“If we put all of their heads together, the great management thinkers at the end of the day give us the same, simple, and true answer,” writes Matthew Stewart in his thought-provoking book, The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting It Wrong (W.W. Norton & Co., 2009). This is his answer:

“A good manager is someone with a facility for analysis and an even greater talent for synthesis; someone who has an eye both for the details and for the one big thing that really matters; someone who is able to reflect on facts in a disinterested way, who is always dissatisfied with pat answers and the conventional wisdom, and who therefore takes a certain pleasure in knowledge itself; someone with a wide knowledge of the world and an even better knowledge of the way people work; someone who knows how to treat people with respect; someone with honesty, integrity, trustworthiness, and the other things that make up character; someone, in short, who understands oneself and the world around us well enough to know how to make it better. By this definition, of course, a good manager is nothing more or less than a good and well-educated person.”

A former management consultant, Stewart questions the value of a business school education and the validity of management consultant’s theories in helping leaders and their organizations succeed. While he takes dead aim at such luminaries as Taylor, Drucker, and Peters, he ignores gurus like Juran and Deming who helped define total quality management and, through their work, the Baldrige model. The difference, it seems, is that Juran and Deming stuck to what the data and information told them worked while the others presented grand theories as inimitable truths that every organization should embrace.

Either that, or Juran and Deming escaped Stewart’s scrutiny because they lacked the notoriety of Taylor, Drucker, and Peters.

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