Management Art and Management Science

By Kennedy Maize

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Is management a science? An enormous intellectual construct developed over the past century—by business schools, consultancies, and major staff components of business firms and government agencies—is dedicated to that proposition. My 40 years as a government management trainee, a middle manger, an executive, a successful business owner, a long-time observer of managers at all levels, and a reader of the literature of “management science” leads me to answer emphatically, “No.” My experience is that management science is an oxymoron, on the level of “military music,” “senate intelligence,” and “congressional ethics.”

The logical implication of my rejection of management as a science is that management consultants, who peddle management science are seldom valuable, frequently worthless, and often destructive. I embrace that logic and have seen it in practice.

Unmasking Management Myths

I love the headline on a recent The Economist column: “The Three Habits … of Highly Irritating Management Gurus.” For a moment of pause, recall that imprisoned Enron executive Jeff Skilling was once a McKinsey & Co. consulting heavy hitter, advising a then-modest-but-successful natural gas pipeline company that became the shamed House of Enron. Given what he saw as a consultant, Skilling became an Enron executive and proceeded to wreck the business.

The self-proclaimed management gurus mostly focus on irrelevant numbers, imprecise measurements, and flawed visions, employing the prestidigitation of PowerPoint. (For the best critique of PowerPoint, check out Edward Tufte’s The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within.) It’s all a fraud. The ubiquitous faux jargon—“customer-centric, shareholder-driven, synergistic, win-win-win”—is all junk.

So I was delighted with philosophy doctorate and former disgruntled (for very good reasons) management consultant Matthew Stewart’s new book, The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting It Wrong (Norton, Aug. 2009). Stewart’s book (also available from Amazon.com in Kindle format) intersperses his personal history with stories of the often fraudulent, highly entertaining, and mostly bogus practices of management consultants over the past century. Stewart provides a biting and often hilarious intellectual critique of the unscientific underpinnings of the lucrative practice of management science.

Courtesy: W. W. Norton Co., Inc.

As Stewart argues persuasively, management is an art and a craft, better examined as part of the liberal arts than as an allegedly scientific discipline. Today’s management consultants, in his experience and mine, often are the equivalent of 19th-century traveling medicine men (no women need apply) and evangelical Christian snake handlers. They attract their followers without regard to quantifiable results or rigorous and repeatable inquiry, but in response to artistic presentation, psychological babble, and plausible (not replicable) results.

If your company is employing or thinking of employing management consultants, this book is must reading. Look out: The trade is mostly about blue smoke and management-mirror mythologies. The practice rests on unproven theories with no predictive value and alleged science that relies on unfalsifiable hypotheses without scientific controls, dressed up in a lot of sales razzamatazz. In short, argues Stewart from his experience, management consultants are—as two writers for the Economist defined them a few years ago—“witch doctors.”