📖 The Management Myth

Why The Experts Keep Getting it Wrong

2009. Matthew Stewart

After graduating from college in the mid 80s, Stewart started a career in management consultancy that lasted a few decades, through the glory years of what was at the time considered “the worlds newest profession”. This book is proposed as an insiders account of the industry which really exploded onto the scene in a new way in the 80s.

It’s a funny account of one man’s experience in, and take on, an industry that is pretty easy to throw digs at. And as you might guess from the title, plenty are thrown.

“In the time-honoured tradition of management consultants everywhere, we built up our expertise on the spot, with the generous support of our local clients”

What I found more interesting however was Stewart’s novel take on some of the leading management thinkers in recent history. His tales from the consulting life are interlaced with unique takes on the work of management “celebrities”.

First up is Frederick Taylor, the man everyone loves to hate, and one of—if not the—very first management consultants. Although rather than just argue that his principles have aged out—like many do, including me—Stewart goes further, essentially discrediting much of his contribution. It’s a surprisingly well research critique, much of which you don’t hear about elsewhere.

Stewart argues that Taylor’s scientific movement was “deeply unscientific”, and better described as “a parody of science”. At his fireside chats with visiting factory owners, he would exaggerate results without ever supplying the data or the methods that would have allowed others to reproduce and verify such results. Steward references detailed accounts from the yards of Bethlehem Steel that directly contradict the narrative that Taylor attempts to weave in The Principles of Scientific Management.

“To embellish a story once may be counted a minor offence; but to lie repeatedly and gleefully, and to base one’s career on the lie, even while cultivating a public image as one of history’s most notorious sticklers for the facts—this requires character”

But Taylor is far from the only victim. Elton Mayo’s famous Hawthorne experiments are also debunked as pseudoscience.

“Mayo conjured a simulacrum of scientific theorising out of an anecdote whose details were quietly altered where ever they failed to make the right point”.

Peter Drucker, Michael Porter and Tom Peters all get multiple chapters devoted to their critiques. In a chapter entitled “Tom Peters talks to God”, Stewart sets the scene for the release of In Search of Excellence by framing the disdain between Drucker and Peters—“In my mind, Peter Drucker was the enemy”—followed by “the stampede of ‘gurus’ who rushed to satisfy the public demand for management advice on the heels of Excellence”.

Plenty of other household names make cameo’s throughout too. Like Douglas McrGregor, who’s “memorable” Theory X, Theory Y was “laid out in an essay of a couple dozen chatty paragraphs and then padded with miscellaneous other writings to fill out a book”.