In his first workplace experiments, Taylor aimed to establish the optimum speed for operating lathes. It was the centerpiece of the “Boxly Talks,” which in turn became the basis for Taylor’s 1911 book, The Principles of Scientific Management, which launched the revolution that created scientific management and the management consulting industry as we now know it. The pig-iron tale was the first in a long line of what we now call business case studies. Joseph Juran (1904–2008), a Romanian-born American engineer and consultant who championed quality control, showed that Pareto’s insight has wide application in industrial and manufacturing settings. It offers pretended technological solutions to what are, at bottom, moral and political problems.

The idea that management is a technical discipline can be traced to a number of earlier, seminal thinkers-notably Henri Fayol, Mary Parker Follett, and, above all, Frederick Winslow Taylor, the so-called father of scientific management. I found a discipline that isn’t a discipline so much as a collection of unsolved problems and hidden agendas-where asking the right questions is much more important than finding the right answers, where issues are not resolved so much as temporarily placated, and where the biggest rewards go to those who can stay focused on the one big thing that really matters. In 2006, the CEOs of the Fortune 500 averaged $15 million in compensation In formal evaluations, as well as in my own estimation, those who did not have MBAs performed better, on average, than those who had MBAs.Ī 1988 study sponsored by the business schools themselves stated the obvious when it concluded that “key managers pay little or no attention to research or its findings.” As of 2008, it has passed 140,000, representing one out of four master’s degrees of all types. Note that the 2008 Statistical Abstract has 142,000 master’s degrees in business for 2005,ġ988, the year I started work, that number had grown to 70,000. In 1968, the nation’s universities awarded fewer than 18,000 master’s degrees in business subjects. Roughly one-quarter of graduates at top business schools and up to one-sixth of undergraduates at elite universities now begin their careers by advising other people how to manage their businesses.

Twenty-five years later, it employed about 10 times as many. In 1980, the consulting industry, in the broadest definition, employed about 18,000 professionals worldwide. Management consulting dates from the early decades of the twentieth century, it had been for much of its existence something of a gentlemen’s club.

The Management Myth by Matthew Stewart