The Management Myth

April 21, 2011 6:35 AM

"Management theory came to life in 1899 with a simple question: “How many tons of pig iron bars can a worker load onto a rail car in the course of a working day?”... At the end of the day his “method” amounted to a set of exhortations: Think harder! Work smarter! Buy a stopwatch!" Matthew Stewart on the fruitlessness of management science. "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."
posted by geoff. (54 comments total)

Good post
posted by leotrotsky at 6:44 AM on April 21, 2011 [1 favorite]

I would love to say I stole from you, but it was Udi Dahan that I cribbed (for some reason can't find a link to the individual tweet, but it is only 3 or 4 down from the top)!
posted by geoff. at 6:54 AM on April 21, 2011

I agree with Stewart of course, but Taylorism is hardly cutting-edge when it comes to useless management pablum.

For example I love to mock the McKinsey Quarterly

I believe BCG and maybe Bain have similar publications. Also HBS. All dreck.
posted by JPD at 6:55 AM on April 21, 2011

I've always considered management consultants to be grifters with graduate degrees.
posted by leotrotsky at 6:58 AM on April 21, 2011 [1 favorite]

my preferred description "a guy who knows a million ways to fuck, but has never had a girlfriend"
posted by JPD at 7:03 AM on April 21, 2011 [2 favorites]

Hasn't management theory pretty much been reduced to "act like you care about the workers and they'll work harder for a while"?
posted by tommasz at 7:20 AM on April 21, 2011 [1 favorite]

I can't tell you how many times I've heard that damned motto "Work Smarter" belched-out by some management suit. Odd, they never seem to be able to explain what, exactly, that shit means.

My favorite (as in, "You're lucky I'm unarmed at this moment") management mantra was constantly recited by an office manager who was proud of her "open door policy". To wit: "If you don't have a solution, don't come to me with a problem." Brilliant stuff, that.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:24 AM on April 21, 2011 [5 favorites]

Well I fooled you...I fooled you...I got pig iron...I got pig iron...I got aaaaaaaaaaaaalllll pig iron
posted by spicynuts at 7:27 AM on April 21, 2011 [17 favorites]

I may be conflating some definitions of "management consultant", but hey, they're not all crackpots.
posted by klarck at 7:31 AM on April 21, 2011

klarck - that's not strategy consulting - its a different type of consultant. (And they have take "Lean" to the point where it is rapidly becomeing a meaningless concept.
posted by JPD at 7:42 AM on April 21, 2011

Oh man, the management bat signal is lit again already, and as Metafilter's resident management professor, I feel the need to respond. So let me say, and I think I say this out of something other than just defensiveness, this article is not very good. Let me explain.

Stewart is right to point out a tension between two schools of thought in "management theory" (more on those scare quotes shortly). There has always been tension between humanists and rationalists, and Mayo and Taylor were among the first representatives. I also understand why this is not that interesting to a philosopher of sorts (which is Stewart's angle), since it doesn't represent much deep thought. That is about where I think the insights in the article end, since I think that Stewart claims lofty intellectual positioning, but goes after soft targets.

First, "management theory" is not so much a thing for people actually do research in management. Most people who study management are, in part, psychologists, economists, historians, or sociologist. And oh boy, do these groups have theory beyond Mayo and Taylor: starting with Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Schumpeter, and going through recent Nobel winners and lots of other people you neither have heard of nor care about unless you are an academic. We talk theory all the time, you can't publish without it. But theories aren't that useful for telling you how to directly make money, which leads me to the second issue...

Stewart repeatedly confuses (as do many commentators) the worst management claptrap with the entire field. You will meet annoying MBAs, you will see vapid business books, you will be told to "work smarter, not harder" by managers. We spend a lot of time at work, and like other fields that we care about a lot but that have complicated, in-progress findings (medicine and psychology come to mind), there are plenty of popularizers, gurus, and mediocre books out there to fill the gap. If you really want to use the worst of the field to mock everyone in it, well, not much I can say there. MBAs and consultants are dumb! My boss sucks! Well, yes, sometimes, but sometimes management consultants help.

