graphic shamelessly stolen from Nick Webb's neato gallery

Which Doctors?

If you don't look at the publish date (April '97), this interview with the authors of The Witch Doctors about Management and Business books would fit today and 8 years in the future.

Psychology Today

Management Madness? Management Theory -- The experts weigh in on what management advice to takeand what to toss.

Getting down to business with two journalists at The Economist, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge.

Maybe you've never paid much attention to the ideas spouted in those bestselling business bibles by management gurus like Peter Drucker and Tom Peters. But you'd better. Management consultants are the hidden brains behind downsizing, corporate restructuring, and other trends that are changing your job--or eliminating it altogether.

Each year American managers and enterpreneurs shell out three-quarters of a billion dollars on business books, trolling for tips they hope will make their firms more competitive. Meanwhile, companies themselves spend $15 billion for consultants to come in and tell them what they can do to be more efficient. Trouble is, many so-called management experts are simply peddling hot air.

PSYCHOLOGY TODAY: Human behavior and motivation haven't changed much over the years. Why haven't there been more basic, universally accepted management principles that tell people what to do to get the most out of their employees?

ADRIAN WOOLDRIDGE: One reason is that management theorists are essentially divided into two groups. One group thinks that workers are basically dolts who have to be goaded into doing things, either by incentives such as pay or by punishments for not working. The other group holds the opposite set of psychological assumptions: that workers are basically creative, innovative people who want to please and do their best, and that the way to motivate them is to give them as much freedom as possible. So you have two completely incompatible psychological models, and the industry sometimes mixes the two views or switches back and forth. "Reengineering" was the last big management fad, and it was based on the idea that you treat your workers as people who need carrots and sticks above everything else. And now because people have gotten sick of that, we're veering madly toward trust and empowerment and letting people express their individuality.

PT: The title of your book, The Witch Doctors (Times Books), makes clear your skepticism about the value of many management theories. How did this incredulity develop?

AW: Every day books with titles like Leadership Lessons from Star Trek or How to Drive Your Company Like a Dirigible would arrive at my desk. And there weren't just one or two of them--there would be five, six, seven. If you see this stuff streaming out every day, it's impossible not to develop some sort of incredulity. But not all of the advice is nonsense. Some of it is extremely good.

PT: How can readers tell the bad books and bad management sciences from the good?

AW: We thought at first that we would be able to put together a list of approved gurus, but we found that the good gurus often say silly things and the bad ones sometimes say very sensible things.

OHN MICKLETHWAIT: For example, Harvard Business School's Theodore Levitt, the world's best marketing professor, fell hook, line, and sinker for the idea that people around the world were becoming so similar that companies could sell the same product in the same way everywhere. This has worked for only a very few products, like Coca-Cola--and even then there are doubts that the Chinese look at the drink in the same way that, say, Americans do.

Less impressive gurus, meanwhile, do occasionally say some profound things. Stephen Covey's basic idea in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People--that building a more effective company is as much about improving the performance of the individuals who make up its workforce as it is about reorganizing them into new work teams--is actually quite a good one. But he didn't need to begin the book with the words, "To my colleagues, empowered and empowering."

In any event, we can recommend a few basic rules for selecting good management books. You should ignore any book that promises far more than it can ever hope to deliver--for example, if it claims you'll be as rich as [billionaire investor] Warren Buffett if you read it. Or that if you don't read it, you're going to end up living in a cardboard box.

You should also be very suspicious of anything that is written by more than two people. When you have five or six authors, it becomes writing by committee. You get the impression that they have just chucked a hodgepodge of ideas into a collection. Also beware of anyone who claims they've found a general solution to a problem that affects everybody. What we've found about management theory is that parts of it work, that some of it is good for certain types of companies. But the chaos that spurs creativity at a software firm may not benefit a bank. The idea that there's one system that can save every company or industry is untrue.

AW: Another good principle is to avoid animal metaphors--any book that advises you to swim with the sharks, roar with the lions, or dance with the fishes. Just leave those on the shelves.

PT: One of your premises is that management theorists are the "new unacknowledged legislators of mankind." What do you mean by that?

JM: What we're saying is that these are people who affect our lives very deeply. Management gurus can eliminate your job if they advise a company to downsize. They can also change the way you work in your job. Suddenly you get pushed onto a series of work teams. Or maybe "hot-decking" gets introduced and you no longer have your own permanent desk. You can also be subjected to something called "360-degree evaluation," a semimalicious system in which people are asked to criticize their bosses. All of these things change the way people spend their days.

Management theory also affects you as a customer. For instance, in the old days when you called your bank you used to get through to your local branch. Now you get through to someone miles away at a customer service center that's been outsourced--contracted to an outside company. In some ways, this sort of thing makes more of a difference in your life than the laws the government legislates. There's remarkably little that [the President] can do to your job, but there's a great deal Peter Drucker can do.

PT: The faddishness of the management field is both fascinating and disturbing. Managers run from one guru or theory to the next like headless chickens...

There's a whole lot more and even more brutal, Here.

One part I have an experiental quibble with is this:

Also beware of anyone who claims they've found a general solution to a problem that affects everybody.

An "all-purpose solution"? Of course not. But an almost-invariably-all Impetus?

Sure. They're out there. If you start from the inside out. Oooga-boogah!