Anthropomorphizing companies, units, artwork, governments &etc is a long trend in humanity that needs to stop. I don't know the psychology behind it, but humans

Anthropomorphizing companies, units, artwork, governments &etc is a long trend in humanity that needs to stop. I don't know the psychology behind it, but humans seem to love to find a handful of other humans to personify an agency, then become overly obsessed with them as the cause of success or failure. The US government doesn't suck: Bush or Obama suck. Apple isn't a great company: Steve Jobs is a great leader. AIG doesn't have a bad business model: Mo Greenberg makes bad decisions. The Patriots didn't win a Super Bowl: Tom Brady won the Super Bowl! No organization, NONE, has exploited this tendency more than Harvard. They are masters of the bait and switch. And this article is a classic example. They list all sorts of arguments for there being problems with companies/units, then, without any proof of causation, attribute the failures to bad management. They talk about what it means to be a good manager, but in no way do they offer any evidence that the problems of bad employee engagement and productivity will actually be solved by introducing a good manager. Why? Because Harvard is in the business of selling you its students as managers. They've developed a reputation of offering highly-credentialed applicants two (HBS) and four year (HUG) vacations to ride the marketing wave of "Harvard grads are great managers." While MIT focuses on creating students who themselves will invent, create and further the pace of the world, Harvard instead seems to have chosen to exploit our tendency to anthropomorphize company success by latching onto shareholder and management insecurities (lack of engagement and productivity), even where there isn't anything to be insecure about, and inserting their graduates into highly paid positions as "the solution." And they've been fabulously successful in this marketing campaign. I think SV has done a very good job of seeing through this schtick, but comments here make me think the tide is turning. That's not to say there's no such thing as a bad manager. There are managers who can personally ruin/save a company. But all problems are not caused by bad management. All productivity issues do not stem from bad management. Sometimes it's a sociopath manager, but more often it's a bad product or business plan or economic downturn or any one of a set of problems that no shiny new Harvard manager will fix.