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As a voracious reader of business books and journals, I’ve become increasingly jaded and disillusioned. I’ve spent countless hours over the past quarter century searching for insights, concepts, and tools that might really change things. Yet for all the hype that “management” gives rise to and is prone to, most of what I’ve seen is just more of the same, repackaged for a new time and possibly a new audience. Some of it is vaguely interesting. A good deal of it is just plain nonsense.

For all the efforts of academics, consultants, executives, and writers, there’s been surprisingly little progress in the field of management thinking. A handful of concepts cooked up 30, 40, 50 – or even close to 100 years ago – are still the ones that matter; and they are the core of what now gets touted as “new,” “breakthrough,” or “revolutionary.”

The DuPont chart, a tool for thinking about how companies create wealth, appeared almost a century ago. Fifty-odd years ago, Peter Drucker noted that every company needs to answer three questions: 1) who is the customer? 2) what is value to that customer? and 3) how can we deliver it? And around the same time, the human resources school of organizational behavior gathered momentum with its message that people are the most important resource, and treating them well is smarter than treating them badly. So what has changed? Answer: nothing. What better advice is on offer? Answer: none. These long-in-the-tooth ideas remain the bedrock of today’s “freshest” management thinking. Again and again, they’re tarted up for a new audience by management’s “thought leaders.”

Of course, there will be howls of protest at this view. After all, a lot of people have a lot riding on the world being eager to hear what they have to say – and being willing to pay for it. But one thing I’ve learned about management is that we have a very good idea of what works. Get these few things right, and you have a chance of success; get them wrong, and you’re roadkill. Another lesson is that there are no silver bullets in business. And in this time of great change, we really can’t afford to keep reinventing the wheel or flailing around for answers that don’t exist.

There are three possible tests of the value of any new insight or concept: 1) how useful it is to busy, practicing managers; 2) whether it advances our understanding of a particular topic such as strategy, leadership, change management, customer service, or operations; or 3) whether it becomes a catalyst for further investigation and thought. By these tests, very little of what’s dished up is worthwhile.

This is alarming, given that management is the discipline at the very centre of human affairs. The one that makes pretty much everything happen. That makes businesses competitive and schools, hospitals, and armies effective. That makes cities, ships, trains, power stations, and much else work. And that drives innovation and progress.

You’d think that, by now, we’d have figured out how to manage things. That we’d have settled on a set of core principles and a proven set of practices. But we haven’t. Instead, we keep on searching. And searching…

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