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Matthew Stewart
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The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting it Wrong Hardcover – August 10, 2009

by Matthew Stewart (Author)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 326 ratings
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A brilliant, not-to-be missed account of the reasons why management thinks the way it does―and why they are flawed.

If CEOS, consultants, top managers, and other financial wizards are so smart, how come they screw up so badly? Why is there no correlation whatsoever between a business school education and success in business? Why might you be better off studying something as irrelevant as―philosophy?

In The Management Myth, Stewart offers:

 

  • An insightful romp through the entire history of thinking about management, with memorable sketches of Frederick Winslow Taylor, Elton Mayo, Peter Drucker, Michael Porter, Tom Peters, and other management celebrities
  • A devastating critique of pseudoscience in management theory, from the scientific management movement to the contemporary disciplines of strategy and organizational behavior
  • A swashbuckling account of the rise and much-anticipated fall of management consulting, laced with personal tales about cryptic PowerPoint presentations; the bait-and-hold techniques that keep clients paying to be told what they already know; and the colorful internal politics at his own ill-fated consulting firm, where rivals for power found imaginative uses for an in-house shrink
  • Historical perspective on why so many CEOs make so much more than they deserve
  • A clear explanation of why the MBA usually amounts to so much BS

With wit and wisdom, Stewart makes an electrifying case that the questions and insights of management theorists belong not to the sciences but to philosophy, and that, in the final analysis, “a good manager is nothing more or less than a good and well-educated person.”

Previous page
  1. Print length
    352 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    W. W. Norton & Company
  4. Publication date
    August 10, 2009
  5. Dimensions
    6.6 x 1.3 x 9.6 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    9780393065534
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0393065534
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Stewart (The Courtier and the Heretic) reflects on his unconventional path to becoming a successful management consultant—despite a complete lack of business knowledge or experience, let alone an MBA. He offers an insider's perspective on the industry, revealing the astonishingly high routine consultant fees and the absurdity of leading firms depending on consultants fresh out of school to tell them how to run their business. Following in the footsteps of shamans, consultants envelop their work with an aura of sacred mystery and outrageously unjustified levels of self-confidence to add to their perceived expertise. Gleefully revealing the magician's tricks, Stewart takes readers on a whirlwind tour of how this industry came to be a powerhouse. Filled with fascinating insider anecdotes and featuring a who's who in the consulting world, including Peter Drucker, Michael Porter and Bruce Henderson, this wry, absorbing book will enlighten executives about the value consultants actually bring to their clients. (Aug.)

Review

"At last, a book that knocks the Kings of Consulting off their thrones. The Management Myth is a rare and often very humorous exposé on the shenanigans behind the corporate empire that has catapulted us down the current road to economic turmoil."
― John Perkins, best-selling author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and The Secret History of the American Empire

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0393065537
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company; First Printing First Edition (August 10, 2009)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780393065534
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393065534
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.17 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.6 x 1.3 x 9.6 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 326 ratings

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Matthew Stewart

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Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
326 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Todd C Cheng
5.0 out of 5 stars Nice.
Reviewed in the United States on May 18, 2023
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The author interweaves their career journey in consulting with the practices and fickle ideologies in the ‘sciences’ of management. He eloquently rattles elements in the arguments or philosophies of Drucker, Deming, Porter, Taylor, and many others. He finds foibles in each. I don’t recall a single compliment contributed. Then he tackles the state of the U.S. MBA education principles, the consulting industry, and tugs on a few of the effects of this on industries. He capture the life cycle of consulting and evolutions in the growth. He overlays his own struggles as a company founder, consultant, and legal struggles. He is scorned. However, the blending of personal and historic synthesis helps it be an addictive read. And his wit in cynicism keep it fun. He is critical, but not as a character attack as a contrasted perspective.

