Management Books are Bunk
09 May 2009This article was kicked up last week on Hacker News, http://news.ycombinator.com, and I thought I would share it here with the group.
The Management Myth by Matthew Stewart:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200606/stewart-business
This is a long article…long even by my standards. Set aside some time and curl up with your laptop and a frosty mug of your favorite beverage.
For those of you who find you can’t spare half a day’s time reading about management theory, and who can blame you, allow me to sum up a few of Stewart’s key points regarding modern business management:
- Management books are bunk, don’t waste your time
- Frederick Winslow Taylor, author of the Principles of Scientific Management, is regarded as the father of scientific management. Steward describes how Taylor formed his management theories with a short story about a bunch of workers moving pig iron.
- The story goes...ask a bunch of workers to perform a task as quickly as they can for a short period of time. Take that data and extrapolate out what a worker could do in an entire day. Lastly account for lunch, breaks, and rest periods
- In this instance Taylor took precise measurements of how much work was being done over a short period of time, but when he accounted for breaks Taylor just picked a number out of thin air.
- The question arises, why perform such detailed analysis of the work and then just throw a giant fudge factor into the equations when accounting for everything else?
- Although most modern management books treat Taylor as a footnote in the history of management, at the core of all of these books are the same principals...appear to have a scientific measurement of how to manage people and then throw in a giant fudge factor to account for the ‘human’ aspect of management.
- The article goes on to describe the work of Professor Elton Mayo in the 1920s, describing that if people care about what they do they will work harder for the greater good of the company. This is the ‘humanist’ theory of management.
Stewart sums up these two viewpoints:
Between them, Taylor and Mayo carved up the world of management theory. According to my scientific sampling, you can save yourself from reading about 99 percent of all the management literature once you master this dialectic between rationalists and humanists. The Taylorite rationalist says: Be efficient! The Mayo-ist humanist replies: Hey, these are people we’re talking about! And the debate goes on. Ultimately, it’s just another installment in the ongoing saga of reason and passion, of the individual and the group.
I’ve read this article a couple of times now, and have spent a considerable amount of time reflecting back on how I manage the people under me. As I look back on my career I can recall instances where I have managed using both methodologies, I’ve been Tayloritte and a Mayo-ist, and I don’t believe I’ve settled on either side…I’m not sure I am supposed to pick a side.
I have to ask myself, what is the point of all of these management theories? What are we actually trying to accomplish when it is all said and done?
From my vantage point it appears as if we are attempting to predict the future. We are hopeful that if a person is given a task to perform, moving pig iron or writing code, that person can perform that task in a certain period of time. Based on those estimates we can hopefully derive when the assigned task will be completed and when we can ship product.
I believe I’ve been reading the wrong books in a vain hope to predict the future…Stewart goes on to conclude:
The tragedy, for those who value their reading time, is that Rousseau and Shakespeare said it all much, much better. In the 5,200 years since the Sumerians first etched their pictograms on clay tablets, come to think of it, human beings have produced an astonishing wealth of creative expression on the topics of reason, passion, and living with other people. In books, poems, plays, music, works of art, and plain old graffiti, they have explored what it means to struggle against adversity, to apply their extraordinary faculty of reason to the world, and to confront the naked truth about what motivates their fellow human animals. These works are every bit as relevant to the dilemmas faced by managers in their quest to make the world a more productive place as any of the management literature.
I think I’m going to take Stewart’s advice, I’m dumping my management books and I’m cleaning out my Amazon wish list this afternoon. I am going to replace those books with books written by the greats.
Define greats however you like, and yes, Douglas Adams does count.