Confronting Managerialism
100% recommend
Why HN recommends it
Argues that American business culture and its elite schools have distorted management and society. Its critique of managerial thinking is eye-opening and useful for anyone questioning how businesses are run.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Confronting Managerialism offers a scathing critique of the crippling influence of neoclassical economics and modern finance on business school teaching and management practice. It shows how business managers, once well regarded as custodians of the economic engine driving growth and social progress, now seem more like the rapacious "robber barons" of the 1880s. Confronting Managerialism is a unique, topical, and controversial look at a subject that impacts us all.
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…have a "manager" who is somewhat business agnostic I now see this as a piece of a self-justifying ideology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managerialism A while back I read an eye-opening book called "Confronting Managerialism: How the Business Elite and Their Schools Threw Our Lives Out of Balance". [1] They see US-style management as a primarily a caste system. One of the odd things about business in the US is that most…
on “Management theory is becoming a compendium of dead ideas” ↗…notion of bullshit jobs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs [1] E.g.: https://hbr.org/2018/03/is-lack-of-competition-strangling-th... [2] This is a good book on the topic: https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Ec...
on “The U.S. productivity slowdown: an economy-wide and industry-level analysis” ↗For the background and how things go wrong, you might enjoy the book "Confronting Managerialism" by Spender and Locke. The Lean folks also have a lot of good critiques. A book that sticks in my mind is "Simple Excellence: Organizing and Aligning the Management Team in a Lean Transformation", but…
on “Managers, not workers, are losing jobs to AI and robots: study” ↗…shareholders at large, a specific shareholder group, the board? They often have different interests, and recruit or are looking to recruit agents for them. For the consultant? Whoever pays! I found the book "Confronting managerialism: How the business elite and their schools threw our lives out of balance" by Locke and Spencer quite useful to understand some of the realities at play (not specifically consulting, but the broader managerial…
on “McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source” ↗…then I saw your book recommendation and chuckled, “Of course!” What an important book. Here’s a purchase link (non-affiliate but the URL that donates to your selected cause): https://smile.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-...
on “McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source” ↗This guy slightly missed the mark. The clerical class have evolved into the management class. Their religion is supply side macroeconomics. If you like N. Taleb's fooled by randomness the book "confronting managerialism" by Locke & Spencer is a great followup.
on “Accountancy Is the Priesthood of Modern Life (2020)” ↗…establish dominance. "Fair" is irrelevant; even "well run" is secondary to keeping the caste system in place. If you're interested in the nature and history of this, you might see if your library has the book Confronting Managerialism: http://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Eco...
on “HN: I was fired today, is this even legal?” ↗On the same topic, I absolutely recommend reading "Confronting Managerialism: How the Business Elite and Their Schools Threw Our Lives Out of Balance" by Robert R. Locke and J.-C. Spender. https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Ec...
on “Bulldoze the business school” ↗…facilitates the real Ponzi scheme of getting paid today on tomorrow's bill. Sort of tangential, but if you find this article whatever combination of interesting or eye-opening, you may want to read Locke's Confronting Managerialism. (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11532185-confronting-man...)
on “Why is this idiot running my engineering org?” ↗Exactly. And if you're curious what this says, I'd recommend reading Spender and Locke's "Confronting Managerialism". It's a great look at the dominant ideology of MBA-style management. And for me Rother's "Toyota Kata" was a good inspiration as to how to think of management not as control layer, but where teaching…
on “Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?” ↗I'd suggest you read about managerialism, our reigning business paradigm. Spender and Locke's "Confronting Managerialism" really opened my eyes. If you think of management's purpose as making the business better, there's a lot that doesn't make sense. But it gets clearer if you think of it as caste dedicated to both individual…
on “No, we won’t have a video call for that” ↗…work relates to developing, maintaining, and enforcing The Plan. But this is so much the dominant paradigm that it's hard for many to even imagine alternatives. A good book here is Spender & Locke's "Confronting Managerialism": https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Ec... So it may be that even if the future depended on it, build times could not be reduced because it's paradigmatically impossible. For basically…
on “Nuclear power is too slow” ↗…The Plan fits in well with a managerial upper caste, because it lets them take credit for the successes and blame others for the failures. If you haven't read it, you might enjoy Locke and Spender's "Confronting Managerialism".
on “Drift towards danger and the normalization of deviance (2017)” ↗…I learned functional programming: I had never really thought about the rest of programming, its philosophy and value system. I was soaking in it, so I didn't need to. The book that got me going was "Confronting Managerialism", but I'm sure there's a fair bit more out there these days: https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Ec...
on “A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools” ↗One book I found really interesting on this theme is "Confronting Managerialism: How the Business Elite and Their Schools Threw Our Lives Out of Balance": https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00A76WZ96/ Core to their point is that managers have basically become a caste. They define managerialism…
on “Elon Musk Decries ‘M.B.A.-ization’ of America” ↗