Abstract
Management is dead, but don’t take my word for it. Peter Drucker saw this first. He begins The Practice of Management, the book that made him famous, with a bold prediction: “management will remain a basic and dominant institution perhaps as long as Western civilization itself survives”.1 What a surprise, then, to find him administering the last rites to management a little more than 40 years later: “as we advance deeper into the knowledge economy, the basic assumptions underlying much of what is taught and practiced in the name of management are hopelessly out of date… As a result, we are preaching, teaching, and practicing policies that are increasingly at odds with reality and therefore counterproductive.”2
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Notes
Peter F. Drucker, The Practice of Management (New York: Harper and Row, 1986 [1954]): 4.
Peter F. Drucker, “Management’s New Paradigms,” Forbes 162, no. 7 (1998): 152–77: 152.
Peter Drucker published more than three dozen books. His The Practice of Management, originally published in 1954, might be called the classic management text of the twentieth century, certainly of the second half. Drucker coined the term “knowledge workers” in Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New “Post-Modern ” World (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1959). See also his The Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines to Our Changing Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1969); “The Age of Social Transformation,” The Atlantic Monthly 274, no. 5 (1994): 53–80. In “Knowledge Workers Are the New Capitalists,” Economist, September 15, 2001, Drucker claims that the economist Fritz Machlup first used the term “knowledge industry.” At about the same time, Galbraith described an emergent class of new knowledge workers, technical and scientific experts, and Daniel Bell foretold the arrival of a post-industrial society where this expertise played a major role. See John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967) and Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1973). Later, Robert Reich wrote about the global order of the 21st century, with three different categories of knowledge-work: routine, like data processing; personal services, like nursing; and symbolic analysts, like the “wizards” whose legacy is the algorithms and derivatives that created havoc in the financial industry at the tail end of the first decade of the new century. Robert Reich, The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991). A conference at Lancaster University in 1992 marks one of the first major academic inquiries into knowledge-work. Papers presented there are published in the Journal of Management Studies, November, 1993 and the “Editorial Introduction” includes a brief history of contributions on knowledge-work and the knowledge society from around 1960 up to that time. See Frank Blackler, Michael Reed, and Alan Whitaker, “Knowledge Workers and Contemporary Organizations,” Journal of Management Studies 30, no. 6 (1993).
The etymology of ‘management’ is uncertain but it began to be widely used and written about at the very end of the 19th century. For one view on the concept and its origins see Geert Hofstede, “Cultural Constraints in Management Theories,” The Executive 7, no. 1 (1993). On the history of management in the 20th century see Stuart Crainer, The Management Century: A Critical Review of 20th Century Thought and Practice (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 2000).
The charge that managers weren’t paying enough attention to processes was made by advocates of “process reengineering,” which became one of the tools of management I talk about later. Regarding those views from the Left, under the umbrella of critical management studies (CMS), a loose coalition of scholars has provided valuable insights into management as an ideology. CMS began with the work of Mats Alvesson and Hugh Willmott in the early 1990s, as a synthesis of critical theory and post-structuralism. See Mats Alvesson and Hugh Willmott, eds., Critical Management Studies (London: SAGE Publications,1992).
Gary Hamel, “Moon Shots for Management: What Great Challenges Must We Tackle to Reinvent Management and Make It More Relevant to a Volatile World?,” Harvard Business Review 87, no. 2 (2009): 91—8 . 91—2. See also Gary Hamel and Bill Breen, The Future of Management (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2007). In the past few years, bank collapses certainly helped to undermine people’s faith in management. Some writers on Hamel’s side are even more dogmatic. Recognizing the importance of knowledge in work, Verna Allee says, “changes everything.” “Executives and business leaders… must completely change the way they think about the organization, business relationships, measures, tools, business models, values, ethics, culture and leadership.” Verna Allee, “Knowledge Networks and Communities of Practice,” OD Practitioner 32, no. 4 (2000) available at OD Practitioner Online, http://methodenpool.uni-koeln.de/communities/~%200D%20Practitioner%200nline%20-%20Vol_%2032%20-%20No_%204%20 (2000)%20~.htm. Theodore Taptiklis is a fellow traveller. See his Unmanaging: Opening up the Organization to Its Own Unspoken Knowledge (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). See also, Lowell L. Bryan and Claudia Joyce, “The 21st Century 0rganization,” The McKinsey Quarterly, 3 (2005): 24—33.
Writers, increasingly, are questioning whether the MBA is a suitable education for managers: whether it makes good managers and good management. See Henry Mintzberg, Managers not MBAs: A Hard Look at the Soft Practice of Managing and Management Development (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2004); Matthew Stewart, The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting It Wrong (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009); Dev Patnaik, “Reinventing the MBA: 4 Reasons to Mix Business With Design Thinking” (http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/dev-patnaik/innovation/reinventing-mba).
Although he doesn’t say so, each of Gary Hamel’s “moon shots,” like “expanding employee autonomy,” “depoliticizing decision-making,” and “humanizing the language and practice of business,” is a corollary of management practices being incompatible with knowledge-work. Barry Lynn describes the so-called “globalization of production” as “the end of the line,” referring to Ford’s River Rouge-type of vertically integrated, production-line-manufacturing. The end of the line has enormous implications for economies and societies. See Barry C. Lynn, The End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation, 1st paperback edn (New York: Currency Doubleday, 2005): 16.
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© 2011 Mark Addleson
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Addleson, M. (2011). The end of the line. In: Beyond Management. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230343412_1
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