A Repost from the Atlantic Monthly:

The world of management theorists remains exempt from accountability. In my experience, for what it’s worth, consultants monitored the progress of former clients about as diligently as they checked up on ex-spouses (of which there were many). Unless there was some hope of renewing the relationship (or dating a sister company), it was Hasta la vista, baby. And why should they have cared? Consultants’ recommendations have the same semantic properties as campaign promises: it’s almost freakish if they are remembered in the following year.

Interesting article in all. I've long felt that the culture around managment and related consulting is a kind of voodoo. The paralells Stewart draws between these gestalts and traditional religion are apt.

Most organizations can probably benefit more from increasing transparently (if only internally) than from any passing management fad, but this is something bureaucracies will always resist. Why? Well, it actually does make it hard to hide inefficiencies, which leads to the inevitable question of "how much more productivity could we have?"

This is part and parcel of the perverse American relationship to work and productivity. WE work too long for too little, and we produce too little of real value as well. I know a lot of people (including myself) who will work needless 16 hour days or 80 hour weeks because we think this makes us herculean performers in our trade, when in fact if we were just to plan and focus a little more we could have been done much more quickly.

The problem is that getting all your work done quickly and then -- egad! -- clocking out to do non-work things is seen as a sign of slackerdom, while objectively spending twice as long to accomplish half as much is seen as heroic.

This starts with a work-style that develops in the college system (slack and cram, all while managing perceptions), and becomes embedded and ingraned over the course of years.

It gets worse in larger organizations, where that "perceptions management" part becomes more important than the actual products of your work, which are unlikely to be truly consequential.

And now I'm off to file my TPS reports...