One even­ing at the din­ing table:^1.

Han­nah: “What is your job mum?”

Olyvia: “I man­age a team of dentists.”

Han­nah: “So you drill holes in people’s teeth?”

Olyvia: “No, I am a manager”

Han­nah: “What is that?”

Olyvia: “I make sure my cowork­ers have everything they need to do their best pos­sible work.”

Man­age­ment is the craft of achiev­ing object­ives vicari­ously; achieve­ment through other people. The manager-employee rela­tion­ship is de facto hier­arch­ical. The idea of the man­ager to con­trol work­ers was pop­ular­ised by Hypotheticorp’s mor­tal enemy, Freddy Taylor. Simply put, the man­ager con­trols resources and staff fol­low instruc­tions. This is, how­ever, a great mis­con­cep­tion of the true nature of the manager-employee relationship.

When Pres­id­ent Nixon met Premier Zhou Enlai (???) in 1972, he asked his thoughts about the French revolu­tion of 1789. Zhou Enlai reportedly con­sidered the ques­tion for quite some time before finally answer­ing, “It’s too soon to tell.”

Zhou Enlai was right. The ideals of the enlight­en­ment of people as inde­pend­ent thinkers has after over two hun­dred years still not been fully real­ised. The struggle between Ancien Regime think­ing and Enlight­en­ment ideals can also be seen in man­age­ment the­ory. The Taylor inspired sci­entific view of man­age­ment versus a more human centred view is a recur­ring theme in man­age­ment lit­er­at­ure. At Hypo­thet­icorp we believe in Enlight­en­ment ideals and pro­claim a human­istic view on management.

Man­agers are sub­ser­vi­ent to their employees

Man­agers are essen­tially sub­ser­vi­ent to their employ­ees. It is the manager’s task to select the right people, make sure they are provided with suf­fi­cient resources, have the right know­ledge and provide a good work­ing envir­on­ment. The man­ager is also respons­ible for main­tain­ing net­works with external stake­hold­ers. Every activ­ity of the man­ager is aimed at enabling employ­ees to get the work done effect­ively and effi­ciently. The man­ager makes sure that staff are able to provide value to cus­tom­ers. To refer back to Chinese wis­dom, Lao-Tzu wrote 2500 year ago:

The highest type of ruler is one of whose exist­ence the people are barely aware.

1. Based on a true story. The names have been changed for pri­vacy reas­ons. [↩]

At Hypo­thet­icorp we have writ­ten reg­u­larly about hum­bug in man­age­ment books. Many the­or­ies about man­age­ment, mar­ket­ing or strategy are expressed in pretty dia­grams and matrices, prioritising form over substance.

In man­age­ment the­or­ies there is a huge dis­con­nect between pop­ular­ity of the­or­ies and their empir­ical evid­ence. Pop­u­lar the­or­ies usu­ally suf­fer from a lack of empir­ical val­id­a­tion, while empir­ic­ally sup­por­ted the­or­ies pub­lished in peer reviewed man­age­ment journ­als remain obscure and unknown.

In a recent paper Mata Alvesson and Jör­gen Sand­berg lament the field of man­age­ment stud­ies is stronger in pro­du­cing rigour than in pro­du­cing inter­est­ing and influ­en­tial theories. ((Alvesson, M. and Sand­berg, J., 2011. Gen­er­at­ing research ques­tions through prob­lem­at­iz­a­tion. Academy of Man­age­ment Review, 36, 247–271.))

The infam­ous Boston Con­sult­ing Group Mat­rix, that is taught to busi­ness stu­dents world wide, has been called the “philosopher’s stone of the con­sult­ing busi­ness”. The BCG mat­rix has been used as a ration­al­isa­tion to fire people or under­take a merger. ((Owen, D., 1982. Those who can’t, con­sult. Harper’s, 265(1590), 8–17.)) The mat­rix legit­im­at­ises action through sym­bolic ref­er­ences to the mys­tique of strategy.^1.

Hum­bug in man­age­ment is, how­ever, not a recent development. Management guru Chester Barn­ard expressed it in 1938 as such:^2.

I believe that a good deal of con­flict­ing bunk is taught in these fields. This argues for improve­ment and devel­op­ment, not against teach­ing what can be taught. In the time of New­ton, or even much later, a great deal of mod­ern phys­ics, and much that is fun­da­mental in it, was not known, and for this reason per­haps a good deal of bunk was then taught in the field.

Man­age­ment is his­tor­ic­ally speak­ing a very young field of endeav­our. Formal stud­ies of how people behave in a pro­fes­sional envir­on­ment only star­ted when Fre­d­er­ick Taylor ana­lysed labour­ers log­ging pig-iron.

The Philosopher’s Stone of management

The nat­ural sci­ences are much older and have developed a rig­or­ous method that ensures their suc­cess. How­ever, in the early day of the phys­ical sci­ences, even prom­in­ent fig­ures such as Isaac New­ton spent a great amount of time on alchemy and other occult stud­ies in an attempt to find the Philosopher’s Stone.

Whether this means that in sev­eral cen­tur­ies from now man­age­ment the­ory is as suc­cess­ful as phys­ics in con­trolling real­ity remains to be seen. Man­age­ment, strategy and mar­ket­ing are inher­ently social sci­ences and people are not bil­liard balls whose tra­ject­or­ies can be pre­dicted and con­trolled. The Philosopher’s Stone of man­age­ment is the art of under­stand­ing people. The key to under­stand­ing people lies not in rig­or­ous stat­ist­ical ana­lysis of ques­tion­naires, but in life exper­i­ence of the manager.

1. Astley, W.G., 1985. Admin­is­trat­ive sci­ence as socially con­struc­ted truth. Admin­is­trat­ive Sci­ence Quarterly, 30(4), pp.497–513. [↩]
2. Chester Barn­ard (1938) The Func­tions of the Exec­ut­ive. Har­vard Uni­ver­sity Press [↩]