The management myth (2006)

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/06/the-management-myth/304883/?single_page=true

by wtbob • 10 years ago

240 154 10 years ago

Companies hire M.B.A.'s and consulting firms because management is so hard. Alas, I think the fundamental reason for this is that the human psyche was designed by evolution to operate in small foraging bands, not large, hierarchical organizations, and it is really hard to get anything so unnatural to work very well.

dilemma2• 10 years ago

My belief is that, after working in a couple of dysfunctional companies, organization design with proper work and communication processes, and effective management, is the "secret" to company success. Almost no one seems to understand what management is and that it is a job in itself, just like being a designer or engineer is.

That being said, I've studied management and agree that as it's being taught it is indeed inane. Currently, I'm learning how to not manage a company by working as a grunt and being managed. I think this experience will be very valuable in the future as I intent to start a company.

cookiecaper• 10 years ago

Can you walk us through your idea of the daily work of a manager, since you say it's "a job in itself"? I understand that if you give a person a title and tell them to sit around for 40 hours a week and collect a paycheck, they'll invent ways to stretch that out, but in real terms, what are the daily objectives that a manager must address? How many people can one manage before they need to commit their attention 100% to management? 10 subordinates? 5? 1? Is someone not a "real manager" as long as they have time to do code work on the side? Is a manager who does code automatically less qualified than one that would ensure his managerial duties exclude any time for other pursuits? Is someone only a legitimate "manager" if they went to school for it? Can it be self-taught?

I've had management positions before so I have my own answers to these questions, but I'm curious about yours.

7952• 10 years ago

My belief is that, after working in a couple of dysfunctional companies, organization design with proper work and communication processes, and effective management,]

These are principles that people generally agree with. However, applying them with force from the top can do more harm than good. You can have a couple of possible outcomes:

* The process will be badly designed and ignored. * The process will be badly designed and not ignored.

Designing good systems is very difficult and needs to be based on evidence.

jldugger• 10 years ago

There's many reasons to hire firms besides the one you defend. From the OP:

In one episode, when I got involved in winding up the failed subsidiary of a large European bank, I noticed on the expense ledger that a rival consulting firm had racked up $5 million in fees from the same subsidiary. “They were supposed to save the business,” said one client manager, rolling his eyes. “Actually,” he corrected himself, “they were supposed to keep the illusion going long enough for the boss to find a new job.”

Spooky234• 10 years ago

I've witnessed this approach several times. Another variant That requires extra sociopath points is the double down strategy.

In one case, the principal hired a big consulting firm to the tune of $10M, and created some crazy project that fucked up that part of the company badly. The principal sucked up to some industry group, got a big award, and subsequently got a big promotion and shoved some cannon fodder into his old job.

Next step: cut off the funding oxygen, yank all of the consultants, and blame everything on the new people.

tootie• 10 years ago

They provide intellectual cover. When you're approaching some completely new line of business, any early decisions you make are bound to be educated guesses. Management consultants are paid to come in, act confident, make wild guesses with apparent certainty, and give you something tangible to show to your backers that you're taking the smartest path. It's simulataneously worthless and extremely valuable.

My current project was strategized, scoped and planned by McKinsey before we even drew the first wireframe. They spent 6 months coming up with a framework that was completely wiped out in the next 6 months. They provided no tangible benefit to the finished project, but who knows if they would have even gotten budget approval without their magical slideshows and spreadsheets.

given• 10 years ago

http://www.discovery.org/a/130

ACow_Adonis• 10 years ago

Really, what can i say other than a good piece of writing that essentially matches my own conclusions and experience (and of course, I'm biased because I have the philosophy degree like the author and, now having worked for government and a big private corp, though I've not had the "pleasure" for working for a consulting firm, I have had the "pleasure" of working with them when hired by senior executives). I feel I need to comment just so this article generates some discussion/anecdotes.

