The MIT Sloan Management Review brings out every quarter a
compendium of ideas, opinions and research on the precepts and
practices of management and their application to real life
situations. Whoever closely follows the contents over a period is
bound to notice the repetitive nature of the topics handled in these
compilations. Not only do the topics selected have some sort of a
cyclical shelf-life, but the propositions advanced are also not
stunningly original, although couched in different words and
phrases, constituting a corpus of the same concepts going by
different nomenclature, at different times.
Indeed, authors on management compulsively go to great lengths in
performing verbal antics or semantic acrobatics to maintain a look
of freshness, erudition and even a revolutionary discovery and to
avoid giving the impression of working with a limited repertoire.
Since management falls between the two stools of both art and
science, anything goes, and no harm is done whether you act on the
prescriptions or totally ignore them.
Human beings being what they are, regimenting them to behave all the
time undeviatingly in the manner laid down by the management gurus
is next to impossible. Human nature will, and does, assert itself,
regardless of all the nostrums flying about. Alexander Pope, of all
persons, saw this coming a couple of centuries before F. W. Taylor,
the father of the so-called `scientific management' by his ringing
assertion: "For forms of government, let fools contest; whate'er is
best administered is best"! Replace `government' by `management',
and you will get the drift of all that I have been saying so far.
Happily, there is nothing inscrutable about management mantras.
Being imitative of familiar coinages in the scientific or
psychological domain, or reminiscent of usages in common parlance,
they are easily comprehensible, although at times they may seem far-
fetched or outlandish.
I want to take as an example a recent article ``The Seven Deadly
Sins of Performance Measurement (and How To Avoid Them)'' by Michael
Hammer, Visiting Professor of Engineering Systems at MIT and the
Fellow of Said Business School at Oxford University.
`Widespread malaise'
Performance measurement suited to the different areas of activity —
manufacturing, procurement, marketing, sales, negotiations,
investment, customer `delight' and the like — of an enterprise has
always been a tricky undertaking, since there are so many subjective
elements and other intangibles vitiating it.
So, when the learned professor offered to identify the seven deadly
sins committed while devising and using what he calls `the metrics',
I was excusably agog.
But scarcely had I waded through the preamble, when I found myself
struggling knee-deep in a swamp of what was being held out as the
symptoms, tantamount to sins, of a `widespread malaise'.
I enumerate the seven sins with a summary of the author's annotation
so that you may judge for yourself whether they add up to anything
substantive: Vanity (measures intended to make the managers look
good); provincialism (preoccupation with organisational boundaries);
narcissism (`unpardonable offence' of measuring from one's point of
view, you may well ask whose else's?); laziness (assuming one knows
what is important to measure without giving it adequate thought or
effort); pettiness (measuring only a small component of what
matters); inanity (implementation unmindful of consequences on human
behaviour and enterprise performance, whatever that means); and
frivolity (`the most serious sin', unpardonable or not, is not
clear, of not being serious about measurement in the first place.)
Are you any the wiser? Well, it does not matter, if you aren't. As I
said, such lather does no damage. In fact, it helps to while away
the time without mental strain.
B. S. RAGHAVAN
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