Approaching 100 years: The damaging pseudo-science of "Management"

It has been almost 100 years now, since "Management" was instituted, formally, as a "science". The birth date is marked by the publication of Frederick W. Taylor´s landmark book "The Principles of Scientific Management", released back in 1911. In the years after its publication, Taylor´s self-proclaimed "science" was widely recognized as misleading, damaging and based on a pile of lies invented by Taylor himself. Taylor´s insights were largely discarded and proved wrong. But practice nonetheless embraced tayloristic thinking, and the thinking of other falsifying and mistaken "founders" of management, such as Elton Mayo, Igor Ansoff, Michael Porter and the likes. Their tayloristic concepts and mindsets have, in spite of their obvious an substantial flaws, strived within the realms of organizations everywhere and of "management" in general.

Taylor´s key concepts, those of division between thinkers and executers (and a still superior consultant elite) can be found in almost all organizations. The idea of functional division, another of Taylor´s pet ideas, was turned into a standard. Plan-based coordination (later embraced by the Soviet Union) is wrongly considered indispensable among most managers and in most firms and even not-for profits. Porter, Ansoff and their likes have since refined the ideas of planning and strategy in firms. Mayo and his many followers have tried to give command-and-control management a human appeal, by suggesting that through psychololical manipulation, management can optimize results, making people happier and still cling to power. And then there were the likes of Peter Drucker, wishing to justify the existence of the management caste, on moral grounds, and leading to the idea that management is a noble profession, if only you "get it right".

In the meanwhile, it doesn´t take a brilliant mind to recognize that the management myth is based on a pile of shatters. Management is a self-serving lie that has taken people world.-wide, shareholders, clients, and societies hostage of un-democratic and damaging practices. It is time to bring "Management", the "Alpha"-logic of organizations, to an end, and to replace it with a systemic, humanistic and society-serving alternative.
This is what we call Beta. Next year, 2011, would be a wonderful date to celebrate not 100 years of Management. But the end of Management.

Regards, Niels Pflaeging