An Irreverent Look at "Management Stuff" in Business Administration

Here's the setting. Picture yourself as a new professor of business administration, having spent many moons studying Management as an undergraduate student, as an MBA student, and finally, as a Ph.D. student. Well over seven years have gone by in total, devoted to studying management as one of the most important social phenomena of the industrialized age. What would your outlook be? (It's a rhetorical question.)

Another fifteen years down the road, you walk into another of innumerable Introduction to Management courses that you have taught, beginning another semester with the usual, casual approach to the first day of class. After the syllabus is reviewed and the usual administrativia is in the bag, you begin the entire semester by going around the room, asking for a response from each student to the following question:

"Why are you in this course?"

Insisting that no honest answer will be punished in any way, typical answers are "Because I have to as part of my major," "My advisor told me I needed it to graduate," "It was the only elective I could take this semester," and my favorite, "I don't know. This is a waste. All this management stuff is just a lot of common sense."

"So," I ask, "if all this management stuff is just a lot of common sense, why are there so many bad managers? Anything that uncommon, cannot by definition be common! Are they insensible, or stupid, or what? What's wrong with this picture you've painted?"

Shift to another setting you may be more familiar with. It is you, not I, that is found in a popular chain bookstore. You are browsing for something to help you in your career. You just got promoted to a legitimate management position, albeit a low-level one. In your mind's eye stop for one moment, and note all the management books on the shelf for sale. How, you ask yourself, can I possibly know what's any good amidst all this management stuff?

I freely admit that much of what is in the business/management section in popular bookstores is of limited utility, redundant to what's been said a million times, written just to sell the fad of the day, or written just to make money, period. I am ashamed that there is so much garbage written about a field and calling as noble as that of the profession of management, but there you have it and I say "Uncle!" Yes, there are a lot of writers who pass themselves off as management experts. A lot of them are consultants (okay, like me) who write books to complement their business reputations, a lot of them are academics (okay, like me too) under "publish or perish" pressure, and a lot of them come from a lot of other miscellaneous places, and some of them give a black eye to legitimate management practice, literature, research, and scholarship. Hence the cynical term "management stuff" has earned itself a place in the common business jargon.

I hate that term with a passion. Ever since two ape-like people tried to accomplish something together (such as your in-laws,) management has been practiced, mis-practised, or malpractised. Jumping ahead a bit, I will assert that management as a profession was born around 1900, led most notably by one Frederick Winslow Taylor who got himself dragged before a Congressional inquiry for daring to assert that the biggest problem in industry was the deplorable state of ignorance, caprice and guesswork in management. This was the day when the prevailing theory about motivation held that workers should be paid as little as possible in order to keep them hungry and desperate and willing to do almost anything for almost nothing in return. So who knew?

Beliefs like this weren't as ridiculous then as they sound today. Try to grasp what a revolution the Industrial Revolution indeed was. In the blink of an eye in historical terms, society was able to produce vast quantities of goods (thanks to inventions such as the steam engine) and transport them efficiently over very long distances (thanks to the steam engine), giving rise to the first large enterprises (most notably, railroad companies and steel companies.) This was an unprecedented social revolution as well as a technological one and nobody had any idea how to "manage" it. Trial and error was the best tool available and lot of people paid dearly for it.

Nobody understood large organizations as social phenomena, let alone engines of production and wealth-creation. A new class of worker arose, eventually called "managers," charged with the task of establishing some kind of order in the widespread industrial chaos. Nowadays, we recognize that management itself is a bona fide economic factor of production along with the traditional factors of land (going back to dominantly agrarian economics,) labor, and capital. Sometimes the term "entrepreneur" is preferred and distinguished from the "manager" as a factor of production, but I will not split that hair here.

As things evolved over the next hundred years, management became studied in earnest and was expressed in different schools of thought, most of which are still healthy today: classical approaches of 1900-1925 are today captured in fields such as Organization Theory, human relations approaches from 1925-on in Organizational Behavior, then came systems approaches, contingency approaches, political approaches, mathematical approaches - you name it. There are lots of "schools' of management thought.

The point, however, is not to champion one at the expense of the other, but to champion all schools that have been studied through legitimate means. Overlooking whether the chicken preceded the egg or vice versa, this means a recursive dynamic nudging progress along in research, scholarship, and practice. Management is a legitimate field of scientific study of the modern human experience.

So let's just dispense with the "management stuff" attitude and look at what we know after all this time, shall we?