I have no doubt that part of the reason I loved this book so much is because I work in the consultancy industry – I should say technology consultancy and not management consultancy, or even more vilified, strategy consultancy – and therefore several examples included in this book were frustrations or comic situations I’ve experienced.
Even when I consider this fact I still feel this is an exceptional book, and in no small part informed my view on managing people for the first time, you can read that blog post here.
Stewart’s honesty and self-deprecating jokes help pull you in as a reader. The way he mixes his own experience with a history of the management profession and current affairs makes it a highly informative as well as riveting read.
The key 7 messages I took away from the book:
The History of Consultancy – I was fascinated to read about the roots of management consulting, it’s engineering background and the fact it’s only been around since the 1950’s. I couldn’t agree more with Stewart when he says that leadership and management aren’t sciences and the attempt to make them so are only detrimental. By believing these are sciences you start ‘training’ managers – in the same way you train doctors – but training doesn’t work as there isn’t one standardised, one size fits all model to success. Managers need to be educated not trained, shown multiple different ways of doing things and taught that there is no single way that always works.
Strategy Consultants are hired to verify a pre-defined dream, not create one – Stewart has the ability to make it seem so obvious that, and as a reader, you question your own perception and inability not to realise it sooner. Strategy consultants are, most of the time, brought in to validate senior leaderships’ own dream that, due to internal politics, they can’t instigate without external approval/validation. As it’s the company’s senior leader who is also paying the strategy consultants fees, what incentive is there for them not to find the answer the senior leader is looking for?
Consultancy fills too many hopes and dreams, that’s why it remains – Every business man or woman dreams of finding the simple answer that can transform their business and solve many of their biggest problems, and strategy consultancy continues to promise the answer, hence it’s longevity. As Stewart states: ‘…scientific management fulfilled too many hopes and prayers to be ignored merely on account of its logical and factual deficiencies.’
The Problem of Business Schools – This argument was something I was vaguely aware of before reading the book, but Stewarts’ forming of the argument, that business schools are a self-fulling prophecy was very interesting. He argues that schools are too close to the consultancies and multi-national executives, so don’t challenge the status-quo or hold these groups accountable for the rubbish they are so often pushing.
The real meaning of the word Strategy – “The term Strategy in ‘Strategy consulting’ actually means ‘high-ranking’. A strategy consulting firm is one that works for people higher up in a bureaucratic hierarchy.” This was something I had believed for so long, it was nice to hear someone of Stewart’s standing call it out so matter-of-factly.
Action beats Strategy – “Most successful strategies emerge through action; they become perspicuous only in hindsight.” So many companies – and people – get paralysed by their wish to ensure the plan is fully detailed before starting anything. The way to learn, progress and improve is by action, whoever and wherever you are in the corporate ladder.
How spot on the ‘Wheel of Suffering’ really is – Explained in more detail in the notes below – and on page 276 of the book. I love how well it reflects how businesses are constantly cyclically moving between quality, upsizing, downsizing, efficiency & human relations. It highlights that at all stages it is the companies’ people who suffer.
Before getting into the detail of my specific notes on the book, I want to just spend a few sentences explaining the link I saw between ‘The Management Myth’ and ‘Outliers‘ by Malcolm Gladwell, another great book I read around the same time, you can find my review here. The key commonality is in the media’s perception of, and societies wider focus on, ‘success’ and the drivers for success. Both books highlight many examples of people or groups analysing what makes something or someone great, and actually getting completely the wrong end of the stick and missing the key detail. Just as Gladwell argues we need to spend more time looking at an individual’s luck and hours of dedication instead of intellectual brilliance or strategic brilliance, Stewart argues to be a great manager you don’t need to have gone to the best schools or work for McKinsey, you just need to have a good education, appreciate that management and leadership aren’t a science, take action and learn as you go.
Detailed below are the key messages and phrases that resonated with me while reading. If any of the below spark your interest I’d suggest you read the book yourself, you can find it here. As always anything in speech marks is a direct quote from the book.
Book Notes
The Accidental consultant
A witty account of how Stewart fell into the career of management consultancy, the same route many do!
College Man
‘In the 1910s, the engineering consulting firm of Arthur D Little, which had hitherto concentrated on offering its clients solutions to chemical and civil engineering problems, crossed the metaphorical bridge laid down by Taylor and began to supply advise to CEOs on problems in ‘management engineering’. In the 1950s, the elders at AD Little schooled a young Harvard MBA named Bruce Henderson in the arcane art of management consulting. In 1963, Henderson struck out on his own to establish the Boston Consulting Group. One of Henderson’s wards in the 1970’s was ‘Henry’, the man who eventually hired me. In 1984, after a detour though the large consulting firm of Booz, Allen, & Hamilton, ‘Henry’ and his friends broke away to found the firm I later joined.’
