Hard-Core Management

Everything You Know Is Wrong

Management isn't what it used to be. It used to be all about boring meetings, politics, low-technology, confusion and inefficiency. Now, thanks to two decades of reengineering, research and refitting, management is lean, wired, nimble, informed, intelligent, responsive and flexible. In short, like the children in radio host Garrison Keillor's fictitious hometown, Lake Wobegone, every manager is above average.

Right. You know better. Everyone working in business has probably had a bellyful of the cant about customer focus, competitiveness, technology and change. Despite all of the pious orthodoxies, vision and mission statements, business is still by and large a matter of boring meetings, nasty politics and inefficiency. It's not low tech anymore. But, far from being a cure, technology has often proven to be a curse. Managers operating in a low-technology environment had a healthy skepticism about what they knew and what they could do. Managers equipped with high technology are like teenagers behind the wheel of a performance car, too confident, too powerful, too excited and dead wrong.

In fact, progress has made business a lot tougher...