Matthew Stewart has written a truth-telling expose in which he explains that the high priests of business management, the MBAs, consultants, and other shamans, have no clothes! In a monumental act of misdirection he, or maybe his editors, choose to title his book, ”The Management Myth: Why the experts keep getting it wrong“. The title of this blog entry would have been more apt.
The Management Myth
Let me begin by saying that this blog entry is not a review of Stewart’s book, mainly because I haven’t read it! But I have read and reread his article in the June 2006 issue of The Atlantic, entitled more succinctly, “The Management Myth“, and if that article, which you can read online, is representative of the book, then I can recommend the book without hesitation. If its book reviews you want, try Jill Lepore’s in the October 12 issue of the New Yorker, “Not so Fast” and Andrew O’Connell’s in the August 13th, 2009 Harvard Business Review, “Why Business Theories are a Waste of Time“.
Now, on to the matters at hand.
As readers of this blog know, as a critical thinker and yes, as a bona-fide “consultant to management”, I have a very off-center view of the nature of business”, which I describe as a subset of a broader behavioral set I call “enterprise“. My formal education and training were in the fields of Sociology, Social Psychology, and Education, and that background provided me with a foundation of theory that has served throughout my life and career as a basis for understanding and interpreting human behavior.
From my perspective, there is no dividing line between business and non-business. There is only the process of human interaction in which people go about the “business” of living. The roles individuals come to play in their communities — parents and children, teachers and students, workers and managers, leaders and followers, predators and victims, lovers and haters — are shaped by the forces of circumstance, luck, and shared intention. The one common denominator is that we are all born into community and by virtue our humanness, are bound to work together to survive and hopefully, to prosper in the world. There are no isolates. There can be no loners. To be human is to be wound up into a web of interaction from which there is no escape. This is the “busy-ness” by which we make our way, day-in and day-out.
Matthew Stewart’s is making this same point . “Business” is not a science nor, in and of itself, a meaningful field of study. The so-called “science of management” is no more than an apologetic for a certain set of relationships — suppliers to customers, managers to workers, the powerful to the powerless. These relationships are not produced by any set of external laws of nature. They are rather, a singular example of one form of relation that has come into existence and has been perpetuated by those who benefit most from it.
Because the “science” of management is an apologetic rather than a real science, it is rife with tortured logic that must conform to dogma that justifies the status quo. Fredrick Winslow Taylor, called by many the “father of management science”, enshrined this dogma as the myth of “efficiency”, by which maximum production can be extracted at a minimum price. To put this another way, those who profit from the labor of others, aim to do so by compensating those others at the lowest possible rate. A rose by an other name, is still a rose. Six sigma, Lean, TQM, Re-engineering, and Value Stream Mapping, are all roses by another name. The rich get richer and poor get poorer. There is no science in this. There is only self-interest fueled by power.
Does this mean that I, a “business consultant” am anti-business? Not at all!
What I am saying, is that the assumption that business is first and foremost, about the profits that accrue to managers and shareholders, must not be the principal aim of a business enterprise. Maximizing the efficiency of a business’s profit making ability is a recipe for disaster in which the number of losers increases at an increasing rate and, in the long term, can only result in everybody losing. These ultimate losses can be tallied in terms of rampant wars, resistant diseases, deforestation, pollution, global warming, and myriad as yet unimagined, long term contradictions of human enterprise, so aimed.
Dr. W. E. Deming, also a “business consultant”, countered the ideas of maximizing efficiency (i.e. profitability) with the idea of “optimizing” the system of enterprise as a whole. He set forth the aim of a business “system” in the first of his 14-Points — “(Conduct business) …with the aim to become competitive and to stay in business, and to provide jobs.”
To be competitive while staying in business and providing jobs, is a complex constellation of aims. No one can take precedence over the others. The business of business must be driven with an infinitely forward looking vision toward the creation of value that serves individuals, communities, nations, and world. Conceived and aimed in this way, business enterprise is one of the best means by which humans can harnesses the power of competing ideas and methods to drive the creation of a “better world” (Deming), continuously. In doing this there is PROFIT!
Many years ago I had a conversation with Dr. Deming in which I asked him about what my role as a consultant, should be. He explained that my role was to provide my client with an outside perspective and a set of a methods for figuring out how to optimize their system of enterprise.
I replied “But what if the client wants straightforward answers instead of methods of inqury?”
Deming replied, “Anyone who says they have the right answers is a ‘hack’. Move on. You are wasting their time and your own”.
As Stewart observes, the “science” of management is mostly nonsense. The proper fields of study for those who seek to improve the efficacy of human enterprise (e.g. business) are the libral arts, social sciences, and philosophy. Deming referred to this as SoPK. The bottom line cannot be measured in dollars alone. It can only be measured in terms of that which we aim to do, and that dear reader, is fundamentally a function of the values we hold dear.
Deming’s aim? “We are here to make a better world.”
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I can sympathise with the central message of this post. As a management consultant myself I do get embarrassed by the exaggerated claims made by some in “my profession”. As an example I see a lot of consultants who are pitching to implement some standard or methodology or other making all kinds of wild claims. For example “It WILL increase staff motivation, it WILL improve efficiency, it WILL pay for itself in no time …” well sometimes, often even, it might not. It depends on a whole stack of variables if we’re truthful, not least the way we implement it, how much we spend implementing it, and, most crucially, the starting position of the client. Maybe they are pretty tight to begin with, so for a start you’ve got a reduced scope to deliver against these wild claims
It’s the snake oil of the modern business world and it does the rest of us no good at all
Shaun,
Your reflections speak well for you as a consultant.
Deming often spoke of how organization’s need help from “outside” the system in order to improve. He also spoke of “hack” consultants.
I think his first comment was about a theory of knowledge . “A system cannot understand itself” because it is encapsulated in its own reality. A consultant/mentor is also encapsulated by a reality, but that reality is different. In difference there is discovery.
In his second comment regarding “hacks”, I think his point was that consultants are subject to the same perverse motivators as any other business enterprise, and if they fail to resist the aim to profit by any means — relying on lies (marketing and sales hype) — they do more harm than good.
In a competitive environment, the impetus to lie to others and one’s self, is very great. In my view, the job of the consultant/mentor is provide a skilled and well informed outside perspective that can help a system see things in new ways. The rightness or wrongness of the consultant’s perspective cannot be determined by any objective measures.
The consultant’s stock and trade is not “right” answers and guaranteed methods, it is his or her ability to understand the nature of a system, variation, knowledge, and human behavior. and to help a client organization create its own unique solutions to the challenges it faces.
For this service, the consultant deserves to be paid a fair and equitable wage — no more and no less.
But how can a consultant convince a prospective client of the value of his or her service? Deming told me, the consultant cannot. Only the client can come to the awareness that his or her organization is stuck in the system they have created.
Here is Seth Godin’s recent view on what good companies should do more of … and I think it applies as much to consultants as anyone
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/11/the-why-imperative.html
Basically he reckons we all need to concentrate on what we do well and draw clear lines, meaning that when necessary we admit “we don’t do that” as opposed to chancing our arm and trying to blag our way through. Not that it ever happens …
Good point. A necessary rule of thumb for we who profess, advise, mentor, and educate is to acknowledge what we don’t know. As in the the Hippocratic Oath says. “First, do no harm.”
As Deming said, “There is no substitute for knowledge.”
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