Name: The management myth
ISBN: 9780393065534

The management myth

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…

What Hacker News says

jfilMay 2026

I recomment reading "The Management Myth" by Matthew Stewart, on this topic

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PropelloniMar 2026

Modern self-help is as much a sham as are management gurus, which is no surprise because they overlap. Who cannot recall "Start with why?" or the "7 habits of highly effective people"? They play on your insecurities and promise silver bullets. If they don't work it is because you are, of course, deficient. You need another self-help book or follow this guy on Insta. Indulging all this self-help stuff is just another form of procrastination, instead of doing it you talk and read about doing it. It's just like learning Org-mode (no offense) to be better organized instead of, you know, organizing.

My waking call was, ironically, another management book "The Management Myth" by Matthew Steward (I think), which just showed me the ridiculousness of it all.

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itamarstMar 2021

Taylor's most famous story (Schmidt and the pig iron) was... mostly made up.

https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/1556350

Hawthorne effect... was also made up.

> But only five workers took part in the study, Dr. Ross said, and two were replaced partway through for gross insubordination and low output. > > A psychology professor at the University of Michigan, Dr. Richard Nisbett calls the Hawthorne effect ''a glorified anecdote.''

(https://www.nytimes.com/1998/12/06/weekinreview/scientific-m...)

I learned both these facts from the highly entertaining "The Management Myth": https://mwstewart.com/books/the-management-myth/

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factsaresacredApr 2018

Anybody who found this interesting will like 'The Management Myth':

> The thing that makes modern management theory so painful to read isn’t usually the dearth of reliable empirical data. It’s that maddening papal infallibility. Oh sure, there are a few pearls of insight, and one or two stories about hero-CEOs that can hook you like bad popcorn. But the rest is just inane.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/06/the-man...

And previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11931270

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pinewurstOct 2015

I was "blessed" enough to see one of their engagements - the young Bob and Bob McKinseys. So much money, so little results.

Which prompts me to recommend my favorite book on management consulting, the life, the legends, the myths:

http://www.amazon.com/Management-Myth-Debunking-Business-Phi...

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jacques_chesterNov 2014

Matthew Stewart's The Management Myth[1] is a pretty brutal autobiography of "strategy consulting".

A key insight is the role of business school theorists, particularly Michael Porter.

Porter essentially looked over the fence at economics, saw what the economists introduce as the bad behaviours and outcomes of monopolists, then taught that as behaviour to be emulated.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002PQ7B72/

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