voodoo, visions and MBAs

This page looks at dot com voodoo: perspectives on the dot com gurus and the consulting industry.

It covers -

• introduction
• precedents
• witch doctor dot com
• fix-of-the-month club
• amnesia
• MBAs

     introduction

As Hal Varian & Carl Shapiro note in the outstanding Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy (Boston: Harvard Business School Press 1999)

Ignore basic economic principles at your risk. Technology changes. Economic laws do not

That is consistent with Nicholas Carr's assessment in Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage (Boston: Harvard Business School Press 2004).

     precedents

[under development]

     witch doctor dot com

We enjoyed the cautionary tales in The Witch Doctors - What the Management Gurus Are Saying, Why It Matters & How To Make Sense Of It (London: Heinemann 1996) by John Micklethwait & Adrian Wooldridge, The World's Newest Profession: Management Consulting in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2006) by Christopher McKenna and Dangerous Company (London: Brealey 1997) by James O'Shea & Charles Madigan.

They are entertaining and useful reading before hiring any management consultants. There is a somewhat less generous analysis in American Anti-Management Theories of Organization: A Critique of Paradigm Proliferation (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1995) by Lex Donaldson and Managers Not MBAs: A Hard Look At The Soft Practice of Managing & Management Development (London: Berrett-Koehler 2004) by Henry Mintzburg - both strongly recommended - Eliot Freidson's Professionalism Reborn: Theory, Prophecy and Policy (Chicago: Uni of Chicago Press 1994) and the thoughtful False Prophets: The Gurus Who Created Modern Management and Why Their Ideas are Bad for Business Today (New York: Perseus Books Publishing 2003) by James Hoopes. The latter is particularly perceptive about the limits of management theory and guru jargon outside business.

Stuart Crainer's Gravy Training: Inside the Business of Business Schools (Oxford: Capstone 1998) offers a jaundiced but often perceptive account of the MBA factories and the latest dogmas about doing business online. It builds on his irreverent examination of Tom Peters - Corporate Man To Corporate Skunk (New York: HarperBusiness 1997). There is another perspective in Staffan Furusten's Popular Management Books: How They Are Made & What They Mean for Organisations (London: Routledge 1999) and in What They Teach you at Harvard Business School (London: Viking 2008) by Philip Delves Broughton.

Lewis Pinault's Consulting Demons: Inside the Unscrupulous World of Global Corporate Consulting (New York: HarperBusiness 2000) is an unpleasantly self-absorbed account by a former demon.

     fix-of-the-month club

Connoisseurs of planning fads can't go past Henry Mintzberg's The Rise & Fall of Strategic Planning (New York: Prentice-Hall 1994), an incisive corrective to the reincarnations of Tom Peters & Co, his Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour Through The Wilds of Strategic Management (New York: Simon & Schuster 1998), co-authored with Bruce Ahlstrand & Joseph Lampel, and The Capitalist Philosophers: The Geniuses of Modern Business � Their Lives, Times, and Ideas (New York: Times 2000) by Andrea Gabor. Richard Whittington's What Is Strategy - and Does It Matter? (New York: Thomson 2000) and Management Consulting: Emergence and Dynamics of a Knowledge Industry (New York: Oxford University Press 2002) edited by Matthias Kipping & Lars Engwall are also of interest.

Alfred Chandler's magisterial works - in particular The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1980) and Scale & Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1990) - are a starting point for understanding what has lasted .... and why.

As a reminder that there are no silver bullets Paul Strassmann in The Squandered Computer - Evaluating the Business Alignment of Information Technologies (New Canaan: Information Economics Press 1997) provides a detailed analysis of outsourcing, usability, IT consultants and best practice.

Strassman's Information Productivity: Assessing the Information Management Costs of U.S. Industrial Corporations (New Canaan: Information Economics Press 1999) is also provocative.

Michael McGill's American Business & the Quick Fix (New York: Holt 1988) retains its relevance as an analysis of management fads, fixes and phobias: quality circles, matrix management, managerial grids ... 

When we first published this page we said that were he writing today Prof McGill would have a lovely time with the dot com mantras - embrace the free, hug the void - and the spectre of one-minute managers competing on internet time. Since that time we have read The 10 Second Internet Manager.

     amnesia

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (New York: Portfolio 2007) by Don Tapscott & Anthony Williams exhorts the reader to

Forget everything you know about the way we do business. Mass collaboration is revolutionizing the corporation, the economy, and nearly every aspect of management.

     MBAs

Harold Leavitt's 1989 'Educating our MBAs: On teaching what we haven't taught' in 31 California Management Review 3) (38-50) cruelly suggested that "we have built a weird, almost unimaginable design for MBA-level education" that deforms students into "critters with lopsided brains, icy hearts, and shrunken souls".

A 2005 paper by business school academics Harry Deangelo, Linda Deangelo & Jerold Zimmerman echoed Mintzberg in another 'physician, heal thyself' lament, commenting

US business schools are locked in a dysfunctional competition for media rankings that diverts resources from long-term knowledge creation, which earned them global pre-eminence, into short-term strategies aimed at improving their rankings. MBA curricula are distorted by "quick fix, look good" packaging changes designed to influence rankings criteria, at the expense of giving students a rigorous, conceptual framework that will serve them well over their entire careers. Research, undergraduate education, and Ph.D. programs suffer as faculty time is diverted to almost continuous MBA curriculum changes, strategic planning exercises, and public relations efforts. Unless they wake up to the dangers of dysfunctional rankings competition, U.S. business schools are destined to lose their dominant global position and become a classic case study of how myopic decision-making begets institutional mediocrity

That is consistent with comments in Jeffrey Pfeffer & Christina Fong's 2002 paper The End of Business Schools? Less Success Than Meets the Eye that

What data there are suggest that business schools are not very effective: Neither possessing an MBA degree nor grades earned in courses correlate with career success, results that question the effectiveness of schools in preparing their students. And, there is little evidence that business school research is influential on management practice, calling into question the professional relevance of management scholarship.

and with the critique in the 2007 AACSB report (PDF).

There is a more positive view in Capitalizing Knowledge: Essays on the History of Business Education in Canada (Toronto: Uni of Toronto Press 2000) edited by Barbara Austin and From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession (Princeton: Princeton UniPress2007) by Rakesh Khurana.

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