Fast Fades of Management Trends
Via Fast Company’s post The Half-Life of Ideas
Today’s Wall Street Journal includes an excellent essay by Phred Dvorak (love that name!) about why management trends quickly fade away. (You might need an online sub.) Drawing on the expertise of management consultants and thinkers such as Thomas Davenport, the piece suggests that the biggest culprits may include:* Consultants offer services in which they lack expertise
* New ideas come and go faster and faster
* People try to apply the same idea to too many dissimilar problems
* New practices and processes don’t work for every organization
I’d add the following:
1. Too much “managment by magazine” (The CEO reads an article and “EUREKA! We’re going to be customer intimate!”)
2. The theory or idea, even when a great one perfect for the organization, never actually gets implemented. Too hard, too much of a change, too expensive.
3. The revolutionary, end-all magic management tool is rehashed trash to begin with.
Here’s the thing - we all look for magic, so we fall for promises all the time (even when we know better - follow me to the cosmetics counter sometime.) The hard cold reality is that there is no fairy godmother of management (and that jar of glop ain’t gonna make me look 25 again.)
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July 3rd, 2006 at 6:47 am
What always amazes me is, consultants who are “experts” come in and immediately start spouting all these wonderful ideas that will grow your business.
The only problem is, they haven’t spent 15 minutes doing uncovery - truly understanding that business and its customers.
If someone comes in and doesn’t do SERIOUS uncovery, finding out everything they can about you, your competition, your customers - be afraid - be very afraid.
Love the “management by magazine” bit - so true.
Holly
July 5th, 2006 at 1:36 pm
King Solomon said it best, “There’s nothing new under the sun.” The best we can hope for is to “rehash the trash” in some new combination to catch someone’s eye. Or find the people who still don’t get it after seeing miles of management road kill and knock some sense into them. People have not changed that much in our thousands of years on the planet. The “management by magazine” issue (or “executive brain fart” as I call it) is alarmingly rampant. Great post… got me thinking and chuckling.
July 6th, 2006 at 7:16 am
Holly, thanks for dropping by and good points. Yeppers, that’s why I “hate consultants.” Spent way too much time being forced to listen to canned consultant happy talk back in my Corporate America days.
Timothy - Indeed, somebody once said something along the lines of, “We’re using Iron age brains to think in a nuclear age.”
And, it’s even more dangerous when the CEO has read a whole book!