All I can really conclude is that it seems to me to be common practice to look to consultancy either when you:

-don't know what you're doing and from a merit point of view probably shouldn't be in the job you're in

-you just need temporary labor without the problems/responsibilities of permanent employees

-you need to hide/cover-up/massage something

-you have a friend at the consultancy and you just continually hire/swap jobs while managing other people's money/resources and funnel it to each other

-or...possibly combined with all of the above, you need to hide your work/non-work behind a veneer of social prestige and acceptability: if profits increase, you take credit, if it fails (and if you actually measure whether it fails you'll be in the minority), well, you can't be blamed, I mean you hired the best consultancy...i mean...they have letters next to their names and everything (well, more commonly everything except experience in the business they're consulting about).

But in this sense, the management class and consultancy are beginning to blend together: its just all about image, project confidence, never introspect or question or measure anything properly, don't hold them to account, and remember...and the end of the day its about networks, how much you get paid in fees and bonuses, and your next job. No one's going to investigate your claims of past success anyway since its all behind NDA's and corporate veils.

Unfortunately, I don't know what kind of legal position I will be in if I actually talk about some of the...err..."interesting" experiences I've had, and the people in these industries obviously have to protect their reputations (since that's about all they have) so I'll just take a quick quote from the article:

"As I plowed through my shelfload of bad management books, I beheld a discipline that consists mainly of unverifiable propositions and cryptic anecdotes, is rarely if ever held accountable, and produces an inordinate number of catastrophically bad writers. It was all too familiar. There are, however, at least two crucial differences between philosophers and their wayward cousins. The first and most important is that philosophers are much better at knowing what they don’t know. The second is money. In a sense, management theory is what happens to philosophers when you pay them too much."

maxxxxx4• 10 years ago

For the last 4 years I have worked for the first time in my career as employee of a big corporation. The "managing class" of MBAs reminds me of the way a communist state like East Germany was run. Centralized decision making, information withholding, the desire to plan out everything for years, saying one thing while meaning the opposite, hanging up motivational posters "we are innovative" while squashing innovation, ignoring of inconvenient facts and so on. All that comes with the appearance of "management science" and its own insider language.

jostmey• 10 years ago

Universities and Hospitals are infected with them. Like full blown infestation.

Amygaz4• 10 years ago

Yep! But his is not like an autoimmune disorder (e.g. type 1 diabetes). It's more like an acquire disease (i.e. type 2 diabetes), for which we fully understand how to prevent and alleviate, but somehow do not implement the necessary measures.

horsecaptin• 10 years ago

Now you know why healthcare and education costs so much in America.

jacques_chester• 10 years ago

Well, yes. This is because both are examples of command economies and both evolve additional non-hierarchical mechanisms to achieve actual outcomes.

In any large enterprise there is always a Nomenklatura who actually "make things happen".

When explaining to people that trying, for the billionth time, to create The Perfect Reward Scheme won't work, I put it this way: GOSPLAN had decades, and access to unlimited men with guns and dogs, to make its plans work. And it failed.

ced• 10 years ago

So what's the alternative?

Spooky234• 10 years ago

I've been part of that group within large organizations at a few different levels.

It's both an intensely rewarding experience -- you get to fix things that are broken and get a lot of creative license. Simultaneously, it's also intensely depressing, as you get to learn how the metaphorical sausage is made.

dingbat2• 10 years ago

do your attempts in explaining this make any difference at all in terms of making things happen? or are they also failures?

wz10003• 10 years ago

GOSPLAN had decades, and access to unlimited men with guns and dogs, to make its plans work. And it failed.

I am no fan of oppressive regimes, centralised planning or Stalinism, but it always grinds my gears when people point to the collapse of the Soviet Union as the One, Absolute proof that centralised planning is always doomed to failure.

While I'm sure that the hierarchy and command structure of the government and economy had their parts to play in the collapse, their importance is often overplayed by gargantuan proportions.

At the time of the October Revolution, Russia was a largely agrarian society, which henceforth industrialised and developed remarkably quickly under Stalinist Five-Year-Plans, in the midst of the Great Depression. However, it was still poor and barely industrialised when it was decimated by WWII. Despite this, it recovered to become a major world power that challenged the US during its peak.

US GDP has consistently been 3-5 times USSR GDP during the the latter's entire period of existence. Despite this, the pressures of the Cold War forced USSR military spending to match US spending, reaching more than 25% of GDP.

Any country in a similar position would be doomed to crack under the economic strain, regardless of the structure of government or economy.

kafkaesq• 10 years ago

GOSPLAN had decades, and access to unlimited men with guns and dogs, to make its plans work. And it failed.

