Gave it a scan - I guess I disagree a little. I work in a field in which there are very few MBA types. People rise through the field as content or education experts, and end up falling into management gradually as they get promoted. And usually they have had no management training, and all their coursework is in humanities.

As a result, it's not uncommon in my field for office systems to suck, people to blunder their way through decision making, be totally unfamiliar with basic ideas about project management, make heartstopping HR mistakes,etc. Whenever I talk to younger colleagues, I tell them to pursue management training every chance they get.

Management is funny - it seems like common sense that no one needs to tell you - and yet, in fact, there are a lot of invented wheels out there, and someone does have to tell you about them. The things I mentioned above are a start on that list. Systems, legal structures, and effective practices don't occur to people naturally. I struggled with lots of problems for a long time, thinking it was me, and then when I learned some relevant management skills, it was like "OOOOOoooh. AAAhhhhh. There are really easy ways to get this stuff done. This is a solved problem/these are useful ways of thinking about problems."

For sure there is plenty of BS in the management world. I guess that's just because the world of business generates enough excess income that there's plenty of money to pay management consultants, who in addition to consulting on managing also promote the idea that an MBA is essential. It becomes self-replicating. And yet, there are a lot of life skills and job skills that don't get taught anywhere outside management classes, and I'm glad I've had a few.

I don't think the author doesn't believe in management skills. I think he needed to earn a living with a graduate degree in philosophy and ended up doing management consulting, was initially intimidated but overcame it by thinking like philosopher. My own bias would be to think like a psychologist.

I was pretty surprised to see Taylor and Mayo held up as paragons of management theory. The MBA that I took critiqued these theories pretty roundly, discussing contemporary theories of management as much more complex and situated than the outdated "management science" presented here. In a career that has spanned industry, management and consultancy, I have encountered some pretty awful managers. Most of them tend to spout over-simplistic ideas like "to have people recognize the object of a task, we need to name it." Duh. Or the manager who read hugely tedious and long extracts from "Communities of Practice" to 40 people, in the mistaken belief that this would get us to collaborate more. Actually, it did bring us together, around the theme of "WTF was that about?" The MBAs that I know are the only effective managers out of the lot, mainly because they constantly question why things are done in a certain way.

Most of the managers for whom I have worked appear to believe that people work hardest if they are made insecure, demoralized and in fear for their jobs. It never seems to occur to them that "hardest" may not equate to "most effectively." In this economy, I hear of this approach everywhere I go. The best management approach is just to realize that you are dealing with people, each of whom wants some recognition, reward, and satisfaction for what they do. It's not rocket science. Psychology is a big part of contemporary management theory.

The most useful stuff that I got out of my MBA were an understanding of service management and a deeper understanding of marketing:
Service management, especially flow-control, is fascinating. Lay out the work area so that early tasks can be done first. Don't have people getting in each others' way as they work. Provide a customer-routing path that allows people to access the services that they need, in the order that they need them. Identify bottlenecks and provide paths around them. Use historical data to calculate the number of staff needed at peak vs. off-peak times. I am amazed at how many - sometimes pretty large - businesses appear to be managed by someone with no understanding of these principles. Look at the layout of your local buffet or salad bar for an example. How many of these position the dressings, forks, and beverages (the things you typically take last, or go back for) right at the start of the line, next to the empty plates & containers? So people are constantly getting in each others' way and tempers fray ...
Marketing is really fun(!). Identifying what market segment (subgroup of potential customers) is most likely to buy your products or services - or how these should be configured for various target market segments - can seriously ace your business plan. Understanding what things various types of customer want out of the deal is critical to configuring what you sell, so that you can customize your offerings to appropriate groups of people. For example, Toyota don't seem to have understood that around 40% of people who buy their smaller Scion models are older drivers who want low-maintenance, frugal cars (according to my local Toyota dealer). So they provide a flash-driven, stroboscopic website aimed at 18-25 yr-olds. This is probably a deterrent to sales. (I know that it gave me a headache and I never did manage to find the information I wanted). The other side of the marketing coin is that understanding how market segments are targeted makes you much more resilient to the BS that abounds in ads ...

The bottom line is that an MBA has probably not increased my earning power, but it has made me a better manager and a way more aware consumer!

The best management approach is just to realize that you are dealing with people, each of whom wants some recognition, reward, and satisfaction for what they do.
Yeah, this. Also realising that people are all different and seek different forms of reward and recognition. One of the biggest failings I see in managers is the expectation that every single staff member should be a superstar with ambition, instead of accepting that there will always be people in the organisation for whom work is nothing more than a method of obtaining sufficient money to live the life they want to. There is nothing wrong (and a lot right) with a person who simply wants to do their work competently and leave on time every day. Accepting this and allowing those people to work in the way that suits them also allows you to focus on 'developing' people who do have ambition and who are happy to put in the extra work for future rewards. Succession planning is an area where lots of people fail, because they are too scared to build capacity of staff under them for fear of being challenged or shown up, instead of seeing that building the capacity of your staff strengthens your position and makes life immeasurably easier for managers.

I hold no formal qualifications in management (and next to none in any area, although I did a few years of part-time study towards a management qualification), but I've been successful in achieving relatively rapid promotion where I work and I attribute this largely to the people who work for me - without them, I would have achieved nothing. By letting them do their job without micro-managing while communicating clear goals and expectations, by supporting them to build their skills and knowledge and to experiment with new ways of working, I've built capacity in the team that has allowed me to move up the hierarchy with confidence that there is someone ready to fill my shoes that I can rely on to support me. All of this seems to me to be common sense and generally aligns to strategies that management theory puts forward.

While formal management training does seem to put forward the concept of questioning current ways of operating, I don't see that this training is essential to thinking this way. I encourage staff to do this - to ask 'why do we do this, why do we do it this way and what would happen if we either didn't do it or did it differently?'. Working in a regulatory agency perhaps helps with this somewhat, as current thinking around regulation is to take a 'minimum regulatory intervention' approach and to aim to interfere as little as possible, while still maintaining a firm hand where needed. It's really the same approach that I find works well for managing people - let them do their job in the way that works best, make sure they understand what the goals are and only intervene when things don't seem to be working.

The experiences related in the article only serve to cement what I have always thought - just because someone calls themselves a consultant doesn't mean they know any more than you do and they may well know less. The extortionate fees charged by consultants (management and otherwise) are by no means any indication of their knowledge and/or skill - they are more reflective of their ability to sell themselves. In other words, there is a direct correlation between the level of bullshit and the hourly rate.

It was also clear to me that the writer of the article doesn't have any sort of basic grounding in management training. The example he quoted about the experiment related to varying light levels etc ignores the conclusion that was arrived at in that experiment - that productivity levels increasing had nothing to do with the rewards that were being offered or the level of light, they were because the people were being watched. People work harder when someone is watching them work and measuring their output, in other words. Well, duh.

This is an enjoyable article.