matthew stewart the management myth

LA URGENTE Y PARTICULAR INNOVACIÓN NECESARIA EN LA ENSEÑANZA DEL NOBLE OFICIO DEL MANAGEMENT (1 DE 7)

COMENTARIO: The Management Myth, el libro del filósofo y ex-consultor Matthew

Stewart nos ofrece en sus 303 páginas: a) una narración sucinta y muy bien documentada

de la historia del pensamiento del siglo veinte sobre el management, y b) otra narración

(que es toda una novela de suspenso e intriga) sobre su experiencia como consultor de

empresas; sazonada por rigurosas reflexiones, que se le facilitan por la formación

filosófica que le acompaña, acerca de porqué el management y su enseñanza merecen

mejor trato y atención que la que hasta ahora han recibido.

Todo dueño o administrador de una escuela de negocios, o decano de una facultad de

administración de empresas, o director de programa MBA, etc. se deleitará con su lectura

y eventualmente beneficiará a la organización a su cargo; ni que decirlo, así mismo, todo

manager/gerente oficiando actualmente en una organización.

Los siete siguientes comentarios remiten a siete breves citas del libro, y creemos que

cumplen el doble propósito de despertar el apetito hacia su lectura, y esbozar porqué

afirmamos que estamos de acuerdo con su autor sobre que es urgente y necesario

innovar radicalmente en la enseñanza del noble (*) oficio del management.

(*) Usamos el término "noble" en su sentido de "Honroso, estimable".

CITA: The Management Myth, Matthew Stewart (p.11)

“But the modern idea of management is right enough to be dangerously wrong and it has

led us seriously astray. It has sent us on a mistaken quest to seek scientific answers to

unscientific questions. It offers pretended technological solutions to what are, at bottom,

moral and political problems. It conjures an illusion – easily exploited – about the nature

and value of management expertise. It induces us to devote formative years to training in

subjects that do not exist. It favors a naïve view of the sources of mismanagement, making

it harder to check abuses of corporate power. Above all, it contributes to a

misunderstanding about the sources of our prosperity, leading us to neglect the social,

moral, and political infrastructure on which our well-being depends…

The sixteenth-century English philosopher Francis Bacon, defined an idol as a phantasm

of the mind – sometimes founded in the limitations of our rational faculties, often furthered

by the misuse of language and the sophistry of false teachers – that leads us to a pattern

of misunderstanding of the world and sustain irrational practices.

By that definition, the idea of management is an idol of our times. It is a fat word over a lot

the thin questions marks. It is an edifice of grammatical errors, misperceptions, and

superstitions that keeps in business much that should be put out of business.”


CITA: The Management Myth, Matthew Stewart (p.159) El Autor cita a Bruce Herderson,

el fundador del Boston Consulting Group.

"Can you think of anything less improbable [sic] than taking the world's most successful

firms, leaders in their business, and hiring people just fresh out of school and telling them

how to run their business and they are willing to pay millions of dollars for this advice?"

COMENTARIO: ¿Es necesario añadir otro comentario, a éste, el comentario de uno de

los fundadores de “la industria”, quien comenta sin tapujos sobre la increíble y disparatada

promesa de valor de su industria? Sí, es necesario: la verdadera promesa de la

consultoría tendría que ser enseñar a pensar, aprendiendo a pensar junto a los gerentes

practicantes, sobre las realidades, retos y desafíos propios de cada organización,

organización repetimos, no industria, cada cual desde su historia, desde su ethos

particular.



"By making market share one of only two variables in assessing a business, the matrix is

inherently biased toward an expansionist strategy... The matrix, in keeping with the

fundamental thrust of the strategy planning tradition, presumes that managers can do a

better job of allocating resources among business than the market can. The matrix

presumes, for example, that it is better to invest the milk from cash cows in the limited

portfolio of stars and questions marks available to a corporation than to send it back to

shareholders."

COMENTARIO: La intersección y eventual alianza de saberes provenientes del estudio de

la economía y de la administración, es en sí asignatura pendiente en el currículo del

estudio y la enseñanza de la ciencia de las organizaciones. J.A. Schumpeter fue el

economista-historiador que quizá más cerca estuvo, tanto en su pensamiento como en su

práctica docente de lograrlo; la invitación no puede ser otra que a continuar el camino por

él abierto. Es menester poner a hablar los números, que hablan de las finanzas de la

organización por ejemplo, con su historia y con la historia de sus fundadores y familias; y

lo es también poner a hablar a sus gerentes actuales con el mundo en que viven y

producen hoy, y con el que quisieran para sus hijos y los hijos de sus hijos, que lo vivirán

mañana.



