Management Madness? Management Theory

ADRIAN WOOLDRIDGE: One reason is that management theorists are essentially divided into two groups. One group thinks that workers are basically dolts who have to be goaded into doing things, either by incentives such as pay or by punishments for not working. The other group holds the opposite set of psychological assumptions: that workers are basically creative, innovative people who want to please and do their best, and that the way to motivate them is to give them as much freedom as possible. So you have two completely incompatible psychological models, and the industry sometimes mixes the two views or switches back and forth. "Reengineering" was the last big management fad, and it was based on the idea that you treat your workers as people who need carrots and sticks above everything else. And now because people have gotten sick of that, we're veering madly toward trust and empowerment and letting people express their individuality.

PT: The title of your book, The Witch Doctors (Times Books), makes clear your skepticism about the value of many management theories. How did this incredulity develop?

AW: Every day books with titles like Leadership Lessons from Star Trek or How to Drive Your Company Like a Dirigible would arrive at my desk. And there weren't just one or two of them--there would be five, six, seven. If you see this stuff streaming out every day, it's impossible not to develop some sort of incredulity. But not all of the advice is nonsense. Some of it is extremely good.

PT: How can readers tell the bad books and bad management sciences from the good?

AW: We thought at first that we would be able to put together a list of approved gurus, but we found that the good gurus often say silly things and the bad ones sometimes say very sensible things.

JOHN MICKLETHWAIT: For example, Harvard Business School's Theodore Levitt, the world's best marketing professor, fell hook, line, and sinker for the idea that people around the world were becoming so similar that companies could sell the same product in the same way everywhere. This has worked for only a very few products, like Coca-Cola--and even then there are doubts that the Chinese look at the drink in the same way that, say, Americans do.

Less impressive gurus, meanwhile, do occasionally say some profound things. Stephen Covey's basic idea in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People--that building a more effective company is as much about improving the performance of the individuals who make up its workforce as it is about reorganizing them into new work teams--is actually quite a good one. But he didn't need to begin the book with the words, "To my colleagues, empowered and empowering."

In any event, we can recommend a few basic rules for selecting good management books. You should ignore any book that promises far more than it can ever hope to deliver--for example, if it claims you'll be as rich as [billionaire investor] Warren Buffett if you read it. Or that if you don't read it, you're going to end up living in a cardboard box.

You should also be very suspicious of anything that is written by more than two people. When you have five or six authors, it becomes writing by committee. You get the impression that they have just chucked a hodgepodge of ideas into a collection. Also beware of anyone who claims they've found a general solution to a problem that affects everybody. What we've found about management theory is that parts of it work, that some of it is good for certain types of companies. But the chaos that spurs creativity at a software firm may not benefit a bank. The idea that there's one system that can save every company or industry is untrue.

AW: Another good principle is to avoid animal metaphors--any book that advises you to swim with the sharks, roar with the lions, or dance with the fishes. Just leave those on the shelves.

PT: One of your premises is that management theorists are the "new unacknowledged legislators of mankind." What do you mean by that?