The Management Myth: Debunking Modern Business Philosophy by Matthew Stewart
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Ideology of Corporate Power

A sentimental aphorism has it that we’re all unique. Not so. Among the almost 8 billion people in the world, the chances that there is someone else who looks like you, talks like you, and even thinks like you if fairly high. There just aren’t that many genetic and cultural variables to ensure the reality of a conceit like uniqueness. But actually meeting a physical or psychological twin is another matter in which the 8 billion works against ever encountering him. Unless, of course, he writes a book and generates a little fame. Then, bingo, we realise our membership in a class, a culture, a generation of more or less replicable people. Someone out there shares our experience and concerns. A miracle.

So, paradoxically, when we have a near-double, we have an identity. Matthew Stewart is proof of my own replicability and confirms my own identity. We share the disappointed aspirations of young academics who find that knowing more and more about less and less is the path down an intellectual black hole. We both spied some hope that there might be a place for intellect in the practical world of business and became management consultants. This proved a way of making a living but ultimately brought us both close to moral bankruptcy. Both of us ended up returning to a sort of quasi-academic environment whence we hurl occasional broadsides at the present representatives of our past lives.

No one pays attention to these broadsides. It’s really not in anyone’s interest to do so because they are meant to undermine that central virtue of modern business life: confidence. Professional confidence (not to be confused with its moral cousin) is the only essential trait of the corporate business executive. Everything else - commercial knowledge, political skills, contacts, etc. - can be either acquired or learned with enough confidence to do so. Confidence makes one a player. Trump is the empirical proof that the world is corporate and is fuelled by confidence. Arrogance is simply unreflective confidence, the highest form of virtue. Most of the 8 billion appear to agree. The hell with them: there is an Other.

Confidence is self-generated; it can’t be instilled or taught. It is the virtue of the Americanised individualist. Confidence is the secular residue of that paramount Christian virtue of faith. You either have it or you don’t. If you’ve got it, flaunt it. And the sure way to lose whatever you might have of it is to question its presence. Ultimately this is what Stewart does in this very well written book on the conceits of not just management consulting but also of the whole ideology of corporate management, which is really a global system of quasi-religious belief and power. For me the similarity of our experiences is toe-curling and I would like to forget about most of them.

Management is a ‘thing’ of the 20th century. No one is quite sure whether it is a coercive or a facilitating thing, or what peculiar substance it might have. But is a thing whose importance increased, not incidentally, with the importance of that other 20th century ‘thing’, the corporation. As a practical matter, it is these two things in which the world has most confidence. We may complain about the corporation and its management from time to time simply because it is involved in so much of our daily lives. But we are confident that their brand names and capabilities will be there when we want them. And we are confident that they will continue to provide us the employment, the career path, and the pensionable wealth that we need to survive.

So to suggest that global confidence in corporate management is misplaced is not going to be a popular message, at least among the already confident. Corporate culture is not primarily concerned with the organisation, production and sale of goods and services, that is to say, economics. Rather this culture is driven by expectations, that is to say, finance - what an entirely imaginary future might yield. This is a world comprised entirely of expectations, unverifiable facts as assertions. Despite their ephemeral nature, expectations are what makes the corporate world tick. Confidence is the mutually agreed upon engine of the corporate economy of expectations. Think big or get lost.

Expectations, of course, are products of the imagination. They are fictions. And like all fictions, they are lies. Expectations are not perceived as lies, however, as long as they are mutually re-enforcing. My lie confirms your lie and vice-versa. At that point our joint lie becomes reality, a context in which we feel comfortable... and, of course, confident. Stewart does a rather comprehensive job of cataloguing those joint lies. Corporate managers lie about their lack of confidence. Management consultants lie about their achievements. But together these lies can generate what everyone needs - greater expectations.

Confidence is not hope. Expectations are not prudent forecasts. Hope recognises one’s incapacity, one’s limitations, one’s vulnerability. Forecasts have at least some reference to cause and effect, action and result. But confidence is directly proportionate to the level of one’s expectations, no matter how absurdly high. Expectations are the social proof of personal confidence. This is a remnant of the Calvinist certainty of faith in salvation as proof of salvation. Management consulting exists functionally to boost expectations to new levels, to spread the faith. This, not any other results or consequences, is what they get paid for. As Stewart points out “this isn’t science; it’s a party trick.” It’s also the new ministry selling salvation in this world rather than another.

The corporation is a competitive market in expectations. Everyone in the corporation is trying to outgun everyone else in the expectation of advancement as a sign of their personal confidence. The more senior they are they more they are hired for just this reason. But the CEO, the department head, the section manager, the team leader, are all vulnerable to the conflicting expectations of those who work for them. Most of these subordinates think they are better than the folk who manage them. This makes expectations a battle field. And as Stewart says therefore, “consultants are selling something other than pure analysis.” In fact they don’t sell anything rational at all.

What they are selling is most often a way out of the gridlock in expectations within a management team. Consultants are the Prussian shock troops called in to tilt that field in the favour of the senior executive who often does feel remarkably like Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo waiting for relief by Papa Blucher. The consultants’ expectations become his expectations; and the lower level griping and sniping are crushed under a mass of analytics and Aristotelian logic. Consultants prove that people don’t know what they should know, don’t know how to act when they get to know it, and resist learning how to act unless threatened. The idea is to build such a formidable fictional expectation that no one dare raise his or her head above the parapet in objection.

In short, consultants are an instrument of power, of coercion, of dominance which has little to do with whatever nominal problem they have been hired to address. Stewart puts the matter less laconically: “The chief message to be communicated [to managers during a consulting assignment], in almost all situations, was that you will be expected to work much harder than you ever have before and your chances of losing your job are infinitely greater than you have ever imagined. As savvy managers understand, consultants are the cattle prods of the modern corporation.” If you not with us, you’re against us and will be condemned to hell. Generalised chutzpah.

Consultants are fired not when an assignment is completed (most would go on forever, other things being equal), but when they have become part of the managerial problem, that is, when they become a threat to the executive who hired them. Consultants may go native as they eventually understand the business and develop a truly informed opinion; they may become a cost liability which is no longer defensible by the client-executive; or they may have simply demonstrated that their contribution to commercial success is as fictitious as their past accomplishments. Whatever the specific circumstances, the underlying reason for ‘breakup’ is the loss, for the moment of their coercive power.

The ideology of management - that there is something ‘scientific’ to the idea of management - persists, however. It is the rational excuse for calling the consultants (or their replacements) back - sooner rather than later. This is the big cultural lie that everyone has an interest in ignoring. Stewart’s summary is hard to beat:

“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”

You are not alone, Matt. If we could get all these corporate types to read more literary fiction rather than pretend to manage, everyone would be better off. Until then, we can share our heretical lack 0f confidence.

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