For a while (until the early 80s) things did work reasonably well in the Soviet Union, compared to its overall condition at the end of WW II.

Grishnakh3• 10 years ago

The "managing class" of MBAs reminds me of the way a communist state like East Germany was run. Centralized decision making, information withholding, the desire to plan out everything for years, saying one thing while meaning the opposite, hanging up motivational posters "we are innovative" while squashing innovation, ignoring of inconvenient facts and so on.

Huh? What's wrong with centralized decision making and planning out everything for years? The rest I can agree with, but 1) in any company, you need centralized decision making or you won't get anything done; the point of a company is not to be a democracy, it's to be a machine that generates profit, and centralized decision making accomplishes that. And 2) what can possibly be wrong with planning things out far ahead? I worked at Intel for years and they did this, and it worked, for the most part. (Obviously, circumstances forced plans to be altered or even abandoned at times.) If you don't have a plan several years out of what you want to be doing, you're not going to accomplish anything big. How do you think the Moon missions could have worked if they didn't plan that out years in advance?

It sounds to me like you're comparing whatever little podunk 20-person company you used to work at with the big corporation you find yourself in now, and you're trying to assume that everything the little company did was somehow correct. It wasn't; the big company got to be a big company by doing something right.

Many of the other things you complain about just sound like typical bad management, and things you'll find in any organization that isn't perfect. Information withholding and saying one thing and meaning the opposite and ignoring inconvenient facts: aren't those common with the US government? I saw these in several small companies I've worked in (and big companies too). It's not unique to big companies. There's definitely more of it in poorly-run companies, which should be no surprise. There's no shortage of poorly-run companies out there, big and small.

As for the motivational posters, that's a fad (though admittedly it's been around a good 15-20 years now). I recommend getting your own motivational posters and hanging them in your cubicle (if you even have a cubicle; working at big companies was a lot nicer 10-20 years ago before this idiotic "open plan office" craze). You can get some excellent posters [here](https://www.despair.com/collections/demotivators).

(What kind of site calling itself "Hacker News" doesn't even support some kind of basic markup for embedding links? Come on guys.)

naasking5• 10 years ago

What's wrong with centralized decision making and planning out everything for years? The rest I can agree with, but 1) in any company, you need centralized decision making or you won't get anything done; the point of a company is not to be a democracy, it's to be a machine that generates profit, and centralized decision making accomplishes that.

No it doesn't. Top-level decision makers are poorly informed about what's possible and what's actually effective. Complete top-down decision making is Dilbert incarnate.

Top-level executives need to make the goals of the company clear to team managers, and that's not just "profit", and they need to set the constraints that any direction in pursuit of those goals must satisfy (such as legal or marketing requirements), and let the engineers find optimal solutions within that space. Engineers excel at finding effective solutions given a set of constraints, executives excel at defining business policies that effectively shape a successful business. Let each employ their appropriate skill set.

And 2) what can possibly be wrong with planning things out far ahead?

Inflexibility to changing market conditions. Having invested time, money and effort into forming such an intricate long-term plan drives us to stupidly believing sunk cost fallacies, and ignore evidence of ineffectiveness.

digi_owl5• 10 years ago

The problem is when the decision makers are removed from daily events, and they stick dogmatically to the plan and try to change reality to fit said plan.

A non-soviet example may well be McNamara's time as Secretary of Defense.

As one anecdote put it, by the time the report of a shooting of a elderly lady with a bicycle in a Vietnamese village had reached the DoD, it had become a ageless, genderless, combatant, with a grenade...

maxxxxx4• 10 years ago

As far as I know "podunk" is an insult, is that what you intended?

My problem with the planning obsession is that planning is really hard in software development. It's different in production. There you can predict the future fairly well.

When I tell some middle managers that I don't know exactly how long a software project will take they insist on endless planning meetings that hold up work even more. In the end it's best to make up an estimate so the team can go back to work. All teams are forced to do so so in the end you just wait for the first team to fall behind schedule and take the blame.

The whole system is pretty much everybody lying to each other and hoping they won't fall first.

danblick• 10 years ago

What's wrong with centralized decision making and planning out everything for years?