‘I was, in effect, one of Taylor’s ‘college men’ except that my pig-iron yards were the back offices of large corporations, mostly banks.’
The Truth About the Pigs
‘Taylor’s much-touted ‘scientific selection of the workmen’ – the conscientious investigating of history, character, and aptitudes of which he writes so passionately in his Principles of Scientific Management – never happened.’
‘It appears that a handful of labourers were able to match Noll’s prodigious output over brief periods – but always under the proviso that they could return to the old plan whenever they chose, which they did frequently…There is no evidence that Bethlehem Steel realised any significant benefit from the experience…Taylor, on the other hand, walked away with a total $100,000 in consulting fees.’
‘More troubling even than the many logical flaws in Taylor’s conception of science is the attempt to extend scientific inquiry into areas where it clearly does not belong…it was about the rights and responsibilities of workers and employers, the division of spoils from increases in productivity, and the obligations of an enterprise to its community.’
‘Taylor’s ultimate aim was to advance the interests not just of the managerial elite, but of an elite within the elite – the special cadre of management experts, or consultants. Self-interest was never very far from the centre of his work, and therein lay the most obdurate source of its errors. Scientific management isn’t a science; it’s a business. The same may be said of the work of consultants, the gurus, and even many of the professors who have followed in Taylor’s lucrative footsteps. As in any business, what separates the winners from the also-rans isn’t independently verifiable expertise; it is the ability to move product.’
The Art of Hunting Whales
‘In an ideal world, perhaps, we the consultants might have been hired to help the bank gain some perspective on its identity issues. But the truth is that management hired us to fulfil its dreams, not to quash them. We were more a symptom of the problem than the solution.’
‘Consultants prize their whales for much more than mere size. Large clients provide a safe haven in which to train new associates or to tuck away mediocre performers. They serve as laboratories in which to test new products.’
The Management Idol
‘Why invent such an improbable thing, such a manifest contradiction in terms? The simplest answer is that scientific management fulfilled too many hopes and prayers to be ignored merely on account of its logical and factual deficiencies. Its contradictions are the contradictions of the modern workplace, magnified and exaggerated in the form of an absurd doctrine.’
‘With the management idol, he [Taylor] did not find a technological solution to the problem of reconciling democratic ideals with the realities of life in a modern economy. He simply restated the problem, and then etched it in giant letters across the landscape.’
The Proper Study of Mankind
‘Reading Barnard’s work, one develops the conviction that giant corporations did not arise because of technological changes, accumulation of capital, or astute manipulation of the political process in order to secure and maintain monopolistic market positions, but because people just long to labour in the thrall of a great leader.’
‘The buzzwords and catchphrases that most excite today’s [management] gurus – ’empowerment’, ‘responsible freedom,’ ‘the wisdom of teams,’ ‘the new organisation’ – hail from the time of Mayo and his Hawthorne experiments, even if their promoters are not always aware of the fact.’
‘To put it all in Greek, one could say that management relies on both a techne (meaning ‘skill or craft’, and the root of our word technology) and an ethos (meaning ‘a pattern of behaviour, or character’, insofar as it discloses bonds with other individuals in a group or society). While techne aims in a general way at the goal of efficiency, ethos is concerned primarily with building trust. Trust is the infrastructure on which the marvels of technology deliver their gains of productivity. Where trust is lacking, efficiency is rarely possible; conversely, efficiency erodes trust. to a certain extent, of course, there is a techne associated with ethos - that is to say, a craft or body of techniques that can reliably help build character in the individual and trust among groups. The Greeks had a word for this craft: ethics, which derives from the conjunction of ethos and techne…ethics is the foundation of management.’
‘As with Taylor’s purported general science of efficiency, most efforts to concoct a general science of organisations fail not because the universal principles they put forward are wrong – they are usually right – but because they don’t belong to an applied science. They properly belong to philosophy.’
How Strategy Become a Business
‘Strategy took hold because it provided an intellectual superstructure that explained and justified the functioning of ‘top management’ in the new M-Form corporations. It grew because it represented the interests of consultants who served this new tier of management. It achieved permanence by furthering the institutional ambitions of the business schools, which expanded rapidly to serve the needs of the new corporations and their vendors. The strengths and limitations of the new discipline of strategy follow mainly from its institutional origins.’
