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Well I've been employed by certain high tech multinationals whose obsession with certain MBA flavors of the decade metrics have reduced them to shadows of their former selves.

They were fulfilling the plan just as much as Soviet whalers.




I’m curious what do you mean by “mba flavours of the decade metric”? Is that a common term?


It's not a common term but it is readily understandable to most people.

There have been numerous management trends, innovations, and fads over the years. Maybe now your company has OKRs. Maybe in the 2000s they had a balanced scorecard. Maybe in 1990s they did Management By Objectives (MBO). Maybe in the 1980s they did Total Quality Management (TQM).

Personally I think that lower-level employees cynically overestimate how much damage things like that cause. The real problem is that the business is floudering for market-based reasons. The management is trying to fix it. That they don't always pick exactly the right cure says more about the complexity of having billion dollar companies successfully navigate big changes than about the fads themselves.

Microsoft was hurt by the rise of the internet & google...not by stack ranking. GE was hurt by GE Capital, not stack ranking. Kodak was hurt by digital cameras, not by Management By Objectives. And so on.


Play on flavour of the month (FOTM), in this context meaning KPIs and other heuristics.




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