruptions etc. If they actually left us alone we would get more done.
  - SoftwareMaven 16y ago
    There is little doubt in my mind more would get done. The question I have is would the right stuff get done? I'm a coder by background. I know how interesting those pesky little problems can become, until they subsume the important things like getting a product delivered. A good manager realizes the (limited) meetings are to ensure everybody is clear and focused on the same goal. A bad managers thinks meetings help achieve that goal.
RyanMcGreal 16y ago
Proves the old maxim: When you stare into the MBA, the MBA stares into you.
JVerstry 16y ago
So many people criticize MBA's out of complete ignorance. They are full of s.it. They only expose their theorizations about it and propagate their naives misconceptions over and over.... They don't even have one !!! Remember 'Good Will hunting' when Robin Williams comes back to Matt Damon, telling him he summarizes people out of what he read in books? It's the same s.it !!! Matthew Stewart shrinks MBA's to his narrow understanding of it. He is definitely not one to take advise from. Really not. Talk to those who have an MBA. Barry-cotter: Thanks for posting those links.
- jbooth 16y ago
  I hope to god you don't have an MBA with that grammar and spelling. I mean, I know it's not a lit program, but come on here.
  - maukdaddy 16y ago
    I'm almost 2/3s finished with an MBA program so I'll jump in here. Sadly his grammar, spelling, and writing does represent a lot of MBA students. People can't write worth a shit anymore. I spend more time than I like to think about correcting other's writing for group projects. And if you think MBA students can't write, you'd be amazed at how poorly most of of them give presentations. =(
- steveklabnik 16y ago
  If you're going to say 'shit,' you should just say it. We're all grown ups here.
jdvolz 16y ago
This whole thing makes me sad because I have a friend who is very good technically who just started his MBA this week. I'm strongly debated not sending this article to him just because I don't want to depress him.
api 16y ago
A leader is supposed to be someone who has gotten very good at doing something and now leads it. The problem is that we've created this parallel track called "business" that has separated leadership from any practical experience. There are now two parallel unrelated non-intersecting career tracks: those who do, and those who lead. Those who can do. Those who can't lead. The pure MBA is our equivalent of the apparatchiks of the former USSR.
mikeleeorg 16y ago
As an aside, I remember being a management consultant and receiving the following <sarcasm>wisdom</sarcasm> from my manager: "You don't have to be smarter than your client. You just have to appear to be smarter than your client."
dimitar 16y ago
Management is a religion. But society was built on religion and we need it today the same way it was needed in Ancient Egypt and Sumeria. Authority is very hard to justify. The high priests of the religions of political ideology and management rule over the peoples of the world. The good thing is we are not going to leave Stonehenge and the Pyramids as traces of our stage in development as species. And no, I'm not an atheist. :-)
- dimitar 16y ago
  Also religion is needed to enforce a particular way of thinking which eases communication. Sometimes you may want to put someones mind in a box.

103 points by clyfe 16y ago

Most of management theory is inane, writes our correspondent, the founder of a consulting firm. If you want to succeed in business, don’t get an M.B.A. Study philosophy instead By Matthew Stewart

toadi 16y ago

He wrote a good book: http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB10001424052970204313604574329183846704634.html http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB10001424052970204...

barry-cotter 16y ago

To summarize in English: Stewart started an unnamed firm, and tried to exit mid-bubble four years later; his partners didn't want to buy his equity, so he sued them. By the time he got his shares bought three years later the firm had imploded. http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2006/05/12/the_myth_of_the_5.html http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2006/05/12/the_myth_of_the... Here's a previous discussion with comments http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=581487 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=581487

clyfe 16y ago
The author of the article you provided calls "The Management Myth": "the article is disjointed, dull, obvious, smug, poorly written, and full of falsely-elevated faux philosophy chatter" plethora adjectives, but fails to bring any argument.
- boredguy8 16y ago
  But still right.
  - jbooth 16y ago
    And still failing to bring any argument. I thought the article was really well written and had a number of good/interesting points. The fact that this guy saw the charade for what it was earlier than his partners but failed to find a sucker to buy his shares doesn't invalidate his point -- if anything, it strengthens it.

eitally 16y ago

tl;dr for my comment: I agree, with caveats, and have personal experience to back up my opinion. Not a bad article but nothing really new. As an undergrad I majored in public history & religious studies (wanted to be a museum curator) while supervising a digitization lab in the special collections library. I didn't have a clue what I wanted to do with my life after I realized I hated curatorial work, so I got a job through Manpower doing web design. Modern web technologies were still emergent then (1999) and I was able to keep abreast pretty well for a few years, until my interests moved more into project management and then actual team leadership. I've been successful so far and now direct about 60 great people worldwide. I've also had time to reformulate my career objectives and realized going back to school was a sensible thing to do, especially if I ever needed a piece of paper to validate my cv in this down economy. I chose a multi-disciplinary systems engineering program at NCSU and it's been a terrific experience that's meshed very well with my current role at work. This was a longwinded introduction to my main point: I see other people in both my masters program and other graduate fields at the university who have absolutely no experience in the real world. Not only that, they still tend to believe that the management track of an MBA is where the money is. They're going to be sorely disappointed when they graduate and realize no company worth it's salt is going to think twice about hiring a newly minted MBA that 1) has never worked a real job and 2) has no management experience. I'm starting to work with both my department head and others to help mentor and guest lecture for these students, and hopefully jolt them back to reality. This isn't to say that an MBA is useless, but an MBA should be a complement to one's work experience and is by no means a replacement. I completely agree with the author that a background in philosophy is often a better tool for a manager than an education in finance/management (still, too many companies lead by the Taylor style of gauging productivity and because Excel still runs the business world there's a strong tendency for managers to try to quantify performance based on metrics... the wrong metrics.).

