

The Management Myth (2006) - clyfe
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2006/06/the-management-myth/4883/
Most of management theory is inane, writes our correspondent, the founder of a consulting firm. If you want to succeed in business, don’t get an M.B.A. Study philosophy instead
By Matthew Stewart
======
singular
I think the real management myth is the implicit mental model most managers
out there (in my experience) make use of, based on ideas of what a worker is,
sourced from the 18th/19th century - i.e. that they are a. doing an unpleasant
job they'd rather not do and b. are likely to try to cop off as much as
possible.

This works well for factory jobs, but not so great for software development.

From this derives all the stuff about dressing in uniform, good timekeeping
(introduces discipline and routine), the need to see the workers doing what
the manager understands to be work (i.e. coding window open, typing out code),
it's what smacks down on anything perceived to be procrastination from a
distance, what maintains a level of suspicion that the staff will, where
possible, do as little work as they can get away with.

This whole model seems to be (though almost always not quite consciously) the
universally accepted approach most everywhere. That, combined with the fact
that many IT managers are not technical themselves, results in a lot of the
stupidities within the industry I think (especially so in internal IT).

Software development is extremely sensitive to ability level and environment I
feel, so the typical suspicion and focus on things utterly unimportant to the
job itself really, really take away from the task itself. What is especially
pernicious is the desire to see work as the manager defines it done, i.e.
sitting down and coding. Software development consists of many things other
than coding including planning, thinking about the problem, etc. and that
attitude not only takes away from the process which actually results in good
software, it promotes those developers who just sit there coding out crap and
punishes those coders who want to think things through more clearly.

~~~
dalore
The funny thing at our work is that we want to code and do our software
development but the managers are the ones getting in the way, with things such
as meetings, interruptions etc. If they actually left us alone we would get
more done.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
There is little doubt in my mind more would get done. The question I have is
would the right stuff get done?

I'm a coder by background. I know how interesting those pesky little problems
can become, until they subsume the important things like getting a product
delivered.

A good manager realizes the (limited) meetings are to ensure everybody is
clear and focused on the same goal. A bad managers thinks meetings help
achieve that goal.

------
eitally
tl;dr for my comment: I agree, with caveats, and have personal experience to
back up my opinion.

Not a bad article but nothing really new. As an undergrad I majored in public
history & religious studies (wanted to be a museum curator) while supervising
a digitization lab in the special collections library. I didn't have a clue
what I wanted to do with my life after I realized I hated curatorial work, so
I got a job through Manpower doing web design. Modern web technologies were
still emergent then (1999) and I was able to keep abreast pretty well for a
few years, until my interests moved more into project management and then
actual team leadership.

I've been successful so far and now direct about 60 great people worldwide.
I've also had time to reformulate my career objectives and realized going back
to school was a sensible thing to do, especially if I ever needed a piece of
paper to validate my cv in this down economy. I chose a multi-disciplinary
systems engineering program at NCSU and it's been a terrific experience that's
meshed very well with my current role at work.

This was a longwinded introduction to my main point: I see other people in
both my masters program and other graduate fields at the university who have
absolutely no experience in the real world. Not only that, they still tend to
believe that the management track of an MBA is where the money is. They're
going to be sorely disappointed when they graduate and realize no company
worth it's salt is going to think twice about hiring a newly minted MBA that
1) has never worked a real job and 2) has no management experience. I'm
starting to work with both my department head and others to help mentor and
guest lecture for these students, and hopefully jolt them back to reality.

This isn't to say that an MBA is useless, but an MBA should be a _complement_
to one's work experience and is by no means a replacement. I completely agree
with the author that a background in philosophy is often a better tool for a
manager than an education in finance/management (still, too many companies
lead by the Taylor style of gauging productivity and because Excel still runs
the business world there's a strong tendency for managers to try to quantify
performance based on metrics... the wrong metrics.).

