The Wisdom Business : What’s Right (and Wrong) With Management Books
The relationship between practicing managers and management professors--fruitful though it often is--displays a strand of mutual contempt. What manager, leafing through a best-selling professor’s latest 300-page recipe for re-engineering, downsizing, empowering or intrapreneuring, has not wondered: “If you’re so smart, how come you’re not rich?” And what management professor, listening to a successful executive roll out his worldview at a weekend retreat, has not muttered under her breath: “If you’re so rich, how come you’re not smart?”
No surprise, then, that management literature is dominated by two unique genres: books by management academics presenting their latest formulas for success and autobiographical volumes by successful practitioners offering the benefits of a lifetime (or shorter) of wisdom. No other profession, it is worth emphasizing, has been so prolific. Management professors ceaselessly churn out titles like “Managing With Passion” and “Beyond Rational Management”; so where are the “Lawyering With Passions” or the “Beyond Rational Doctorings”? When law or medical professors write self-help books, they are meant for clients or patients, not for other practitioners. And for every Louis Nizer’s “My Life in Court” or Richard Selzer’s “Down From Troy: A Doctor Comes of Age,” there are 20 Estee Lauders writing their versions of “Estee: A Success Story.”
Management literature even boasts two unique crossover subgenres: the case study, which attempts to bring the experiences of the practicing manager into the academic setting, and the 200-page consulting report, which attempts to bring academic-style analytical rigor into the world of the practitioners. Again, neither has analogies in law or medicine. Practitioners in these fields consider themselves sufficiently analytical that when they need to consult, they seek out fellow practitioners. And unlike the doctorate-holding management professoriate, the ranks of law and medical faculties are sufficiently suffused with practitioners (law professors require only a professional degree; medical faculties are composed substantially from local physicians) that case studies of the everyday world of practice are far less necessary.
What are we make of this embarrassment of managerial literary riches? To help us answer this question, along come two exquisitely timed volumes. “The Ultimate Business Library” contains short summaries of 50 popular how-to management books, the vast majority written by academics from leading American business schools. Why should a book called “The Ultimate Business Library” confine itself to the musings of professors? Because, editor Stuart Crainer says, books by “actual managers largely provide proof of why the individuals chose a career in business rather than the media”; they “tend to be riddled with egotism and poor writing.”
To test this thesis, we can consult “The Book of Business Wisdom,” which offers short selections from the works of 54 successful, real world business people from John D. Rockefeller to Jack Welch. Why actual managers? Because, editor Peter Krass says, while academics “attempting to crack the secrets of success have used every metaphor imaginable to depict their ideas,” in truth “who better understands the necessary qualities to succeed than the most successful captains of American industry?”
Only in the field of management would professors and practitioners find themselves viciously competing in the marketplace. So how do the products stack up?
As “The Ultimate Business Library” makes clear in a starkly condensed way, popular books by management professors share a particular modus operandi. The professor goes out into the world of practitioners, studies their behavior and reports his or her findings back to a readership of practitioners. For example in one of last year’s hot books, “The Individualized Corporation,” professors Christopher Bartlett and Sumantra Ghoshal thank the 500 managers they interviewed: “By allowing us to see the world through their eyes, these managers have been the navigators, pilots and helmsmen who have helped us understand the new and unfamiliar territory we were trying to chart and describe.”
Undoubtedly the enterprise of reflecting the world of practice back to practitioners can have value, especially if it meets rigorous academic standards. But it must also be recognized how quickly this exercise courts the danger of telling the audience what it already knows: indeed, how uniquely limited it is. In no other academic field do professors focus their research on the behavior of the very people they are trying to educate. Legal scholars study not the behavior of lawyers but the reasoning of courts; medical researchers examine not the behavior of doctors but the pathology of diseases; both then impart their findings to present and future practitioners.
The reason, of course, is that in law school, research is humanities-based (legal scholars study texts), and in medical schools it is based on hard-core science. Most of the scholars in business schools, however, are social scientists: psychologists and sociologists (organizational behavior, marketing), economists (finance) or political scientists (the corporation in society). And social scientists study individual and group behavior. Yet unlike psychology or economics professors, who study the entire realm of human behavior (not just the behavior of psychologists and economists), the social scientists in management schools necessarily focus their studies on the behavior of managers or people in business more generally.
Understandably, then, when management academics take such information from the world of managerial practice and relay it back to practicing managers in the form of “how to” books, they elicit the kind of verdict Domino’s Pizza CEO Tom Monaghan delivered on one such effort: “I didn’t really learn much that was new to me,” he admits in “The Book of Business Wisdom.” “I found as I was reading it that I knew the sense of what it was going to say next even before I read the words.”
“The Book of Business Wisdom” leads one to ponder why autobiographical musings by successful business practitioners are so plentiful yet so rare in other professions. The answer may have something to do with the fact that when you end your legal or medical training, you immediately become that for which you were schooled: a lawyer, a doctor. But when you end your business-school training, you do not immediately become a senior manager; you have to struggle, often for a long time, to become part of top management. Put another way: whereas first you become a lawyer or doctor and then over time you develop a specialty, cataract surgery or copyright law, for instance, the career paths for managers take the reverse form: The “assistant treasurers who handle the company’s foreign-exchange exposure or its benefit plans,” Peter F. Drucker writes, “see their advancement in being promoted out of the specialist’s job and into ‘general management.’ ” Managers thus have life stories of growing breadth on which they can reflect.
