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False Prophets
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False Prophets

The Gurus Who Created Modern Management and Why Their Ideas are Bad for Business Today

James Hoopes
Perseus Books, 2003
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Editorial Rating

7

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  • Innovative

Recommendation

Despite its title, this book doesn’t say much, or much of substance, about business today. Instead, it concentrates on lively professional and personal profiles of eight twentieth century management theorists of varying impact. Hammer and Champy, who launched the 1990s re-engineering movement, are mentioned only in the conclusion, and the gurus behind managing for shareholder value aren’t mentioned. A little less detail about peccadilloes of the long dead and a little more about crucial management ideas that have shaped contemporary business might have made the book more relevant. Interestingly, it indicates that slave owners anticipated some of the progressive ideas in modern management but the author leaves it to the readers to make the connection: voila, contemporary workers believe the cant of empowerment about as much as the slaves believed the plantation master’s pieties. getAbstract.com recommends this book for its anecdotal, gossipy entertainment value. It will make you cautious about management consultants - but if you aren’t already, you can’t have spent much time in business.

Summary

The Corporate Monarchy

Americans have always been notoriously democratic, anti-authoritarian and egalitarian, yet management gurus managed to sell the country on corporate organization. How? In part, by cunningly concealing just how much raw, authoritarian power corporate organization supports, and in part by arguing that such power is, in fact, legitimate and perhaps even liberating. Paradoxically, in a society as protective of civil rights as America’s, corporations can abridge free speech, underpay, overwork, deny just raises or promotions, slant evaluations, fire at will despite good performance and otherwise lord it over employees. If the employees don’t like it, they can lump it or leave. The chief executive of even the smallest corporation has more power in his sphere than the Chief Executive of the United States in the Oval Office. No independent court, no legislative branch checks and balances the power of the corporate chief. Why do people put up with it?

For money, of course. And for status. And because there isn’t much alternative anymore. Being a corporate functionary has its advantages: inside work, no heavy lifting. But it also has its price. Even senior...

About the Author

James Hoopes is a Distinguished Professor of History at Babson College and the author of Community Denied and Consciousness in New England.

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