But, and this is important, most of us work. Isn't it worth thinking about how work can be made more interesting, more innovative, more productive, less soul destroying, more important? That's why I got into the field, and my colleagues are discovering important things: one studies how emotions spread in a workplace, like a contagion, another on how organizations learn, a third tries to understand how companies change their identities over time, another looks at evolving work-family balance, and so on. There is good management work being done. And we teach it to MBAs and publish it in books (read The Halo Effect for a good criticism of popularized work, for example).

Anyhow, rant over for now, until the next post on the subject!
posted by blahblahblah at 7:44 AM on April 21, 2011 [23 favorites]

Well I fooled you...I fooled you...I got pig iron...I got pig iron...I got aaaaaaaaaaaaalllll pig iron

Dammit, I was coming in to post that.

Funny, I taught a class on organizational theory last night. It was short, there isn't much useful to say.
posted by OmieWise at 7:50 AM on April 21, 2011

Thorzdad: IME, the phrase "open door policy" is almost only ever used by managers whose open doors are best avoided.

That is, if employees rightly feel free to walk in and say,
"Your plan is going awry! This is fucked up! Here's what's wrong with your ideas, and why..."
... then we're talking about a manager who has no need to advertise an "open door" policy. It's the cretins, posers, and power-trippers that use that phrase.
posted by IAmBroom at 7:52 AM on April 21, 2011 [1 favorite]

Stewart repeatedly confuses (as do many commentators) the worst management claptrap with the entire field.

Except that 99% of the entire field is that claptrap. It becomes impossible to separate the 1% that is actually useful.
posted by JPD at 7:55 AM on April 21, 2011 [2 favorites]

And management matters, but it is impossible to identify good management ex-ante.
posted by JPD at 7:57 AM on April 21, 2011

blahblahblah I think the main problem is that while there likely is a lot of real research and study going on, it seems mainly not to affect actual management.

Like most people I've worked several jobs, and as a rule the only management I've encountered seemed to boil down to one major thing: how to get people to work harder without paying them more. Some places offered stupid, stupid, prizes. Like the call center which required business casual clothing, but if you exceeded goals you could get a special card that would entitle you to wear jeans for one day.

The actual, real world managers don't seem to be paying any attention whatsoever to the research being done in the field. By the time it gets to them, via popular dumbed down books, it turns into just one more thing to annoy their employees with. Perhaps the research started by observing that people like to be self actualized and appreciated for their work, but when put into effect it means a mandatory meeting where you stand around and wait until someone is named "employee of the month" and then you go back to your cube and resent the fact that the 30 minute meeting means you'll have to work through lunch to make up for the time lost in the meeting.
posted by sotonohito at 8:03 AM on April 21, 2011 [14 favorites]

This problem is not confined to corporations. I'm sure there are plenty of similar examples of cognitive dissonance-generating claptrap in the ranks of all hierarchies, including religions and governments.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 8:08 AM on April 21, 2011

The actual, real world managers don't seem to be paying any attention whatsoever to the research being done in the field.

Fair. See also: medicine, law, political journalism, software engineering, and basically every other field with a continually-emerging canon and time-strapped practitioners.
posted by downing street memo at 8:09 AM on April 21, 2011 [6 favorites]

posted by blahblahblah at 7:44 AM on April 21 [+] [!]

I like what you're bringing to the conversation, and on some level I agree. I've fallen into this field from failed dreams of academia, and it's... odd. Pragmatically, I agree with a lot of what you've said, and as far as day to day work days go, it's interesting.

Philosophically... well. I'd agree with everything you say, except that, as something of an anarcho-syndicalist, I have some disagreements with the basic premise of the conversation. ;)
posted by Stagger Lee at 8:15 AM on April 21, 2011

then you go back to your cube and resent the fact that the 30 minute meeting means you'll have to work through lunch to make up for the time lost in the meeting.--sotonohito

I've worked for a company where all the managers were into pushing management theory on all the employees. I wondered if they ever bothered to add up the cost of the number of employees multiplied by the number of hours spent (wasted) on this multiplied by how much money is spent per employee per hour.

They even brought in the big shot Price Waterhouse Coopers consulting team who did all kinds of employee interviews and customer surveys and in the end showed us all that they understood our niche market much less than we did, which is understandable since we were in that market and they were not.