Read Hayek's "The Use of Knowledge in Society"; it's about exactly this.

singingfish6• 10 years ago

Yeah nah. (That's australian for I see what you're saying but you're wrong[1]). One goal of senior management is to try to determine an organisation's trajectory and make decisions that put it on that trajectory in the hopefully medium to long term - but beware short term financial incentives. Junior management has the same kind of thing going fractal style. Bonus points if that trajectory doesn't work out (do you have one or more fallbacks?). While centralised decision making may enable the whole long term planning thing to be realised, in some situations it's not possible (e.g. medical organisation where you have to give substantial numbers of staff very high levels of autonomy) or desirable (e.g. where you need to make staff at the minimum feel that they're in control of their own destiny because for example they're difficult to replace). In fact regarding the second point, I was involved in a project a while ago where the goal was to improve the autonomy of steel workers in order to effect organisational improvement. So there's a whole movement in management which is being fairly widely adopted to avoid excessive centralised planning.

[1] c.f. "nah yeah" - "what you're saying sounds very wrong but it's probably right"

PythonicAlpha• 10 years ago

I always find it a very negative sign for a company, when the corridors are getting filled with pep talk posters, which could have come directly from the latest management magazine.

For me it is a clear sign, that innovation and real work done in the company is going rapidly downwards.

Continuously repeating, how good "we" are clearly says, that the company is currently "not good enough".

What might work in personal psychology, does not in corporations, where everything else tells the workers, that their work does not count, but only the work of the poster creators.

Elrac• 10 years ago

Can confirm.

I've heard that my company has been told to tighten the belt, that there are a lot of positions in the company that don't produce value to paying customers. At pretty much the same time, I'm seeing a wave of self-aggrandizing motivational posters. I think I see a connection.

cafard• 10 years ago

A woman of my acquaintance, a substitute teacher in one of the local school systems, has said that the number of posters about values and respect is in inverse proportion to the quality of the schooling.

pasbesoin• 10 years ago

Amen. That's a very good, concise, and apt description. It mirrors my own not inconsiderable experience.

I simply can't take it anymore.

MagnumOpus2• 10 years ago

Don't blame the MBA degree as the root cause of these symptoms. I have had a Mathematics PhD manager who exemplified these exact traits to a T. Doing an MBA is just a symptom of the ladder-climbing mentality, just like the buzzword bingo, the elevation of ignorance to a virtue and the do-as-we-say-not-as-we-do leadership.

xyzzy4• 10 years ago

Management is sort of like dating, in that there are so many complexities and hidden variables that you have to go by instinct and experience. I don't see how it can be taught well in school. Try to use empathy and don't make enemies, I guess. Be careful about what you say to both your manager and underlings.

autokad• 10 years ago

to say philosophy majors are better managers than mbas already shows that the person doesnt know what an mba is.

mbas can go any number of directions, and while one clearly does not need an mba to be a good manager, most (actually all) mbas I know that did go into management are much better at it than the philosophy majors I know.

Edit: I also wanted to say that the management classes I did take were super interesting. Management 101 is more like a psychology class than I would have expected. Also, I'm pretty sure the author got an MBA between 2008 and 2010

stephengillie• 10 years ago

After taking management courses at a local community college, I was underwhelmed by the management courses at my state university's Top 15 Management College.

The community college had courses on interpersonal management techniques, and the purpose of a manager in a company. (Hint: It's to find and remove a worker's blockers, not to brow-beat lazy workers.) Though designed for front-line supervisors and other low-middle management, it was some of the best management education I've ever received. I was stunned not to find any similar courses at the higher level.

iofj2• 10 years ago

I am a consultant, usually not in management, and management is about actually participating and propping up, rationalizing, and preventing the firm from dying confronted with management dictats such as:

Our firm wasn’t about bureaucratic control and robotic efficiency in the pursuit of profit. It was about love.

As opposed to bursting out in laughter.

