The End of Management

In The End of Management, writer Alan Murray describes the shortcomings of traditional corporate management.

Among other things, traditional management has an incentive to maintain the status quo, possibly mis-allocating capital and missing new opportunities (under- or not investing in new, disruptive technologies, for example).

Business guru Peter Drucker called management "the most important innovation of the 20th century." It was well-justified praise. Techniques for running large corporations, pioneered by men like Alfred Sloan of General Motors and refined at a bevy of elite business schools, helped fuel a century of unprecedented global prosperity.

But can this great 20th century innovation survive and thrive in the 21st? Evidence suggests: Probably not. "Modern" management is nearing its existential moment.

~snip~

The reasons for this are clear enough. Corporations are bureaucracies and managers are bureaucrats. Their fundamental tendency is toward self-perpetuation. They are, almost by definition, resistant to change. They were designed and tasked, not with reinforcing market forces, but with supplanting and even resisting the market.

There are more examples (and a few counter-examples) in the article. It's worth a read, and not just because I liked the title and what it implies: that the traditional model of management, in which management is necessary in order to control and guide workers, appears to be well on its way to obsolescence.

Good riddance.