We got a lot more done when they got out of our way. How about that for a management theory?
posted by eye of newt at 8:21 AM on April 21, 2011

I thought this was some pretty good advice on how to be a good manager. Albeit in specialist field. I for one wish my manager took blame and wasn't a shifter.
posted by aychedee at 8:32 AM on April 21, 2011 [1 favorite]

I think the existence of management consultants has more to do with the way management itself works than the way employees do their jobs. X in upper management has a fairly obvious idea that would improve productivity...but he can't convince Y and Z. So he hires a very expensive management consulting company to come up with the same idea, and sell it to Y and Z. The whole business with elite MBAs and ivy-educated obnoxious 20-year-olds is just to help sell the ideas better to other people in management.
posted by miyabo at 8:38 AM on April 21, 2011 [2 favorites]

I always cringe whenever I hear about "Human Resources" rather than "Personnel".

Employees are just fucking widgets, cogs, inputs into the machine, a resource from which labor and value is to be extracted, rather than people.

And company that has a "Human Resources" department is up front letting it's employees know what it thinks of them before word 1 is spoken.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 8:42 AM on April 21, 2011 [3 favorites]

eye of newt If it it wasn't for the PWC bit, I'd swear you were talking about a previous employer of mine. They hired somewhat cheaper consultants, though.
posted by Skeptic at 8:47 AM on April 21, 2011

I was in an employee workgroup that was tasked with finding ways to improve productivity. We came back with the advice "1) pay more 2) provide monetary incentives 3) pay more". Management came back with "No, you dont understand. We want you to find ways to improve productivity that dont involve money." And we came back with "No, YOU dont understand. There is no meaningful way to improve productivity that doesnt involve money." There were no more meetings of the workgroup.
posted by Billiken at 8:59 AM on April 21, 2011 [7 favorites]

I for one wish my manager took blame and wasn't a shifter.
Excellent point. My management tools:
1) Protect your people, by all means make people accountable, but as a manager, you are responsible. If they mess up, it's yours to own too.
2) Remove roadblocks. Anything you can do to help your people not be bothered by corporate or client crap will help them succeed.
3) Care. Care about the work you do as a group, and care about what each employee needs to feel challenged, valued, or, for some people, just left alone.

It's not something you can learn by reading. You learn by watching, and doing.
posted by joecacti at 9:00 AM on April 21, 2011 [8 favorites]

The actual, real world managers don't seem to be paying any attention whatsoever to the research being done in the field. By the time it gets to them, via popular dumbed down books, it turns into just one more thing to annoy their employees with.

I'll agree with this. I just got my MBA after about 10 years of actual management experience in software development, and I will say that there are without question really useful concepts that it would benefit everyone to learn. I would specifically call out Structural Holes and the concepts of brokerage and closure. It really helped me understand the balance between tightly coupled high performing teams and people with broader but shallower connections - when to organize for one or the other, and how they act together to create value.

I'd also recomment Personnel Economics (note, not 'human resources'), which puts some economic theory around traditionally softer things like hiring, compensation strategies, and performance evaluations.

In the end I got four things out of the MBA program. 1) I learned some new things. 2) I learned some theory behind things I always knew to be true. 3) I made some good friends. 4) I can play a lot better defense against silly ideas like the ones mentioned upthread, since I know where they come from and what their weaknesses are.
posted by true at 9:00 AM on April 21, 2011 [1 favorite]

"In a sense, management theory is what happens to philosophers when you pay them too much." Brilliant. It's always nice to see a philosopher able to survive and prosper in the real world, and still say smart things about it.


Actually this article is a bit out of date - Stewart has now turned it into a rather good book, also called 'The Management Myth' (I reviewed it myself elsewhere)
posted by Philosopher's Beard at 9:22 AM on April 21, 2011

Although I can't find the whole paper online, it should be pointed out that Taylor's pig-iron story that was central to his argument was essentially a work of fiction. It should also be noted how much Taylorism still influences large corporations like UPS.
posted by Dodecadermaldenticles at 9:38 AM on April 21, 2011

Management came back with "No, you dont understand. We want you to find ways to improve productivity that dont involve money." And we came back with "No, YOU dont understand. There is no meaningful way to improve productivity that doesnt involve money."

