1456
n
Myths in management
realizes that the creeping troubles were originally triggered by the
adoption of the ISO 9000 practice a long time ago. The practice is
adopted by many rms and continues to persist, despite the fact
that everybody would be better off without it.
The same may very well be true for quite a few of our popular
governance mechanisms, the practice of excessive risk-taking, as
we saw it, in investment banking, many forms of performance
management systems, and certainly for corporate sexism, and
pin-striped suits with purple ties on a hot summer afternoon. It
is not that Darwin is wrong – and the mechanisms he discovered
do not rule our markets – it is just that they’re just as difcult to
shake off as a common cold. And they are just as annoying.
Pin-striped pigeons
Management practices, just like viruses, spread by hopping from
one rm to the next. But often, just like viruses, they get a bit of
third-party help. In the case of management practices, that third
party is often a consultant. And that is because management
consultants are a bit like rats. Or, to put it more kindly, pigeons
(referred to by the former London mayor Ken Livingstone as “rats
with wings”). They spread diseases.
I have been working for a while on a large research project which
analyzes the spread of harmful management practices (a dodgy
type of control system, faulty nancial instrument, counter-
productive management technique, etc.). As previously discussed,
one could conjecture that harmful management practices never
see the light of day (wrong) or that if they accidentally do, they
will always quickly die out and disappear (wrong again). But let
me now focus on how these harmful practices actually spread
across rms.
Yep, that’s where the pin-striped pigeons come in – OK, some
of them are rats. Because harmful management practices spread
like a virus, the pattern of how they spread among rms can
be modeled successfully using techniques from social anthro-
pology on the diffusion of harmful cultural practices (such as
..................Content has been hidden....................
You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.