~~~
me2i81
"no company worth it's salt is going to think twice about hiring a newly
minted MBA that 1) has never worked a real job and 2) has no management
experience"

It's a nice thought, and I suppose you could discount the vast majority of
companies as not being worth their salt, but newly-minted MBAs from top
schools seem to be doing just fine relative to the current economy.

~~~
eitally
I would argue that the top flight schools typically do a better job preparing
their MBA students for the real world (externships, more realistic case
studies with active participation from visiting corporate leaders, etc) than
the bottom 90% do.

~~~
jbooth
If there is one thing on earth that I know I will never do with my time, it's
to pay a school for the privilege of doing free work for somebody.

~~~
wan23
Typically interns (externs? what's the difference) get paid for their work at
this level.

------
api
A leader is supposed to be someone who has gotten very good at doing something
and now leads it.

The problem is that we've created this parallel track called "business" that
has separated leadership from any practical experience. There are now two
parallel unrelated non-intersecting career tracks: those who do, and those who
lead. Those who can do. Those who can't lead.

The pure MBA is our equivalent of the apparatchiks of the former USSR.

------
barry-cotter
To summarize in English: Stewart started an unnamed firm, and tried to exit
mid-bubble four years later; his partners didn't want to buy his equity, so he
sued them. By the time he got his shares bought three years later the firm had
imploded.

[http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2006/05/12/the_myth_of_the...](http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2006/05/12/the_myth_of_the_5.html)

Here's a previous discussion with comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=581487>

~~~
clyfe
The author of the article you provided calls "The Management Myth":

"the article is disjointed, dull, obvious, smug, poorly written, and full of
falsely-elevated faux philosophy chatter"

plethora adjectives, but fails to bring _any_ argument.

~~~
boredguy8
But still right.

~~~
jbooth
And still failing to bring _any_ argument.

I thought the article was really well written and had a number of
good/interesting points. The fact that this guy saw the charade for what it
was earlier than his partners but failed to find a sucker to buy his shares
doesn't invalidate his point -- if anything, it strengthens it.

------
toadi
He wrote a good book:
[http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB10001424052970204...](http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB10001424052970204313604574329183846704634.html)

------
RyanMcGreal
Proves the old maxim: When you stare into the MBA, the MBA stares into you.

------
jdvolz
This whole thing makes me sad because I have a friend who is very good
technically who just started his MBA this week. I'm strongly debated not
sending this article to him just because I don't want to depress him.

------
dimitar
Management is a religion. But society was built on religion and we need it
today the same way it was needed in Ancient Egypt and Sumeria. Authority is
very hard to justify.

The high priests of the religions of political ideology and management rule
over the peoples of the world. The good thing is we are not going to leave
Stonehenge and the Pyramids as traces of our stage in development as species.

And no, I'm not an atheist. :-)

~~~
dimitar
Also religion is needed to enforce a particular way of thinking which eases
communication. Sometimes you may want to put someones mind in a box.

------
mikeleeorg
As an aside, I remember being a management consultant and receiving the
following <sarcasm>wisdom</sarcasm> from my manager: "You don't have to be
smarter than your client. You just have to appear to be smarter than your
client."

------
JVerstry
So many people criticize MBA's out of complete ignorance. They are full of
s.it. They only expose their theorizations about it and propagate their naives
misconceptions over and over.... They don't even have one !!!

Remember 'Good Will hunting' when Robin Williams comes back to Matt Damon,
telling him he summarizes people out of what he read in books? It's the same
s.it !!!

Matthew Stewart shrinks MBA's to his narrow understanding of it. He is
definitely not one to take advise from. Really not. Talk to those who have an
MBA.

Barry-cotter: Thanks for posting those links.

~~~
jbooth
I hope to god you don't have an MBA with that grammar and spelling. I mean, I
know it's not a lit program, but come on here.

~~~
maukdaddy
I'm almost 2/3s finished with an MBA program so I'll jump in here.

Sadly his grammar, spelling, and writing does represent a lot of MBA students.
People can't write worth a shit anymore. I spend more time than I like to
think about correcting other's writing for group projects.

And if you think MBA students can't write, you'd be amazed at how poorly most
of of them give presentations. =(

