

The Management Myth - carusen
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/06/the-management-myth/4883/1/#

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patrickk
One page: [http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2006/06/the-
manage...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2006/06/the-management-
myth/4883/)

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bane
"One of the distinguishing features of anything that aspires to the name of
science is the reproducibility of experimental results. Yet Taylor never
published the data on which his pig iron or other conclusions were based. When
Carl Barth, one of his devotees, took over the work at Bethlehem Steel, he
found Taylor’s data to be unusable. Another, even more fundamental feature of
science—here I invoke the ghost of Karl Popper—is that it must produce
falsifiable propositions. Insofar as Taylor limited his concern to prosaic
activities such as lifting bars onto rail cars, he did produce propositions
that were falsifiable—and, indeed, were often falsified. But whenever he
raised his sights to management in general, he seemed capable only of soaring
platitudes. At the end of the day his “method” amounted to a set of
exhortations: Think harder! Work smarter! Buy a stopwatch!"

During my M.S. studies, I had the bad fortune to take a few management
classes, thinking that I could round out my technical education better if I
had some better insight into the field...(also secretly hoping that my M.S.
would help vault me into management positions). Every single piece of
literature I read (and it was a couple thousand pages worth over three
courses) could be summed up in the paragraphs I quoted above. Or rather, the
material I read was more or less a continuing rehash of the above interspersed
with absolutely common sense statements like "employees need to communicate"
or "if some part of your supply chain breaks down, you can't make things".

Much of it just read like shameless self-promotion, management "experts" with
no particular experience managing anything more complicated a coffee pot wrote
endlessly the same material over and over again about how something they knew
was a unique and important observation that would revolutionize the business
world if corporations would only just follow their advice...and then they'd
never actually quite get to what that advice was.

It reminded me an awful lot of those late-night "make money quick"
infomercials that never actually quite get around to telling you how to make
money quick other than to go out and sell other people on the idea that you
can tell them how to make money quick.

The academic papers were among the worst, least rigorous analyses of any
phenomenon I'd ever encountered. I'm pretty convinced that if you can write a
summary about a company, any company, for 2 or 3 pages, stick in some metric-
less graphs that don't mean anything in particular but have labels like "time
value vs. motivation" and fill your citations with non-sequitur references to
Peter Drucker, you too can get published in management journals.

 _rant off_

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ColinWright
Previous discussions:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=581487> <\- 22 comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1556740>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1635499> <\- 32 comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2437437> <\- 8 comments

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wtn
We all knew this already.

Most of the content in The Atlantic is inane.

~~~
zwieback
It's bipolar - one really great article for 3 inane ones. I'm always surprised
how uneven it is.

This one is old, of course, but nothing has changed in the 4 years since it
was publised or the 100 years before that.

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HockeyBiasDotCo
Finally!