As someone who has been known to live & die by the tip cup, my philosophy is Thank you is polite, cash is sincere.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 9:43 AM on April 21, 2011 [1 favorite]

"No, YOU dont understand. There is no meaningful way to improve productivity that doesnt involve money."

I'm in management, and this is exactly the problem I'm encountering with my higher-ups right now. It certainly is possible to improve productivity over the short term without providing a monetary incentive; you can encourage individual competitiveness towards a department goal, or provide a mostly non-monetary incentive like lunch for the team one day, but the problem with this is that upper management always looks at the stats in these times of elevated effort, and expects them to become the norm. And then you get a situation where over a couple of years, you have a team that has taken on two or three times the workload they had previously and not gotten any kind of correlative pay increases.

Which is to say that, all my management training and theory has really taught me is that I can manipulate my team into working hard for next to nothing.

And that I need to find a different job before this one eats my soul and sanity any further.
posted by quin at 9:53 AM on April 21, 2011 [3 favorites]

Can somebody nutshell this Philosophy thing for me?
posted by Casimir at 10:02 AM on April 21, 2011 [1 favorite]

as a rule the only management I've encountered seemed to boil down to one major thing: how to get people to work harder without paying them more

In other words, "maximizing profits."

This is precisely the point of business, when we're talking specifically about profit-making entities. In fact, there is no other reason to be in business. If you want to make dollars*, it's good to make a dollar and it's better to make two dollars. One of the ways to do this is to increase labor productivity and decrease labor costs.

There is plenty of stupid management to go around, just as there is plenty of bad medicine to go with the soaring achievements of good medicine. Denigrating all study of management as pointless is the proverbial baby-with-the-bathwater.

* Please note the specificity of this statement. You can indeed be in business with an entirely different set of goals.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 10:02 AM on April 21, 2011

This is precisely the point of business, when we're talking specifically about profit-making entities. In fact, there is no other reason to be in business. If you want to make dollars*, it's good to make a dollar and it's better to make two dollars. One of the ways to do this is to increase labor productivity and decrease labor costs.

Which is why the the Labor Movement started in the first place, and why the Republican party is launching it's all-out war against them and working people in general.

It's only class warfare when we fight back.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 10:09 AM on April 21, 2011 [8 favorites]

And we came back with "No, YOU dont understand. There is no meaningful way to improve productivity that doesnt involve money."

That is apparently not always true for positions requiring autonomy, according to Daniel Pink.

Regarding "Human Resources", it only recently occurred to me that the function of Human Resources at a company is above all else to protect the company from lawsuits brought by employees. Any other functions are byproducts of this.
posted by RikiTikiTavi at 10:11 AM on April 21, 2011 [4 favorites]

So, this guy started a 'management consulting company' where he was paid to bullshit people, and now he's pointing out that "hey, management consultants bullshit people"?
posted by rmd1023 at 10:12 AM on April 21, 2011

P-B-Z-M - I am definitely with you on the Personnel/HR question. I wrote an AskMe about it a couple of years ago on a bad day at work, although some of the answers made me back off my position a teensy bit.

I worked at IBM from 1973-2003, and it was quite a difference between before and after the coming of HR and management consultants. Some time after In Search of Excellence came out, everybody in my office was given a copy. I remember liking the book at the time, but it seems like the message got weirdly distorted, even by those that were trying to do good. They'd look at HP (for example- they were profiled in Peters' book) and say 'what are they doing right?'. Apparently, they have 'casual Fridays'. It therefore follows that if we institute casual Fridays, then we will have an excellent company.

A lot of people seem to think that the visible policies of excellent companies are the causes and not just the results of that excellence.

And on preview... A word about 'the point of business'. Even in profit-making businesses, a lot of them were formed for other primary reasons. Money is important, but it is not everything. Some people start businesses so they can do what they want and still make a living. When Watson formed IBM, he surely wanted to make a buck. But I think even more, he wanted to found a feudal empire. He took his role as feudal lord seriously, demanding obedience and loyalty, but he also believed in Noblesse-oblige. When businesspeople just focus on money, everything goes to hell.
posted by MtDewd at 10:17 AM on April 21, 2011

Gerstner was a McK alum.
posted by JPD at 10:25 AM on April 21, 2011

And we came back with "No, YOU dont understand. There is no meaningful way to improve productivity that doesnt involve money."