I'll admit: I failed on this one.

singingfish6• 10 years ago

Believe me it gets worse when you teach on management subjects ... Judging by your comment I might have flagged you as a "good" student.

tacos2• 10 years ago

No love for the typical MBA consultant here, but one thing they seem to have over the philosophy crowd? Brevity. Good lord this post needs an editor.

mrep• 10 years ago

He also needs to read some economic textbooks (finance and accounting wouldn't hurt either).

digi_owl5• 10 years ago

Accounting would likely help much more than the other two...

ktRolster4• 10 years ago

His review of the literature is old too, with his primary sources being nearly a century old. If he had done a more comprehensive review, he would have found much of value.

For example, there is no doubt that management philosophies from Japan (like ZQC or the Toyota way) have had an influence on American production. Is that all imaginary? Because US auto quality seems to have improved significantly as a result.

tacos2• 10 years ago

Deming! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

stdbrouw2• 10 years ago

That's kind of the point, though, he's showing the roots of modern management practices go back to that era.

dredmorbius2• 10 years ago

Stewart did read the modern literature. He found it lacking. Addressed in the article's 4th paragraph:

After I left the consulting business, in a reversal of the usual order of things, I decided to check out the management literature. Partly, I wanted to “process” my own experience and find out what I had missed in skipping business school. Partly, I had a lot of time on my hands. As I plowed through tomes on competitive strategy, business process re-engineering, and the like, not once did I catch myself thinking, Damn! If only I had known this sooner! Instead, I found myself thinking things I never thought I’d think, like, I’d rather be reading Heidegger! It was a disturbing experience. It thickened the mystery around the question that had nagged me from the start of my business career: Why does management education exist?

Moreover: he's hammering home the point that management science isn't much evolved from its early pig-iron days.

Something which I, having studied economics in school, am finding applies rather well to economics as well. A discipline which is curiously ignorant of its own history.

stdbrouw2• 10 years ago

Some people enjoy reading for its own sake.

bobsil1• 10 years ago

Set a philosopher to catch a bullshitter. Nice.

hardmaru• 10 years ago

Check out this recent article from The Economist:

Nothing special: MBAs are no longer prized by employers

http://www.economist.com/whichmba/nothing-special-mbas-are-n...

I think this is just the beginning of a much longer trend in management reform.

Amygaz4• 10 years ago

That article doesn't look at if or how a MBA brings value. It mainly points out that a MBA is not a differentiating factor in easily finding a high-paying job, unless it was acquired from a highly regarded MBA program anymore. The reason being that, since MBA programs are money makers for their teaching institutions, they expanded like any rabbit population would do without predation, and with rabbits also getting into the Matrix, since you can earn a MBA from the cozy cushion of your pillow in your bedroom.

digi_owl5• 10 years ago

The basic thing about the MBA is that it boils down the inner workings of a widget factory to generic parts.

This is all well and good when your inputs are chips or bolts, but when they are humans things break down fast.

mixmastamyk• 10 years ago

From Ben Rich's biography, about Harvard Business School: 2/3 HBS == BS.

xivzgrev• 10 years ago

"In my experience, for what it’s worth, consultants monitored the progress of former clients about as diligently as they checked up on ex-spouses (of which there were many). "

Former consultant here. That is 100% true - the metric of success is whether clients buy more work, not how successful your recommendations were (and there can be many reasons to buy consulting services beyond they produced successful strategies)

bla2• 10 years ago

What are other reasons?

slgeorge• 10 years ago

Access to skills, networks or resources you don't have. For any significant decision it can be valuable to get a different perspective. It can also be a way of protecting confidentiality.

Lets say that you are deciding whether to sell a business unit, or to ramp up investment to try and break through.

- Skills benefit: creating the financial models is something many companies don't do all the time. Using an external consultant may also benefit as they may know current industry valuations.

- Network benefit: They might know other people in the segment who would be interested in your business unit. (for product development this is a better benefit). Counter-argument, it's part of managements job to know about the industry so your own network should be enough.

- Resource benefit: The whole team is busy so bringing in external resource to consider the problem lets internal resource keep focusing on existing business. The counter-argument is that if this is the most important thing to do then existing resource should be focusing on it.

- Different perspective: Someone coming from the outside who's not part of your group think. You can sometimes get access to real expects - counter argument is that they're often not real specialists, you have to test.

- Protecting confidentiality: You may not want it known that you're considering selling the unit. Consultants can act as a natural firewall. Tends to be more useful if you're looking at an external purchase - since in my example they'd have to crawl through the numbers of the unit and that makes it obvious.

