This is an outstanding, well-written article about how business management often falls victim to faddish theories.
It is long, but enjoyable and well worth the read.
My favourite quote: "Knowledge, by its very nature, must be intelligible, not obscure."
It comes up in the context of management consultants using bafflegab and fancy-sounding jargon to mislead clients (and perhaps themselves). This quote is a reminder to have the courage, (as is needed in some contexts), to speak up when you don't understand something, ... since what seems like wisdom you are having difficulty grasping, may in fact be snake oil.
For a strangely related article, you might also like to read: "What you can't say" ( http://paulgraham.com/say.html) which also talks about widely held beliefs that later turn out to be just a passing fashion. Although later seen clearly to be false, at the earlier time, the flaws are invisible.
I read it, but apart from the excellent beginning I'm not sure it's well worth it. The author wants to have it both ways: he's an insider and also an ironic critic. But he never addresses his own years of involvement in the bullshit he exposes. As a result, the article becomes increasingly evasive and self-justifying, ending in a bunch of platitudes of his own.
You can't just take a bucket of irony varnish and slather it over everything and act like that makes you different.
The point that he is making is not that management consulting is useless, but the framework for teaching is ineffective. As he says, "What they don’t seem to teach you in business school is that “the five forces” and “the seven Cs” and every other generic framework for problem solving are heuristics: they can lead you to solutions, but they cannot make you think."
The problem (and I see this in technical management as well as in the business world) is that a good manager can think themselves out of the situation without gimmicks or formal training; whereas a bad manager does not become a good one with all the MBAs and training courses in the world.
The other great point he makes, that confirms my own impression, is: "If it’s reminiscent of the kind of toothless wisdom offered in self-help literature, that’s because management theory is mostly a subgenre of self-help. Which isn’t to say it’s completely useless."
I think that is exactly right. Yes there are some people that will derive some benefit from reading a self-help book, but it rarely provides a lasting benefit and is no substitute for an intelligent and mature reflection on your problems.
It is long, but enjoyable and well worth the read.
My favourite quote: "Knowledge, by its very nature, must be intelligible, not obscure."
It comes up in the context of management consultants using bafflegab and fancy-sounding jargon to mislead clients (and perhaps themselves). This quote is a reminder to have the courage, (as is needed in some contexts), to speak up when you don't understand something, ... since what seems like wisdom you are having difficulty grasping, may in fact be snake oil.
For a strangely related article, you might also like to read: "What you can't say" ( http://paulgraham.com/say.html) which also talks about widely held beliefs that later turn out to be just a passing fashion. Although later seen clearly to be false, at the earlier time, the flaws are invisible.