As a reader of the management and occasional consulting craft and a fan of some of the thought contributors he pokes one might expect me to not be a fan. But, I found many passages that make my reread. He adds less researched thoughts and a contrasted perspective that has a wide breath of research.
One person found this helpful
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András Puiz
4.0 out of 5 stars It's thoroughly entertaining to read and raises some good points, yet I still feel the book fails ...
Reviewed in the United States on September 20, 2014
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An interesting read, and a bit of an eye-opener. There are two "plots": the author's own experiences in the consulting business, and a historic overview of management philosophies, the latter in a very scathing, critical tone. It's thoroughly entertaining to read and raises some good points, yet I still feel the book fails to deliver on its promise. If it's set out to debunk the "management myth," it should do a bit more than take some caustic critiques of a bunch of hand-picked management experts from the past, and mix it with some first-hand anecdotes. In other words, the book offers limited coverage and does not jell perfectly, but is well written and insightful.
4 people found this helpful
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DPOP
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant Takedown of the Cult of Management and Strategy
Reviewed in the United States on April 26, 2010
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I just finished this outstanding book. It has been on my list since I read the rave WSJ and New Yorker reviews this past fall. It's a brilliant history of management thought dating back to Taylor and scientific management. It is also a highly critical take down of the management consulting industry that relies on hilarious anecdotes from the author's career in management consulting. For what its worth, I want to mention that this is not what I would call a "subversive" book as it pertains to many companies. While not the book's focus, it is supportive of companies and individuals that eschew the flash and sizzle of Strategy (with a capital S) and Management (with a capital M.)

My favorite quote: "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 the 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 honest, 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."

This is a thoroughly entertaining and stimulating read. I feel ashamed that I have read the work of some of the management gurus excoriated in this book.
7 people found this helpful
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Michael Funk
4.0 out of 5 stars Funny and educational
Reviewed in the United States on September 20, 2009
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Four stars seems a little generous but three would seem way too harsh (3.8 stars?). The chapters alternate between the author's own experiences as a management consultant and a short history of the discipline of management. Somehow, through persistence (and probably a little luck) he was hired by a management consulting firm despite having a PhD in philosophy and no business experience. He seems just as surprised by this as the reader, and it gives him a unique perspective on what followed.

The historical chapters cover the evolution of the idea of management as a profession and a discipline. Basically, how business schools and their curricula came to be. Each historical chapter focuses on one significant figure in the field. He starts with the father of "scientific management", Frederick Winslow Taylor, and proceeds through the formation of institutions such as the Harvard Business School and today's big consulting firms. Finally, he takes on the management gurus of the last 25 years or so.

As the title suggests, he doesn't think much of any of these people or their ideas. Much of the humor comes from how comically unscientific and arbitrary their "research" was. They come across as unintentional con men, people offering near-useless advice to business leaders but blissfully unaware of their own BS. An excellent chapter towards the end points out the parallels between management gurus like Tom Peters and evangelical preachers, who are perpetually claiming that the end is nigh and only they can save us.

His own story is more darkly humorous- the people and firms he ended up working with were much more blatantly geared towards ripping off their customers. There are many comparisons with parasites burrowing into hosts and feeding off of them for as long as possible. If he is to be believed, all management consulting firms are like this to varying degrees- hopefully his was on the extreme end.

I really enjoyed this book. So, why 3.8 stars and not 4 or 5? Mainly because I was left wondering how fair it was. I'm an engineer, not an MBA, and have little prior knowledge of the field or the people he wrote about. But it was such a harsh, blistering, comical takedown of an entire discipline that I can't help but wonder how one-sided it is. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't- I suppose docking a star for this reflects more on me than the author. I can see the BS of the management gurus from miles away, but I wouldn't have thought that MBA programs in general were just as contrived. Then again, maybe he's right. It makes me want to learn more about the subject.
13 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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Massa
5.0 out of 5 stars Genial!
Reviewed in Spain on October 6, 2022
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Fina ironía sobre la profesión de la consultoría de negocios y un gran rigor histórico sobre los orígenes del management.
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Max M.
5.0 out of 5 stars A cynical view on business thought and the consulting industry
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 1, 2021
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Matthew Stewart is a cynic; this is the impression you get from reading The Management Myth. Although, since he is a philosopher by training, he might prefer to be designated a 'sceptic' instead. The book offers both an intellectual history of management thought and a history of his personal experience as a management consultant. And, in fairness to Stewart, from both sides of this twin history, you also get the impression that those who engage with management, whether in theory or practice, could do with being a little more sceptical, or perhaps choose not to be.

When it comes to 'management thinking', Stewart's target isn't primarily the pop management gurus whose books you find being sold in city train stations and airport lounges. It's the academic discipline of management, including everyone from Harvard Business School on downwards. Stewart makes the case that many of the thinkers who were crucial to the development of management as a discipline, such as Frederick Winslow Taylor and Elton Mayo, were frauds who incorrectly generalised the results of very specific cases or just simply fabricated their results.