"A conceptual framework is a way of breaking up the landscape of experience into

meaningful pieces. It is intended to help individuals engaged in a particular practice to

describe and analyze the context of their actions. It is often expected to provide normative

guidance on what to do.

Some chiefs will undoubtedly find the "five forces of cooking" framework supplied here

useful in these ways. Student chefs in particular will be keen to master whatever secrets

they imagine to be lurking in the framework. Academics, as is their work, will inevitably

dispute aspects of the framework and propose amendments or alternatives - such as,

perhaps, a talent-based view of cooking. Most chefs, however, will immediately sense that

the whole endeavor is an atrocious waste of time. A framework, they will point out, has

never fried an egg.”

COMENTARIO: El “divorcio” (que acontece durante el oficiar del oficio) de la concepción

teórica y la acción práctica es inaceptable en cualquier campo, pero en el oficio del

management es además un contrasentido total, esto por supuesto en razón a la dada

enorme contribución histórica de la ciencia y tecnología modernas al éxito (expansión

productiva y eficiencia) de la organización moderna. ¿No es lo mínimo que cabe esperar

del comportamiento de dueños y administradores, en su contribución al producido, un

proceder tan siquiera estructurado y respetuoso de la prueba, el análisis y la síntesis,

como lo es el de técnicos e ingenieros?



"The attempt to turn strategy into a rigorous academic discipline has done considerable

violence to the core value in almost all strategic thinking - the fundamental idea that one

should always keep an eye on the big picture. Seeing the big picture means seeing not

just what is, but what can be. It is, by its nature, a synthetic activity, not an analytic one. It

is essentially creative, not reductive. It happens in an imperfectly knowable world, and it is

risky. It is what we mean by entrepreneurial, in the best sense of the word. The academic

discipline of strategy, like the business school system from which it emerges and the

managerial perspective it represents, is fundamentally analytic, reductive, and risk-averse.

By the default settings of all such institutions, it is bound to prepare people to become

bureaucrats rather than entrepreneurs. We can nonetheless take some comfort in the

knowledge that the core value of strategy will surely survive the academic onslaught. After

all, there is nothing that a blackboard can do to halt the arrival of spring."

COMENTARIO: Siendo éste quizá el término más manoseado del estudio del

management – Estrategia - es sorprendente y grato no obstante atestiguar su vigencia y

atractivo para toda nueva generación de dueños y administradores. Quizá porque resume

la aspiración de dejar huella en el largo plazo, no sólo en las utilidades del trimestre; quizá

porque implica el esfuerzo innovador que permite derrotar al contrincante bien

atrincherado. Nosotros afirmamos que es imposible desligar administración efectiva de

estrategia; y esto en razón no tanto a que la formulación y ejecución estratégica estén a la

base del éxito en el desempeño financiero de la organización, como en que persistir en

“formular y ejecutar estratégicamente” es lo único que hace de la organización un ente en

desarrollo, “vivo”, eventualmente triunfador, en todo caso relevante para la sociedad (ésta

en tanto medio que posibilita su existencia) en donde habitan dueños, clientes y

empleados.



"The gurus hold on to the pretense of management expertise because that is the idea that

fuses their work into a meaningful whole. However much they disdain the academics, the

gurus subscribe to the myth that Taylor concocted and that has sustained the business of

management ever since - the idea that management is a specialized body of knowledge or

expertise that evolves over time and is the preserve of a certain class of professionals.

Indeed, the gurus are today's chief propagandists for this new, modern religion. Drucker,

with his usual self-confidence, has allowed himself to be identified as "the man who

invented management," or, at least, who "established management as a discipline and as

a field of study." In fact, neither he nor his successors established a discipline; they merely

asserted the idea of a discipline. (And, for what it's worth, it was Taylor, not Drucker, who

had the idea first.) If one is to appreciate the gurus properly, to understand why they have

risen to prominence and what their work actually portends, one must approach them not

as the experts that they claim to be, but as the spiritual leaders that the really are."


"To dispute gurus on questions of fact, however, is a fool's game. When Peters and his

fellow gurus contrast the innocent past with the present danger, they are not describing

phenomena that can be observed in real time. They are invoking a certain emotional state

of being. They are expressing our fear of change -and, ultimately, our fear of death. The

pressure from which they seek refuge has its ultimate source not in managerial experience

per se, nor even in a particular economic system, but in our own mortality. They are, in

fact, taking the first step in the long-established formula for success in any democratic

religion, which is to tie this fear of death and destruction to our particular time (whenever

that may be), and so to link our existential anxieties with a claim about the peculiar

wickedness of the age.