‘Strategy, or Strategic Management, is now a thriving discipline, populated with a teeming multitude of theories, studies and controversies. In its fundamental structure and content, the discipline Porter [Michael Porter, 1969] launched embodies the vision set forth by Gordon and Howell in 1959. Strategy, it is thought, will succeed where Taylor and Mayo have failed. It will become the discipline that synthesises all of the other functional sub-disciplines of management and of management education. Such, at any rate, is the hope that Porter and his successors have set out to fulfil.’
A Case Study of Strategy
‘The dirty little secret of the strategy consulting business is that most of the work involves strategy only in the sense that cleaning the kitchen can involve strategy – at least, when the boss tells you to do it. The term Strategy in ‘Strategy consulting’ actually means ‘high-ranking’. A strategy consulting firm is one that works for people higher up in a bureaucratic hierarchy.’
‘In life and in business, the most reliable strategies follow a threefold path. The first and most important step, by far, on the path to glory is to be in the right place at the right time. There is no substitute for being born well…80% of success in life is just showing up…The second step in any successful strategy, assuming you are so lucky as to find yourself in the right place at the right time, is to bet big. In fact, bet massively (especially if other people’s money is involved). The final step, having landed in the right place and put everything on the table, is to work very, very hard to make sure that you aren’t proved to be an idiot.’
Planning While Rome Burns
‘Ansoff’s [Igor, around 1950s] neurosis may have been extreme, but his approach fills a certain psychological hole in the management soul. In the context of complex decisions with uncertain outcomes and no obvious right answer, the managerial mind inevitably longs for some handrails to grasp a mind the smoke and flames. Strategic planning offers that consolation – or illusion – of a sure path to the future.’
‘The idea of strategic planning, far from providing a rational basis for choosing a strategy, is to some degree a rationalisation for a strategy already chosen – as well as a rationalisation for the power of those who favoured that strategy in the first place.’
‘An old straw hat it that Strategy is when you’re running out of ammo but you keep firing on all guns so that the enemy won’t know. As a rule, corporations turn to Strategy when they can’t justify their existence in any other way, and they start planning when they don’t really know where they are going.’
What Consultants Talk about When They Talk about Strategy
‘The consultant guide to profitability: The most reliable way to make money from strategy is to sell it to other people.’
Strategy in the Classroom
‘Most successful strategies emerge through action; they become perspicuous only in hindsight. And this play-it-by-ear kind of strategy making does not result necessarily from a lack of foresight; it often stems from a healthy recognition that the world is generally too complex for our simple plans.’
Tom Peters Talks to God
‘…published as the right fundamental principles of In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best Run Companies, a book that [Tom] Peters co-authored with [Robert] Waterman…The Eight Attributes of Successful Companies: 1. A bias for action 2. Staying close to the customer 3. Autonomy and entrepreneurship 4. Productivity through people 5. Hands-on, value-driven 6. Stick to the knitting 7. Simple form, lean stuff 8. Simultaneous loose-tight properties.’
‘The gurus [Jim Collins, Michael Hammer, James Champy, Jack Welsh etc] offer a wide menu of advice, but all are feeding from the pastures that opened in the success of Peters and Waterman’s book.’
The Science of Excellence
‘The first obvious flaw in the method of Excellence is that it provides for no credible control group…The second and equally obvious flaw in the conception of Excellence is an elementary confusion between correlation and causation. In framing their approach, the authors assume that whatever attributes their excellent companies have in common are the same ones that can predict success in other companies. They fail to consider the logical possibilities that the attributes may have no causal relationship with excellence or that they may be a consequence rather than a cause of excellence
‘Two years after the publication of Excellence, Business Week published an article under the title ‘Oops!’ in which it noted that about half of the excellent 43 were in serious trouble.’
‘Since the perceptions of the public are already factored into stock prices, it is not surprising that the gurus fail to outperform the market. All of this leads to the following conclusion: if you really want to profit from the gurus, listen carefully to what they say and then run fast in the opposition direction.’