RikiTikiTavi: That is apparently not always true for positions requiring autonomy, according to Daniel Pink.

That video was recently played at our company's technology division all-hands, and while I like the video and agree with most of its premise, I'm not so young and foolish as to believe that most managers won't see that and think only "autonomy is the answer". Which, yeah a truly autonomous work environment would be a huge improvement, but I'm sure they'll gloss over a point in that video where they said "Money doesn't matter once you take it off the table and give them enough to not worry about money".

When it comes to money, I think most of us want to a) have some forward progress so they don't feel like they're sliding backwards by standing still, pay-wise, and b) not feel like a chump who is making far less than a co-worker who is either clearly less competent or simply has a better manager when it comes time to stack-rank pay raises and bonuses each year.

I can't complain about my job- good living, safe environment, mentally interesting most of the time, etc- but there's that human tendency to be pissed off if Braindead Bob is actually making $20K more than you while drooling on his keyboard and making messes you end up fixing.
posted by hincandenza at 10:27 AM on April 21, 2011

In fact, there is no other reason to be in business. If you want to make dollars*, it's good to make a dollar and it's better to make two dollars. One of the ways to do this is to increase labor productivity and decrease labor costs.

But that overlooks some pretty big assumptions. If the business can make two dollars by paying a little less, or not replacing retirees or whatever, it does so and has its apologists. But what if it could make three dollars, by murdering half its employees? Must it follow the profit-making imperative there?

No, of course not, it can't. There are laws, and I imagine basic morality would make managers quit before they got their hands bloody. But what if it weren't murder? What if it were only torture? Minor injury? What level of pain should we allow, so that profit can increase? Because putting people in mind-numbing environments, terrifying them that they'll lose their jobs, and steadily paying them less and less for more and more work...that is painful, psychologically and physically.
posted by mittens at 10:39 AM on April 21, 2011 [4 favorites]

I'll chime in again to say that people are not just incentivized by money, and there are dozens of ways one can increase productivity without additional cash. Only in the worst wokplaces are cash the end all and be all.

In fact, research has shown that while money is a big incentive, relying on money alone in organizations increases unethical behavior. Increasing intrinsic incentives, including giving people meaningful work, including a chance to build skills and make meaningful choices, increases productivity without the negative benefits.

Quite frankly, it sounds like a lot of your workplaces suck (and I had some horribly dysfunctional jobs as well). But work doesn't need to be horrible. People who care about their jobs perform better. If you show radiologists a picture of the patient before they examine an X-ray, they are almost 50% more likely to correctly identify cancer, because they empathize with the person. You can get the same effect in call centers. Its not just about money, its about meaningful work.
posted by blahblahblah at 10:48 AM on April 21, 2011

This is precisely the point of business, when we're talking specifically about profit-making entities.

I think the point is that often management are unwilling to spend $x amount on labour that would result in $3x in extra productivity/profit.
posted by kersplunk at 10:55 AM on April 21, 2011 [1 favorite]

there are dozens of ways one can increase productivity without additional cash

And yet, there are far fewer ways to pay the rent.
posted by mittens at 10:59 AM on April 21, 2011 [1 favorite]

MetaFilter: a continually-emerging canon and time-strapped practitioners.

And where, I might add, none of the practitioners get paid. . .
posted by rdone at 11:13 AM on April 21, 2011

I wondered if they ever bothered to add up the cost of the number of employees multiplied by the number of hours spent (wasted) on this multiplied by how much money is spent per employee per hour.

