A former management consultant comes clean: The Management Myth
During the seven years that I worked as a management consultant, I spent a lot of time trying to look older than I was. I became pretty good at furrowing my brow and putting on somber expressions. Those who saw through my disguise assumed I made up for my youth with a fabulous education in management. They were wrong about that. I don’t have an M.B.A. I have a doctoral degree in philosophy—nineteenth-century German philosophy, to be precise. Before I took a job telling managers of large corporations things that they arguably should have known already, my work experience was limited to part-time gigs tutoring surly undergraduates in the ways of Hegel and Nietzsche and to a handful of summer jobs, mostly in the less appetizing ends of the fast-food industry.
The strange thing about my utter lack of education in management was that it didn’t seem to matter. As a principal and founding partner of a consulting firm that eventually grew to 600 employees, I interviewed, hired, and worked alongside hundreds of business-school graduates, and the impression I formed of the M.B.A. experience was that it involved taking two years out of your life and going deeply into debt, all for the sake of learning how to keep a straight face while using phrases like “out-of-the-box thinking,” “win-win situation,” and “core competencies.” When it came to picking teammates, I generally held out higher hopes for those individuals who had used their university years to learn about something other than business administration.
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?
The whole article was brilliant. And, written in 2006, it appears. There is no obvious evidence that things have improved since then, although it may be that management consulting in particular has become less lucrative.
Recent article by the same author:
http://www.strategy-business.com/article/00029?gko=5d297&cid=enews20100413
Great link, thanks for exposing it to me, Ross.
I saw the management story on hacker news a while ago. I’m never quite sure what one can learn from stories like this — that bad management is the norm? At least in the organizations that hire management consultants? But I think you could easily write stories about bad software developers with the same flavor.
The question, to me, is what can we do, if anything, to nudge our organizations into performing better? Over the years, I have become more pessimistic on that score. Regression to the mean seems to be the normal state of things.
My thinking on this is that more important than the method you use to try to do the right thing (as an individual or as a group), is how you can stop doing the wrong thing. In other words, more dangerous than making a mistake is not being able to recognize and correct the mistake.
I think UT Administrative Computing’s biggest weakness is an unwillingness to ever refactor, or even junk and rewrite from scratch, systems that have already been made. Over time, the penalty from this grows. We have about 30 years of accumulated mistakes now, some of which maybe weren’t even mistakes at the time they were made but they are by now. For example, rolling out own mainframe security, or using Natural to replace COBOL instead of something else.
No matter how good an organization’s decision making process, they will make mistakes. Thus, they will need the ability to collectively change their mind. I have not seen that UT administrative computing has that.
Your post was brilliant and spot on. Interestingly I knew a consultant that performed advance training in coating processes. He had worked at a large organization for many years. During that period he gained a wealth of knowledge and experience, however management would never seek his advise or listen to suggestions. So he quit and became a consultant. He was absolutely stunned when his old company became is biggest client. So he now starts all sessions by stating (half tongue in check) “ Hi I’m John Doe, I don’t work for organization so I am an expert”.
So I guess we are back to the beginning “Why does management exist?”