How to Become a Management Guru in Five Easy Steps
”…are the five easy steps to establishing a popular management religion. 1. We are all going to die! …As America’s evangelists understood, fear sells. Bad news for you is good news for the gurus. Management theory has its feet glued to superstition, and superstition floats only in an ocean of fear. 2. The bureaucracy is killing us!…the guru business is the flip side of the strategy business. Both emerge from the same socioeconomic transformation – the rise of the M-Form corporation and the creation of the new middle-management class. Whereas the strategy business approaches this new reality from the top down, however, the guru business comes at it from the bottom up [middle managers from Dominos] …3. There is good news in America! …Following the pattern established in evangelical and self-help narratives, the guru’s offer of salvation has three distinguishing features. The first is that it is always imminent…The second is that it involves a social transformation that goes well beyond an increase in business rights and productivity…The third is that it usually takes place – or at least gets it start – in that land of boundless promise: America…The continuous recycling of the guru’s visions of s future free from bureaucratic constraints makes it quite obvious that these never really refer to a point on the space-time continuum as we know it…4. ‘You have the Power!’…Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Peter’s respectable doppelgänger, cloaks a similar point in language more appropriate to the academic setting in which she finds herself. In her 2006 effort, Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End, she defines confidence as ‘consisting of positive expectations for favourable outcomes’ and argues that success and failure are ‘self-fulfilling tendencies’ resulting from an abundance and lack of confidence, respectively…5. Just look at me!…The guru’s story is one of triumph over adversity. It is his own passage through the dark night of the bureaucratic soul and his subsequent redemption and ascension into consulting heaven that cement his bond with his audience.’
‘Fads in Management Theory: The Wheel of Suffering’ (p.g. 276)
Image of a human ‘You’ pushing a large boulder up a steep incline with the following circular pattern in the boulder:
Quality: Stop Obsessing about your inputs and start focusing on your outputs!
Upsizing: Quality is so yesterday! Just grow!
Downsizing: Ok, so we got carried away with growth!
Efficiency: You need to get organised! You need a system that tells everyone what to do!
Human Relations: Management isn’t about systems; it’s about people!
The Promised Land
‘The collapse of the firm I helped to found is at some level a tawdry tale that illustrates nothing more than that the world has a number of bad apples scattered among the good. But there are some useful lessons in it nonetheless. At least some part of the trouble arose not from the apples but from the orchard – that is, from an approach, a system of thought, and a set of values that brought out the worst in the bad and left out the best in the good.’
The Future of Management Education
‘The time has come to recognise that higher education in management rests on a fatal fallacy. The idea behind the contemporary business school is that preparing future business managers means training them in a discipline called Business Management. After 100 years of fruitless attempts to produce such a discipline, it should be clear that it does not exist. Preparing managers to manage, in fact, is not different from preparing people to live in a civilised world. Managers do not need to be trained; they need to be educated.’
‘If business schools would drop the pretence of providing practical training and engage in a disinterested, critical study of business and management practices and culture they might actually make a significant contribution to society.’
‘The most important source of the problems with academic research in business management is not that it is too far from its ‘customers’, but it is too close to them. It is too close to its students, who will always demand that it’s results be reduced to easily digestible banalities. It is also too close to the corporations the sponsor its research programs, hire professors as consultants, contribute to endowments, and exert pressure through recruiting policies. (If any political party funded political science departments in the way that corporations fund business schools, we would naturally consider their research to be little more than propaganda.)’
‘Good management arises not from the dispensing of business school diplomas, but from a universal respect for the law, a common set of values and expectations, a skilled population benefiting from good public education, and the legal framework that supports salaried employment. Where this ethical foundation of food management is lacking, managerial wizardry will achieve little.’
‘Executive MBA programs, which generally take managers out of their jobs in mid-career for a month or two, offer a number of the advantages of business school at a point in most people’s careers when they are probably better able to make use of them and without the time commitment of the MBA.’
‘The guru’s tips on organisational politics are all there in Machiavelli’s descriptions of Roman and Florentine politics, not to mention Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War or William Faulkner on the American South.’
What makes for a good manger? If we put all of their heads together, the great management thinkers at the end of the day give us the same, simple, and true answer. A good manager is someone with a facility for analysis and an even greater talent for synthesis; someone who has an eye both for the details and for the one big thing that really matters; someone who is able to reflect on facts in a disinterested way, who is always dissatisfied with pat answers and the conventional wisdom, and who therefore takes a certain pleasure in knowledge itself; someone with a wide knowledge of the world and an even better knowledge of the way people work; someone who knows how to treat people with respect; someone with honesty, integrity, trustworthiness, and the other things that make up character; someone, in short, who understands oneself and the world around us well enough to know how to make it better. By this definition, of course, a good manager is nothing more or less than a good and well-educated person.’