The benefit no-one talks about:

- CYA: it's a tough decision and may turn out to be wrong. Helps to have "blah blah international consultancy says that X market will do Y and recommended as follows ...". Counter-argument: get some integrity. In fairness it can help to bolster an argument to have external 'calls to authority'.

Dwolb• 10 years ago

A point-of-view from the essay is the author dislikes employees who can't think critically.

The big issue I have with the piece is that poor critical thinking skills isn't an issue with only MBAs. Every field and every degree has a spectrum of people with poor critical thinking skills to good critical thinking skills.

So yes, dumbly putting up a client-facing diagram of a 5 forces analysis might be pretty stupid, but knowing to think about the role government might play in the firm's ability to capture profits is good practice.

Similarly in hardware, blindly following a manufacturer's board layout is dumb too if you don't understand the specific needs of your application and how the schematic and board might change.

dilemma2• 10 years ago

Inability to think critically or be creative often come as a result of management. Positions are too narrowly defined, so operators lack context for their work. Without information, you literally can't think at all.

wallace_f3• 10 years ago

Inability to think critically or be creative often come as a result of management.

Unfortunately, in my experience management does not want you to think critically. They want you to do what you are told.

From the article: >... the science of handling pig iron is so great and amounts to so much that it is impossible for the man who is best suited to this type of work to understand the principles of this science, or even to work in accordance with these principles, without the aid of a man better educated than he is.

This is so accurate a description of management in my experience. Unfortunately, I have not always worked for the best companies, but I don't know if it's the same at the best places.

RobertKerans• 10 years ago

To put slightly positive spin on that, is being uncreative not a benefit in management? In my experience, those that are creative (although that's a pretty nebulous term) seem to, as a rule, be fairly—deeply uncomfortable in management positions, because creativity is curtailed - more prosaic organisational skills are more important.

aryehof• 10 years ago

I'm somewhat unclear why management consultants are hired.

1. Is it to help management solve problems they can't themselves solve? 2. Is it to show and teach how to manage? 3. Is it to help improve the management process and organizational structure?

refurb• 10 years ago

You missed the most important reason! To have an "objective outsider" look at a business issue in an "unbiased" way.

Please note my quotation marks.

When I was a consultant, the purpose of hiring us ranged from a temporary extra pair of hands to the above. Most projects were somewhere in between.

In terms of the "unbiased view", every single company knew what they should do. These were smart people. However, internal politics prevented them from getting the ok from leadership. So, you hire an outside consulting firm and when someone says "that's a bad idea" you hold up the McKinsey deck and say "these smart guys think it's the right decision".

Works nearly every time.

enraged_camel• 10 years ago

It works the other way around too: consultants make very convenient scapegoats, which allow managers and executives to push for change (via the consultants they hire) without risking their own neck.

smcl• 10 years ago

I've no idea either - tbh it's quite possible that it ends up being the blind leading the blind, but if you're paying hefty fees it feels like you're actually doing something.

Related note - The Armando Iannucci Shows (by "Veep" creator, about 10 years beforehand) tackled Management Consultants very well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSJggp-mbiA&t=0m58s

jomamaxx• 10 years ago

You don't take an MBA to learn how to manage people.

An MBA teaches you about the fundamentals of business and organizations: Finance, economics, microeconomics, marketing, accounting, management accounting, and a lot of stuff in between.

MBA's are 'business wonks' - they may or may not make good leaders or managers.

The tool of the software developer is code, the tool of the MBA is a spreadsheet or an analysis framework.

It's not remotely about people skills.

singingfish6• 10 years ago

Good article. Presumably because I did something bad in a previous life I apparently have a PhD in information systems management (fortunately these days I make my living by bending computers to do my will instead). The whole field is infested with ideology. One reason I'm a failed academic is because of the whole prioritisation of convention over a logical evaluation of the actual problem space. Because I prioritised the latter over the former (and my subfield was especially ideological) I worked more slowly than those making convention-based shortcuts. On the other hand my thesis was accepted with spelling mistake corrections required only :P.