Moreover, it is not just methodological errors that are the issue; it's that the fundamental presuppositions of management thinking, from its inception to present, are wrong. These include the idea that workers behave, and can be directed to behave, in a predictable way so that management can constitute a science based on a general, abstract laws. There is also the utopian social idea that, with the right management techniques, conflict between workers and management can be resolved. For Stewart, and for most people, this is obviously untrue. Some degree of conflict of interests is unavoidable. And what the 'right' management solution is is so context dependent, and technical expertise is so quickly out of date, that it is better to have a broad ethical education, such as one that could be gained from studying the humanities, than that which is currently offered at business schools. This would also have some quantitative elements and basic business strategy mixed in to remedy some of the defects that hold present humanities graduates back in the labour market.

Running parallel to this is a personal account of Stewart's experience as a consultant, plus some (fairly cynical) analysis of the consulting industry as a whole. Consultants, according to Stewart, tend to offer little in the way of genuine expertise and instead effectively scare clients into hiring them, forming a kind of parasitic relationship with their 'host'. Even worse, consultants can act as a legitimators of autocratic management practices. After all, as Stewart points out, implicit in the business of management consulting is the idea that the managers of a company, rather than, say, ordinary workers or customer sentiment, are the most crucial factor in the success or failure of said company. This can then be used to legitimate an unduly expansive view of management power.

Stewart has turned what could have been a dry book (neither management thought nor consulting are inherently thrilling subjects) into something that is entertaining. This is done through his wry sense of humour and amusing descriptions of both his former colleagues and the various management thinkers covered. For example, there's Roland, a jocular, hunting-obsessed Frenchmen with a "face like a pink bowling ball and a belly to match" and who would spend his free time "heading out early in the morning to endanger another animal species". A particularly fascinating segment details the emergence of a new kind of business guru, starting with the perennially angry Tom Peters in the 1980s, oriented towards a mass audience. These new gurus function more as radical eschatological preachers than social scientists. They rage against the bureaucracy of corporate life and offer a heaven-like vision of an egalitarian workplace, in which individual autonomy is no longer stifled by hierarchy. In fact, you could almost say these American icons represent ersatz versions of Karl Marx.

Roland's characterisation is actually one of the more sympathetic in the book. It turns out that the firm Stewart agreed to join, splintering off from A.T. Kearney, would be headed by a set of particularly sociopathic individuals keen on unsustainable expansion and awarding themselves huge amounts of compensations without the knowledge of more junior partners. Stewart makes it obvious that the motivation behind writing the book is personal as well as intellectual. The book acts a vehicle for catharsis, representing a repudiation of his former profession, its intellectual foundations and his former colleagues.

Much of this repudiation seems fair. But I can't help but have slight suspicion that this is a picture that is incomplete. Are consultants really just con artists reeling in unsuspecting clients or, alternatively, mere courtiers serving only the managerial component the firm? Stewart himself claims that the consulting business in Spain he set up for his firm made valuable contributions to its clients. Well, what were they doing differently? He makes detailed and, in my view, sensible recommendations as to what a better management education would look like, but there is relatively little on what a better consulting industry would be like. Is the assumption that a better education would automatically translate into a better industry? What would happen when these well-meaning graduates encounter the reality of where power lies in the modern firm? Nevertheless, this was one of the most interesting and entertaining books I have read in a while.
6 people found this helpful
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flavio cuellar
5.0 out of 5 stars Uno de los mejores
Reviewed in Mexico on September 29, 2018
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En cuanto a la calidad del material del libro, compre el de pasta blanda y las hojas son delgadas... Pero resistentes. En cuanto al autor y el contenido....excelente, uno de los mejores libros que he leído.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars This is the most outstanding counter narrative on the practice ...
Reviewed in India on August 27, 2017
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This is the most outstanding counter narrative on the practice of Management I have ever laid my hands on. Having graduated from B school myself, I can clearly see the glaring gaps in the management education ( well if you can call it that!!) of today and how the whole edifice of management stands on the botched up and antiquated theories and frameworks. This field needs an urgent reform.....
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42 elks
5.0 out of 5 stars fabulous book!
Reviewed in Germany on July 22, 2016
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Very readable, interspersed with highly amusing anecdotes of one who's lived it, very well researched, slightly depressing - wonderful book!
hmmm - is it a sign of resignation that I find it only slightly depressing?

What I enjoyed most was the chronological presentation and subsequent radical dissection of various economic/managerial theories - all you MBA students out there - throw out your text books and read this! A lot more fun and (to a cetrain way of thinking, unfortunately) a lot more substance contained within ...
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