The Wall Street Journal has a book review of The Management Myth by Matthew Stewart. The book flushes out the ideas Matthew Stewert explored in a previous article in the Atlantic about the failure of management to mature as a discipline.
I’m not sure about the book, I have not read it but that is a great statement. And I firmly believe managers need to become experts at managing and by and large they have quite a long way to go. Dr. Deming talked about how we “know” what we know in the aspect of his management called the theory of knowledge (which is not included in any other management philosophy I have seen). That area (with interactions in other areas) explores why people often believe what is not so. And management seems to have a surplus of beliefs that are not based on sound theories.
Read this good article I have mentioned before on this topic by Carlie and Christensen: The Cycles of Theory Building in Management Research [the broken link was removed].
Related: Righter Incentivization – Another Quota Failure Example – Management Advice Failures – Why Extrinsic Motivation Fails – Innovation Strategy – Does the Data Deluge Make the Scientific Method Obsolete? – Data Based Blathering – Doing the Wrong Things Righter – Harvard’s Masters of the Apocalypse
From the Atlantic article:
…
or companies, M.B.A. programs can be a way to outsource recruiting. Marvin Bower, McKinsey’s managing director from 1950 to 1967, was the first to understand this fact, and he built a legendary company around it. Through careful cultivation of the deans and judicious philanthropy, Bower secured a quasi-monopoly on Baker Scholars (the handful of top students at the Harvard Business School). Bower was not so foolish as to imagine that these scholars were of interest on account of the education they received. Rather, they were valuable because they were among the smartest, most ambitious, and best-connected individuals of their generation. Harvard had done him the favor of scouring the landscape, attracting and screening vast numbers of applicants, further testing those who matriculated, and then serving up the best and the brightest for Bower’s delectation.
Of course, management education does involve the transfer of weighty bodies of technical knowledge that have accumulated since Taylor first put the management-industrial complex in motion—accounting, statistical analysis, decision modeling, and so forth—and these can prove quite useful to students, depending on their career trajectories. But the “value-add” here is far more limited than Mom or Dad tend to think. In most managerial jobs, almost everything you need to know to succeed must be learned on the job; for the rest, you should consider whether it might have been acquired with less time and at less expense.
The best business schools will tell you that management education is mainly about building skills—one of the most important of which is the ability to think (or what the M.B.A.s call “problem solving”). But do they manage to teach such skills?