Also I was unaware of Taylor's fudging of his data. Nobody ever draws attention to that, and presumably when I was reading the originals I skimmed that part due to looking for specific information which never made it into later write-ups as I couldn't make it relevant enough to my narrative (thus I never re-read the originals).

ktRolster4• 10 years ago

I apparently have a PhD in information systems management

I honestly didn't know that was possible.

singingfish6• 10 years ago

yep, baffles me as well. Also the fact that it got through with spelling mistake corrections only :o

singingfish6• 10 years ago

Mintzberg's work on the structure of organisations, and what's been built on top of it on the other hand is quite interesting. Glouberman and Mintzberg's followup work on organisational structure in healthcare is pretty good too (wrong but good). Glouberman is a philosopher too which fortuitously makes things relevant to the OP.

They make a differentiation between cure (doctors) versus care (nurses). I'm feel that computer hackers are rather like doctors and nurses in that regard. High levels of professional autonomy and prioritisation for the doctor level hackers (e.g. I've been given Dr House level free reign to diagnose and cure a system that's been sick for at lest the last two-ish years, and nobody else has been able to work out what's wrong with it). Junior devs are more like nurses, working under direction to treat symptoms to make the patient better but where the architectural considerations are less important.

We currently have a Clinical Nurse Specialist level hacker trying to bolt some new behaviour on top of a very sick subsystem (written back in the day when nobody knew what they were doing). I'm interested to see what he makes of it - he already dismissed extending the subsystem out of hand, and justifiably so, so I'm looking forward to seeing his next decisions.

mwfunk• 10 years ago

The article looked familiar, and it turns out that I had read the author's book on the same subject published several years later. It goes into a lot more detail about the author's personal experiences in the management consulting business, plus much more history WRT MBA programs and where the whole concept of management as a standalone discipline came from.

It's not my field so I don't know how fair the criticisms were. Still, it was a really interesting window into an area that overlaps quite a bit with the tech industry.

Anyhoo, the book that emerged from this article is "The Management Myth: Debunking Modern Business Philosophy":

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002PQ7B72/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

yuhong• 10 years ago

Horrible idea of course, but I wonder if there are companies who pick CEOs randomly from new MBA graduates and pay them an extremely high salary with no stock options or other incentives.

Amygaz4• 10 years ago

I think you may have the beginning of experimental setup to test the hypothesis that the value brought by a MBA is not different than zero.

miraj• 10 years ago

I am a bit perplexed. I think there is a mechanism to prevent duplicate postings on HN?!

Wonder what happened to the filter? I posted this same article earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11928990

sbarski• 10 years ago

Brilliant article. I only wish I'd read it 10 years ago...

wallace_f3• 10 years ago

… the science of handling pig iron is so great and amounts to so much that it is impossible for the man who is best suited to this type of work to understand the principles of this science, or even to work in accordance with these principles, without the aid of a man better educated than he is.

That is the most accurate description of MBAs and anyone involved in selling management consulting and advice.

It boils down to is "it's complicated, you need an expert." Don't ask why, you'll learn your lesson quick enough: "we're smarter than you, and we're really good at expressing it." In fact, that seems to be the primary skill required in this field: expressing that 'we're smarter than you.' I don't believe for a second the selection process at the most prestigious consulting firms is biased towards undergrad institution prestige for any other reason. Plenty of firms looking for great engineers/developers will hire a great candidate with a degree from a less-than-prestigious undergrad. I've never even heard of that in consulting and finance (I'm sure there's some exceptions, but I bet they're few and far between, and probably due to personal connections).

kfk• 10 years ago

Well, I did study BA 1.5 years (for free in DK) and I have mixed feelings. From one end, it's just what the author says as there is a lot of fluff floating around. From another end, though, we did a lot of field studies, which included inferencial statistics, that focused on teaching how to properly test theories. Look, the business world is full of complex issues that need research, humans are difficult. The problem with MBAs is that they don't take BA research very seriously - they pretend to teach academic papers just by reading the abstracts and the easy material. Core competency is actually a great line of research, unfortunately by the time it reaches those doing an MBA it has been stripped of all the useful parts and it has become a mere slogan.

Annatar• 10 years ago

The article confirms my own suspicions and experience: management is the art of selling bullshit, and being a deterrent rather than help (which it is supposed to be, and bills itself as).