As they look back on their lives, nearly all the executives featured in “The Book of Business Wisdom” advance the same worldview. IBM’s Tom Watson Jr. realized that he “couldn’t match” many of his employees “intellectually”; but he also knew that if he “used fully [his] every capability,” he “could stay even with them.” Remington’s Victor Kiam acknowledged that he “couldn’t always outthink” his competitors,” but he “could sure as hell outwork them.” Of course, this notion is tremendously liberating. Even if brains, abilities and talent are unequally distributed, they count for less than one might think. Will, determination, drive, attitude, effort--the traits everyone possesses (or can)--are what make for success. Occasionally, it must be said, in some of these writings the category of will seems to balloon to encompass everything: One of the businessmen quoted in “Business Wisdom” speaks of the “will to manage,” a trait each of us can display. But this very American chord--that will and effort count and that they’re distributed equally even if talent and skill are not--echoes from Andrew Carnegie to Andrew Grove.
Notably, management professors, many of them featured in “The Ultimate Business Library,” seem in the grip of precisely the reverse worldview: Though everybody vibrates with talent and glows with skill, only a few are blessed with supervening will, drive or determination. Here, accordingly, it is not will but skill that becomes the elastic term: Almost all human traits, even the capacities for curiosity, spirituality and playfulness, get tagged as core competencies, skill sets and expertises; we all have talent to burn. But if everybody is equally talented, what then separates the wheat from the chaff? It’s will, grit and effort. While we “are all Michelangelos,” Tom Peters says in “The Circle of Innovation,” “the difference . . . the winning edge . . . is that FIRE IN THEIR EYES.” Or as re-engineering guru Michael Hammer puts it, “ skills are the easy part”; acquiring that necessary “force of will,” however, “is only slightly harder than dieting.”
It is no coincidence that Drucker is the only famous management professor to have written an autobiography, “Adventures of a Bystander” (1978), and now to be the subject of an intellectual biography, Jack Beatty’s insightful volume. Early on, Drucker got a life. Born in Vienna in 1909, he met Thomas Mann, Joseph Schumpeter and Oskar Morgenstern as a youth, fled the Nazis, became a correspondent, taught political theory (and later Japanese art), undertook a wide variety of charitable projects, contributed a regular column to the Wall Street Journal, wrote 29 books, including two novels and worked in business. But if Drucker resembles many managers (although not management professors) in having lived a life worthy of biography, he resembles most professors (though not management professors) in drawing not just on the behavior of managers but on an immense learning in the humanities and general social sciences: history, philosophy, literature, economic theory (and, yes, law and medicine) to help illuminate issues of management for managers. True, even a Peter Drucker can not wholly escape the limits of the enterprise. He, too, of necessity spends much of his time drawing insights from management practice and reporting them back to practicing managers, lacing his writings with preemptive self-deprecatory comments like, “None of these things is particularly new or particularly sophisticated,” or “I well know that there is a fair number of managers who will, having read thus far, say ‘What else is new?’ ” But because of his experiences and learning, Drucker’s work invariably displays greater richness and clarity than that of anyone else in the field. More important, he said it all first.
If Drucker pioneered popular management literature, then Peters’ “The Circle of Innovation” may well represent its end game. Peters, it seems, was faced with a challenge: how to fill a 495-page book on management when every basic idea, indeed, every bit of jargon imaginable has already been coined. Certainly, it helps to use a lot of ellipses, collages, gigantic typefaces, repetition and quotations from others. And it doesn’t take much to realize that you must abandon all fear of contradicting yourself: That way you can get twice as many ideas out. But Peters does more than this; he takes management literature into a whole new era. Consider the following two paragraphs:
“As I see it, everyone who works in a professional service firm should cultivate at least a local/regional reputation. Sure . . . I know everybody says that. Up or out: Either survive and thrive . . . or . . . away you go! Why the hell bother to get out of bed in the morning if your objective is not . . . WOW! Tough? Yes. Fair? I guess I’m inclined to say . . . more or less . . . yes. OK . . . YES.
“(Almost) everything works. Quality per se is not the advantage it once (recently) was. So: Just shout “NO!” to . . . Commoditization (of anything) Me-too/Look-alikes. Embrace: WOW!!!/Lusted-after products and services! Ultimate sin: WHEN WE DO IT ‘RIGHT,’ IT’S STILL PRETTY ORDINARY.”
One of these paragraphs appears verbatim in “The Circle of Innovation.” The other is composed of sentences randomly gathered from different paragraphs within a particular section of the book. The fact that they are equally coherent undoubtedly represents something of a stylistic breakthrough for the genre. In writing a book in which most any sentence might have appeared next to any other with no discernible impact on the argument, Peters is not only the father of the postmodern corporation (as he is often called): He may well have produced the first piece of postmodern management literature.
In 1987, the late philosopher Allan Bloom published “The Closing of the American Mind,” which, contrary to all expectations, became a runaway bestseller and made Bloom a millionaire. Reflecting on his success, Bloom recalled that in his early years, his business friends often needled him with the question, “if you ‘re so smart, how come you aren’t rich?”; now, Bloom said with satisfaction, “I can tell them ‘I am rich!’ ” Bloom’s comment may help explain why titles like “Managing With Passion” and “Beyond Rational Management” keep pouring forth from the management professors, finding a substantial market among practitioners despite their overexposed ideas. Management practitioners already are rich at least by professorial standards. What these bromide-filled books do is reassure them that they are also as smart as management professors. Management professors know they are smart. What these books promise them, however, is that they, too, can become as rich as top managers.