At 05:29 PM 2/16/98 -0600, you wrote:
>I am having a bit of a battle at my company with a manager who is a
>Druckerite over plans to bring "management by objective" (Drucker's
>phrase) and other kindred intellectual frauds to manage our software
>development group. I picked up Drucker's *Management* (Harper
>Collins, 1974) and it is a disaster. He's firmly in the heroic
>business history camp (along with the likes of Alfred Chandler), and
>his book is a mishmash of sloppy, romantic, and one-sided history,
>along with vacuous and cliche'd pronouncements about teamwork, the
>virtuous role of the manager, human nature, etc.
>
>Has anybody written a good anti-Drucker that I might make use of
>(critical reviews, perhaps)? I'm trying to convince my partner that
>we need a cooperative worker-managed approach, without leaders and/or
>managers. I've tried (unsuccessfully so far) to order Food First's
>book on democratic planning in Kerala India, but I'd also like to make
>use of some work that has looked critically at Druckerite management
>practices (I presume he, along with most other Western managerial
>thinkers, traces his intellectual lineage back to Taylor and
>scientific management?).
Since I didn't see your message yesterday and you're meeting with Da Boss
today, I'm not sure how useful this will be, but here are a couple of
thoughts.
a) First off, hasn't Drucker himself rejected his earlier work? I'm pretty
sure that he dumped MBO. I didn't know that anyone outside of the public
sector, where people tend to be slow about catching up on management fads,
used the term "management by objectives" anymore. Certainly it's old
enough that the term doesn't appear in Eileen Shapiro's "Fad Surfer's
Dictionary of Business Basics." So your first line of defense ought to be
to ask him, "didn't that die out back in the 70s with __________ (insert
your favorite dinosaur mainframe system or language)?" If you sneer at it
as something that was already stale and old several years ago, the other
programmers ought to be unanimous in junking it.
b) I think in Tom DeMarco's _Why Does Software Cost So Much?_, he has an
essay on the problem with software metrics where in passing he ridicules
management by objective as a disaster in the field of software.
Unfortunately, I can't find my copy this morning, but I do remember him
saying that MBO was a real turkey, that it led people to do lots of work
that wasn't useful but did fit the "objectives".
c) Unless your boss is a lefty, I doubt very much that the example of
Kerala (or Mondragon) is going to move him very much. A better bet is all
the BS about the "empowerment of teams." Some of the ideas in that lit.
are actually pretty decent, at least for a mainstream business fad, and in
a few places it's had reasonably impressive results. On the factory floor,
it's been used as a way of sneaking in a speedup, but in software
development, I think there are enough tools out there to spike that danger
(e.g., methods for estimating how long a software project is really going
to take, no matter how much your manager wants it done in half the time).
The best thing about "empowering teams" is that almost never goes anywhere,
because no company really wants to give power, however slight, to their
workers.
d) Another good defensive strategy is to say, if we're going to start
talking about new ways of running our software shop, let's take a serious
look at the "best practices" that have been developed in the field of
managing software development. NASA spent oodles of money playing with
project management experiments, and some of their recommendations are
pretty decent: at the very least, they make the life of programmers a
little more sane. So, you could say to your boss, before we start with a
new management system, let's do a systematic, thorough review of what's
been done and what actually works--what's saved companies time and money
(blah, blah, blah). At the very least, this oughta slow him down until you
can maneuver towards a slightly more sane outcome.
Anders Schneiderman
Progressive Communications
P.S. At least your boss isn't pursuing what a buddy of mine's boss has
landed upon: Planning by Doing (oy!).
