Masters of Bullshit Administration. Bureacratic management doxies overview

 
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Masters of Bullshit Administration. Bureacratic management doxies overview

All bureaucratic management approaches do not work. More exactly, they work (in the long run) to the opposite effect:

— forecasted sales are decreased

— budgeted costs are increased

— hiring marketers destroys marketing strategy

— staff morale is inversely proportional to the budget for HR

... et cetera, et cetera.

... So with animals, some spring from parent animals according to their kind, whilst others grow spontaneously and not from kindred stock; and of these instances of spontaneous generation some come from putrefying earth or vegetable matter...

Aristotle

1.

Question: How would you judge, for example, a physical theory if 80% of the air planes built according to it fell?

 ?

Of course.
 

2.

But then why do millions of promoters so faithfully follow all "theories" of management taught in all MBA courses and schools?

 ?

If 80% of new businesses end in bankruptcy?

 ?

Faced with this, these theories cannot explain the reasons for this state of affairs, nor predict even the path to reduce the likelihood of going under.

If old businesses, totally headed by pathetically matriculated MBA professionals, with time, only work worse and worse?

See the model history of General Motors; from the most profitable corporation in the world to shameful bankruptcy and funerals for half the brands.

Even so, it is difficult to blame GM's constantly-replacing-each-other-over-decades general directors of poorly carrying out the shamanic ritual of "management".

Completely the opposite, they dried frog by the ton and prepared black cats strictly according to the fashionable recipes from authors in the Harvard Business Review.

 ?

If all outstanding business success stories have happened contrary to these "theories"?

 ?

And all of the brilliant entrepreneurs have succeeded without spending heaps of time and money on empty-worded studies about the number of angles a the head of a pin.
 

3.

So, not one of the aforementioned theories can explain anything or predict anything.

Not to mention the majority of these "theories" (more exactly, a collection of divination techniques on the model of 14th-century "medicine") are clearly anti scientific.
 

4.

If you look deeper, than all bureaucratic management approaches, — without exception, — do not work.

More exactly, they work (in the long run) to the opposite effect:

... et cetera, et cetera (about the universal theory of bureaucratic development initiatives)

And this is by no means for effect or polemic zeal.

All of this does not work and can not work.

For fundamentally mathematic reasons.

If someone claims the opposite (like, "I myself did"), they li... exaggerate.

If "I myself saw", it means they saw, but did not understand. Or they too... exaggerate.

Or little time has passed.

A common property of all bureaucratic initiatives is to have an almost instantaneous impact. Just as quickly, however, decreasing with time to deeply negative effects.

In such cases, check with your titan of bureaucratic management in six months.
 

5.

A few useful things from the flitting public discourse refer to the process (that is the anti-bureaucratic) approach: value network, Toyota Production System, Goldratt's Theory of Constraints, and similar things.

But not one of these is an all-encompassing theory of the enterprise in a competitive market: working fragments from experiments, local insights, and guesses.

Like physics before Newton.
 

6.

Let's get back to bureaucratic management.

Is it possible to show courage and directly call an MBA — "theory of management" — pure verbal diarrhea?

And all sorts of "business schools", and their promoters, are the modern analogy of medieval medical and theological universities.

I mean: expensive (which the educated understand alludes to.
Any real science can be studied by anyone with the desire individually and for free; lots of money are made from "personal growth trainings" and courses for rapid weight loss
) institutions for damaging the brains of the listener with dogmatic trash.

If the theology was by itself not very harmful (ignoring the mass burnings), then the popular medical cures until the mid-19th century buried more people than the actual illnesses.

Maybe, in the 21st century, it is time to turn away from the managerial analogies of universal bloodletting and mercury treatments?...

Moreover, it is very profitable.
 

7.

The root, worldview mistake of the MBA quacks is that they give subjectivity to invented abstractions that do not exist in reality ("essentialism" in the terminology of Popper).

"Companies", "departments", "management", "structures" as if they really exist and have their own wills and goals.

None of these exist in reality; they are nothing more than intellectual abstractions. By their material they are no different than "God", "Homeland", or the world Communist revolution.

There are collections of individual people.

Managed (on average in a mass) through rational motivations ("people respond to incentives").

And everything else is simple:

  • If, during a bureaucratic reform, the incentives for individual people do not change, then the result will be the same or worse.

No matter what "structures" and "subordinates" the geniuses of bureaucracy invent.

  • And, the opposite. If the motivating factors changed, the result is guaranteed to change.

Given this, the bureaucratic form of changes does not matter.

There is a separate text for those who want to build incentives for workers across a company.
 

P.S. It is said that Galileo took several years to gather the courage to present the heliocentric view of the world.

But he didn't fear the wrath of the dusty churchmen, who, in the Roman Curia (then and now), were intelligent, studied, and fairly free-thinking people. And some were even Galileo's personal friends, including the then Pope.

Galileo feared the mockery of the uneducated masses more than the anger of the Roman Catholic Church.

October 03, 2017