JM: What we're saying is that these are people who affect our lives
very deeply. Management gurus can eliminate your job if they advise a
company to downsize. They can also change the way you work in your job.
Suddenly you get pushed onto a series of work teams. Or maybe
"hot-decking" gets introduced and you no longer have your own permanent
desk. You can also be subjected to something called "360-degree
evaluation," a semimalicious system in which people are asked to
criticize their bosses. All of these things change the way people spend
their days.
Management theory also affects you as a customer. For instance, in
the old days when you called your bank you used to get through to your
local branch. Now you get through to someone miles away at a customer
service center that's been outsourced--contracted to an outside company.
In some ways, this sort of thing makes more of a difference in your life
than the laws the government legislates. There's remarkably little that
[the President] can do to your job, but there's a great deal Peter
Drucker can do.
PT: The faddishness of the management field is both fascinating and
disturbing. Managers run from one guru or theory to the next like
headless chickens.
JM: People buy these books and attend seminars out of fear, and
that's what creates the fads. Middle managers are often very frightened
individuals. They're worried about being downsized. They're worried about
one of these techniques being used on them. Then they see books with
titles that promise relief. The titles advise you to Control Your Destiny
or Somebody Else Will, or they ask if you're In Search of Excellence. And
they give the impression that everything will be okay once you've read
them. People often feel better when they buy these books, but they seldom
do when they read them.
PT: Is there a parallel between the popularity of management books
and the self-help books that tell people how to be happy, lose weight in
30 days, and achieve triple orgasms?
JM: Well, there is a section of the management field that has gone
into self-help. Or maybe a section of the self-help industry has gone
into management theory. Steven Covey was a professor of management and
organizational behavior at Brigham Young University when he decided to
write about the self-help tradition in America, and then he began to
apply these ideas to management. He said that companies had achieved as
much efficiency as possible from an organizational perspective; they had
to go beyond that and have employees work to become more efficient,
better time managers, that sort of thing. So there is a blurring of
boundaries between self-help and management.
AW: For what it's worth, Convey's clients have included Newt
Gingrich, Bill Clinton, and Princess Diana. His trademark is making
people walk across hot coals, although whether he's done that with any of
the aforementioned people, we don't know.
Somebody who is considerably less credible than Covey is Anthony
Robbins, who writes books with titles like Awaken the Giant Within. He
calls himself a business motivation guru. His basic message is self-help
with a little bit of business sprinkled in. Usually there's just enough
business to persuade companies to pay vast amounts of money to hear him
speak.
JM: The purveyors of these books never say that reading them alone
is enough, because they've got other things to sell. After reading the
books, they want you to go to their seminars or, as with Covey, to
workshops that last a week and involve a range of activities from sitting
in classes to climbing mountains and camping overnight at the top.
PT: One guru you do have kind words for is Peter Drucker.
AW: Drucker is an amazing thinker. He has the capacity to spot
major shifts in the economy before anybody else and understand what their
implications are for the way companies are run. But as we point out in
the book, he does occasionally get some things wrong or muddled. What's
slightly sad about Drucker is that because this discipline is so full of
charlatans, other academics haven't given him the attention he
deserves.
At a lot of American business schools, people specialize in
ever-narrower areas, and they produce a lot of journal articles but not
much wisdom. Drucker has avoided that. He really is a general
thinker.
JM: In the book we rather pretentiously describe him as the last of
the human encyclopedias. As a boy he sat on Freud's knee, he had a brief
career in investment banking, he was a political theorist and an
economist, and it's out of that kind of variety that something
interesting comes.
PT: One of your biggest pet peeves is management theory's
insensitivity to language.
JM: There is something remarkably flatulent about management
language. Take Competing for the Future, by Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad.
If you read it, it's just a complete mess of mixed metaphors. It's very
difficult to work out what they're saying. There aren't many people in
this field who stand up and say, "For God's sake, write more
clearly."
AW: One problem is that this is a discipline which aspires to be a
science without really being one, so as a psychological compensation,
management gurus use lots of scientific-sounding words. They never use a
clear English word when they can use an abstract one like
"reengineering," because it gives the impression that what they're doing
is preordained by logic.
Tags:
adrian wooldridge,
american managers,
better management,
books,
business,
business books,
dolts,
economist john,
getting down to business,
Job,
management,
management consultants,
management experts,
management fad,
management gurus,
management principles,
management theorists,
organization,
peter drucker,
psychological models,
shell out,
three quarters,
tom peters