I know of a company that actually does this. In order to book a room for a meeting you had to provide a business justification for how you were going to create value equivalent to the amount of lost time ( meeting duration * number of people * average labor rate) that it was going to take. The justifications used were pretty wishy-washy but it was nice to see a pricetag attached to every meeting. And it really did cut down on "well, why don't you come and sit in, in case something comes up..."
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:18 AM on April 21, 2011 [3 favorites]

Intrinsic motivation actually powers large parts of our economy today, and not just in the sense that people need that in addition to money. For some of these businesses, they can only function if the workers don't get paid. The best example is Google - they have great search results because people created links to other web pages that they legitimately thought were high quality, relevant, etc. But if your motivation for linking to another site is financial, that makes you an SEO spammer who drives down the quality of the search index.

In order for Google to make money, people who create on the internet have to be convinced to work for free. This is also true of Facebook, Twitter, etc.
posted by AlsoMike at 12:05 PM on April 21, 2011

Regarding "Human Resources", it only recently occurred to me that the function of Human Resources at a company is above all else to protect the company from lawsuits brought by employees. Any other functions are byproducts of this.

Well yes, they hope to protect the company from lawsuits by making sure labor laws are being applied uniformly, benefits are administered properly, etc. Just as the CFO tries to protect the company from lawsuits by keeping it financially solvent.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 12:11 PM on April 21, 2011

I first read this as "Martha Stewart on the fruitlessness of management science." Which would be much wierder, and probably more autocratic.
posted by postel's law at 12:43 PM on April 21, 2011

I see value in management theory but I definitely feel that many managers working in the field struggle to actually implement management theory in any meaningful way.

Many lack the education to actually analyze the literature and even if they did they often lack the time to actually sit down and figure out how to make a best practice work for their unique circumstance.

I think many management consultants also fall into the same trap, instead of spending enough time to actually see how an organization works both at the high level and down in the trenches, they assume that a one size fits all approach works universally. Further they often try to turn everything into "common sense" platitudes which are easy to learn but don't really give you much to work with.

The result is you get stuff like bribing people with a more casual dress code. Non-monetary remuneration can be a nice supplement to other forms of compensation but it can't be in lieu of other forms of compensation. All too many managers get trapped into thinking that the stick can be used in place of the carrot or that you can use a fake carrot into making the proles work harder. The self-motivated ones typically are going to work hard no matter one and the lazy ones aren't going to be motivated by lame prizes.
posted by vuron at 1:47 PM on April 21, 2011 [1 favorite]

What I didn't like about all the "quality" horse shit as it was going down was how much of it was actually fear mongering. "The world is getting more competitive every day and if you can't step up, you're going down." and stuff like that. There may have been talk about efficiency and team building after that, but it all started with: "Be Afraid."
posted by Trochanter at 2:10 PM on April 21, 2011 [1 favorite]

I think the point is that often management are unwilling to spend $x amount on labour that would result in $3x in extra productivity/profit.

You won't know it results in profit until you try it. Labor is not a capital expense, like purchasing a machine, that you can recoup or amortize -- you pay for labor, they do their work, and that's it. Short answer: There's risk.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 2:47 PM on April 21, 2011 [1 favorite]

You won't know it results in profit until you try it.

That's why God invented pilot programs. And the endless, endless calls that go with them.
posted by mittens at 3:26 PM on April 21, 2011

"You learn by watching, and doing."

That makes sense to me. You should come and watch our team lead for a while. He never talks to any of us if he can avoid it - I always give him a cheery Hello! in the morning, but now he walks really close to the wall and fast so I can't greet him. It's a small three-minion team. My neighbor says the TL hasn't spoken to him for weeks.

He's someone who would benefit from some Management courses - at least he'd be out of our hair for a while. Nice guy, but paid far more than he's worth.
posted by sneebler at 5:39 PM on April 21, 2011

I love to see management advice from people who have never done it...

You want to be happy at work? Serve your fucking customer well, whoever that is. Want to be a good manager? Give your people the tools to be able to do this.

Productivity is not about money. Anyone who says it is is trying to sell you something. You know this, we have all seen it at every job we've ever had. Productivity is about attitude and enthusiasm, and money can't buy neither. It can only rent it.

When businesspeople just focus on money, everything goes to hell.

No, when they focus on short term money, everything goes to hell. If all business people and managers focused on the long game of making money, everything would be awesome. Because the long term means treating people right and giving a good value. (Vendors, employees, customers alike)
posted by gjc at 9:08 PM on April 21, 2011 [1 favorite]