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I thought Matthew Stewart's take on Theory X / Theory Y from a few years back was fairly sharp: http://www.strategy-business.com/article/00029?gko=5d297 http://
by robin2 13y ago
I thought Matthew Stewart's take on Theory X / Theory Y from a few years back was fairly sharp: http://www.strategy-business.com/article/00029?gko=5d297 http://www.strategy-business.com/article/00029?gko=5d297
In particular, his account of how the axis of freedom vs control in this sort of management theory obscured the nature of conflict in an organization.
Of course, some might think that obscuring the reality of organizational politics is precisely the point of management theory. I would call that a cynical point of view but that wouldn't be strictly accurate. (See http://rdn32.com/2013/01/27/on-cynicism/ http://rdn32.com/2013/01/27/on-cynicism/)
- michaelochurch 13y agoThat's interesting. I think I must be a Y/T then. I believe that people are at their best if trusted (to do their work) but I also believe that human aggregates are doomed to eventual dissolution. The goal is to create value while you can and leave a legacy that allows newer and better institutions (formed decades or centuries later, so perhaps long after individual death) to learn from it. I've written a lot about the concept of simple trust. Essentially, it means trusting people to do their work and generally do the right thing. It doesn't mean you'd hand them a suitcase with $5 million in it; it means you think the person is competent and not an idiot or scumbag. Not all trust is binary, but simple trust ("bozo bit") is, and it's also symmetric and usually transitive, so it becomes systemic. It's actually binary across a company (trust-dense or trust-sparse) and I think those tie into K- and r-selection. If you don't have simple trust, you'll end up with a company where employees are treated badly, so they treat it badly (as they should) and it eventually fails.