The most disturbing (and correct in my observation) thought in the article is that there is now a new ruling class. And when I think about it, the management ruling class is like an octopus, like mafia, with connections and tendrils everywhere: it does not matter whether one is competent or benevolent, as long as one is well connected, the rest of the management mafiosos will always find "a slot" for one of their buddies and shove them somewhere to be a parasite in a company, parasite to the workers and society at large. And while they might be the ruling class at the moment, like a metastized cancer of society, now that we are aware of their presence, I say: nothing lasts forever. Bullshit cannot defeat logic, because problems are real, and bullshit cannot solve problems, only logic and knowledge can.

dvdcxn• 10 years ago

There must always be bullshit for logic to prevail over. There must always be...bureaucracy.

mactitan• 10 years ago

The first myth of management is that it exists.

http://www.murphys-laws.com/murphy/murphy-technology.html

Amygaz4• 10 years ago

That list is funny.

My preferred line is the first one: "Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence". It applies to so many behaviors in various fields.

Then there is one I am not sure I agree with, it really depends on what "level of management" means: "The degree of technical competence is inversely proportional to the level of management". In my experience, technically-challenged engineers, but who somehow end up with management/supervision roles, also s.ck at that too, big time, so much that you'd wish there was a universal law against it.

devonkim• 10 years ago

People interested in the topic of the great farce that is modern business management should read in Jeffrey Pfeffer's Leadership Bullshit that also criticizes the management industry as well as modern corporations' incentive structures for leaders that make the optimum choice for leaders to lie and deceive.

mannykannot• 10 years ago

I agree up to a point, but I doubt any successful business was run by managers who communicated in the style of Heidegger.

SmellTheGlove• 10 years ago

10 years later, this article still holds up. It's not necessarily the MBA that's at fault, but it is a degree handed out by too many institutions to students with too little experience to benefit from it. The MBA has become a career changer degree, rather than a supplement to people with solid leadership credentials - and the reason is obvious, once you have a track record, you don't need the degree, so schools have found a way to collect the tuition somewhere else. And the curricula don't vary as greatly across schools as the marketing materials would lead you to believe.

I am biased. I did some time in a large consultancy. I also chose a JD over an MBA precisely because it was different than the subject matter and way of thinking that I was exposed to on a daily basis at my employer and clients. So to a large degree, I agree with Stewart's position. Every Fortune 500 is pushing for "different perspectives" and "out of the box thinking" - and they pursue it through diversity. However, they hire the same consultants as the rest of their peers and advance individuals with the same degree from the same schools as everyone else. The hired diversity and diverse perspectives wash out somewhere in the middle management ranks. I'm now a director at a fortune 500 and I don't fit the profile at all. There are zero people in my peer group with backgrounds like mine, which is fine. But there are zero people in my peer group with backgrounds similar to mine (meaning non-traditional degrees and work experience) and that probably isn't fine. Naturally, the corporate initiatives are the same as what every other large corporation has done over the last decade - and it's funny because we tend to go last, and still don't learn from the mistakes of other companies. I suppose we don't even hire the good MBAs.

hacknat• 10 years ago

It is interesting that the most successful founders of companies are almost always domain experts in their field, or, at least, have spent time in the trenches of their domain. Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, Ellison, Page, and Brin all studied CS. Jobs had Woz, and is the exception that proves the rule (Jobs was maniacally product obsessed). Jack Welch was an Engineer. The list goes on and on.

Of all the topics that pop up on Hacker News the fact that MBAs are not useful to founding companies or creating new products seems to be a sentiment we share very little controversy over.

Yet why have MBA types come to dominate the ranks of the startup scene? I used to think that this trend wan't a big deal, but now I'm becoming convinced that MBA types cannot, generally speaking, found successful companies.

kps• 10 years ago

William Hewlett and David Packard, for a textbook example of a company built by engineers and then plundered by administrators.

simonswords82• 10 years ago

Yet why have MBA types come to dominate the ranks of the startup scene?

Have they? I wasn't aware that MBAs were infiltrating the startup scene? Would be interested to hear about some examples.

Edit: I totally agree that MBAs shouldn't be let anywhere near a startup.

The management myth (2006)

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