me2i81 16y ago
"no company worth it's salt is going to think twice about hiring a newly minted MBA that 1) has never worked a real job and 2) has no management experience" It's a nice thought, and I suppose you could discount the vast majority of companies as not being worth their salt, but newly-minted MBAs from top schools seem to be doing just fine relative to the current economy.

singular 16y ago

I think the real management myth is the implicit mental model most managers out there (in my experience) make use of, based on ideas of what a worker is, sourced from the 18th/19th century - i.e. that they are a. doing an unpleasant job they'd rather not do and b. are likely to try to cop off as much as possible. This works well for factory jobs, but not so great for software development. From this derives all the stuff about dressing in uniform, good timekeeping (introduces discipline and routine), the need to see the workers doing what the manager understands to be work (i.e. coding window open, typing out code), it's what smacks down on anything perceived to be procrastination from a distance, what maintains a level of suspicion that the staff will, where possible, do as little work as they can get away with. This whole model seems to be (though almost always not quite consciously) the universally accepted approach most everywhere. That, combined with the fact that many IT managers are not technical themselves, results in a lot of the stupidities within the industry I think (especially so in internal IT). Software development is extremely sensitive to ability level and environment I feel, so the typical suspicion and focus on things utterly unimportant to the job itself really, really take away from the task itself. What is especially pernicious is the desire to see work as the manager defines it done, i.e. sitting down and coding. Software development consists of many things other than coding including planning, thinking about the problem, etc. and that attitude not only takes away from the process which actually results in good software, it promotes those developers who just sit there coding out crap and punishes those coders who want to think things through more clearly.

dalore 16y ago
The funny thing at our work is that we want to code and do our software development but the managers are the ones getting in the way, with things such as meetings, interruptions etc. If they actually left us alone we would get more done.
- SoftwareMaven 16y ago
  There is little doubt in my mind more would get done. The question I have is would the right stuff get done? I'm a coder by background. I know how interesting those pesky little problems can become, until they subsume the important things like getting a product delivered. A good manager realizes the (limited) meetings are to ensure everybody is clear and focused on the same goal. A bad managers thinks meetings help achieve that goal.

RyanMcGreal 16y ago

Proves the old maxim: When you stare into the MBA, the MBA stares into you.

JVerstry 16y ago

So many people criticize MBA's out of complete ignorance. They are full of s.it. They only expose their theorizations about it and propagate their naives misconceptions over and over.... They don't even have one !!! Remember 'Good Will hunting' when Robin Williams comes back to Matt Damon, telling him he summarizes people out of what he read in books? It's the same s.it !!! Matthew Stewart shrinks MBA's to his narrow understanding of it. He is definitely not one to take advise from. Really not. Talk to those who have an MBA. Barry-cotter: Thanks for posting those links.

jbooth 16y ago
I hope to god you don't have an MBA with that grammar and spelling. I mean, I know it's not a lit program, but come on here.
- maukdaddy 16y ago
  I'm almost 2/3s finished with an MBA program so I'll jump in here. Sadly his grammar, spelling, and writing does represent a lot of MBA students. People can't write worth a shit anymore. I spend more time than I like to think about correcting other's writing for group projects. And if you think MBA students can't write, you'd be amazed at how poorly most of of them give presentations. =(
steveklabnik 16y ago
If you're going to say 'shit,' you should just say it. We're all grown ups here.

jdvolz 16y ago

This whole thing makes me sad because I have a friend who is very good technically who just started his MBA this week. I'm strongly debated not sending this article to him just because I don't want to depress him.

api 16y ago

A leader is supposed to be someone who has gotten very good at doing something and now leads it. The problem is that we've created this parallel track called "business" that has separated leadership from any practical experience. There are now two parallel unrelated non-intersecting career tracks: those who do, and those who lead. Those who can do. Those who can't lead. The pure MBA is our equivalent of the apparatchiks of the former USSR.

mikeleeorg 16y ago

As an aside, I remember being a management consultant and receiving the following <sarcasm>wisdom</sarcasm> from my manager: "You don't have to be smarter than your client. You just have to appear to be smarter than your client."

dimitar 16y ago

Management is a religion. But society was built on religion and we need it today the same way it was needed in Ancient Egypt and Sumeria. Authority is very hard to justify. The high priests of the religions of political ideology and management rule over the peoples of the world. The good thing is we are not going to leave Stonehenge and the Pyramids as traces of our stage in development as species. And no, I'm not an atheist. :-)

dimitar 16y ago
Also religion is needed to enforce a particular way of thinking which eases communication. Sometimes you may want to put someones mind in a box.