The gurus, like their evangelical predecessors, understand instinctively how to exploit a

fundamental flaw in the human intuition of time. Reason tell us that time is a continuum,

and that yesterday, today, and tomorrow are in reality no different from one another. But

the primitive, chthonic mind disagrees. It tell us that yesterday is very unlike today, which

is nothing at all like tomorrow. The past is innocent and stable, like childhood, like Garden

of Eden, or like the father who went off to work every morning with the same briefcase in

hand. The present, which really exist only as the immediate future, is a source of perpetual

instability, fearsome threats, and relentless anxiety. The far future (see step 3 below)

resolves this instability in the form of calamity or rapture, permanent doom or eternal

salvation.

The gurus understand that to invoke this particular state of being, this anxiety before the

present/immediate future, has a salutary aspect. It is a way of predisposing us to action. It

shake us out of complacency and bring focus to our energies. What the gurus may not

always be willing to say is that invoking this state of being also happens to be a highly

profitable move for the gurus themselves. As America's evangelists understood, fear sells.

Bad news for you is good news for the gurus. Management theory has its feet glued to

superstition, and superstition floats only on an ocean of fear."

COMENTARIO: “Ciencia y superstición”, 500 años después de Descartes y todos los

demás filósofos que con él debatieron, le siguieron, complementaron, o justamente se le

enfrentaron, aún persiste entre los hombres la ansiedad y el temor ante lo desconocido;

quizá por las dudas acerca de su capacidad de aprendizaje, quizá porque el tema se

presente a priori como incognoscible. Para la mayoría de los hombres se presenta

aterrador tener que admitir la sentencia socrática “Sólo sé que nada se”; prefieren inventar

cuanto saben e imaginar que aprendieron sin la exigencia de transitar desde la humildad y

el esfuerzo. Y si alguien les facilita ese camino, están más que dispuestos a seguirlo; a

cambio de no tener siquiera que intentar el otro, que se sabe (y esto es algo que por todos

sí se sabe, así sea de oídas) lleno de peligros, variado en sus sin sabores, con escasas

ganancias para grandes inversiones, y muchas veces para tan sólo llegar a saber, con un

poco de precisión añadida, qué es eso que (aún) no se sabe.


CITA: The Management Myth, Matthew Stewart (p.303 - final del libro)

"The questions that the management theorists raise and the insights that they offer belong

not to a speciously practical discipline of management, but to the history of philosophy,

and they should be taught and studied as such.

What makes for a good manager? If we put all of their heads together, the great

management thinkers at the end of the day give us the same, simple, and true answer. A

good manager is someone with a facility for analysis and an even greater talent for

synthesis; someone who has an eye both for the details and for the one big thing that

really matters; someone who is able to reflect on facts in a disinterested way, who is

always dissatisfied with pat answers and the conventional wisdom, and who therefore

takes a certain pleasure in knowledge itself; someone with a wide knowledge of the world

and an even better knowledge of the way people work; someone who knows how to treat

people with respect; someone with honesty, integrity, trustworthiness, and the other things

that make up character; someone, in short, who understands oneself and the world around

us well enough to know how to make it better. By this definition, of course, a good

manager is nothing more or less than a good and well-educated person."

COMENTARIO: ¿Estudiar filosofía en cambio de administración? ¿O estudiar filosofía

para poder contribuir al aprendizaje y a la práctica de la administración? Sin duda, si algo

así ocurriera, sería un management muy diferente al que conocemos; una gestión del

“recurso” y un pensamiento estratégico que hoy no alcanzamos a imaginarnos. También

la criatura-empresa sería otra, y probablemente en alguna medida transformaría a sus

creadores, los hombres, y a su medio potenciador, la sociedad moderna, la de la ciencia y

tecnologías (blandas y duras) modernas. Continuaríamos consumiendo sin duda, dicho en

el sentido restrictivo de que nos es imposible sacudirnos la humana condición pasajera, y

ante la magnitud de esa “noticia” la sobriedad es escasa… Pero tal vez nuestra

producción y consumo tendrían un nuevo estilo, uno menos afiliado con los partisanos de

la consolación, uno más afecto con creer que tenemos que volver a maravillarnos con

todo. Un nuevo Estilo, con mayúscula, algo que sólo a los hombres corajudos les cabe en

el ser, siéndolo. Y así, quizá hasta los dioses cesarían en su huida, y comience su

regreso.

matthew stewart the management myth

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