Business School Crap

As a part time management consultant it is perhaps heresy for me to suggest the teachings of business schools could be described as crap, but I do think business men and women should view with suspicion some of the latest thinking emanating from business academia.  Why do I say this?  Well throughout my own business career I was an instant convert to many of the various business fads, tools and techniques that were vogue at the time, including Boston Consulting Group Matrix, Total Quality Management, Lean and Agile Manufacturing, Balanced Scorecards, Business Process Re-engineering, Best Demonstrated Practice, Value Stream Mapping........to name but a few.  Looking back, I realise now that I suffered from the indoctrination and therefore the businesses that I was part of, or later in my career running, could have suffered too.  That's not to say that managers shouldn't be analytical and some tools, including those mentioned above, can help to gain a better understanding of  business performance and develop strategies.  But it is important not to get carried away with a simplistic approach to business strategy that many protagonists recommend.

Any business is a complex chaotic system that has no predictability.  Also, because it is a system, it contains a daunting web of interdependencies, both internal to the organisation and external to customers, suppliers and the rest of the global community.  The internal dependencies are difficult to influence and impossible to control.  The external interdependencies are even more remote.  Now the business school solutions to these complex problems are often based on subdivision, breaking down the internal organisation into units, divisions and departments, whilst creating neat sub-contract-driven supply chains to 'control' the outside world.  I'm not saying that this is not the way to try to bring some sort of control and certainty to an uncontrollable and uncertain business environment.  But the mistake is to believe such a structure, together with a few business improvement techniques thrown in, is the panacea for success........it ain't!  In my opinion, it doesn't matter how many case studies you review, there are not common threads for success, or conversely, for failure.

I ask myself, if I'm not happy with what's on offer at business schools right now, then what am I proposing?  Well I believe that the talent we all need to develop throughout our lives is thinking.  We have to be able to apply different types of thinking to situations and in the complex world of business, there is rarely a formulaic approach.  It is also dangerous to become too obsessed with both measuring things that have happened and applying measurements to things that have yet to happen.  Let me explain with an example.  I like to watch the UK BBC programme 'Dragons' Den'.  This is where budding entrepreneurs present business cases to proven entrepreneurs (the Dragons) to try to get investment by one or more Dragons into their businesses.  The Dragons will inevitably explore 'the numbers', i.e. the sales and profit to date and the projected sales and profit usually over the next three years.  If the budding entrepreneurs don't understand, or worse still don't know, their numbers they will be crucified by the Dragons.  Whereas if they present a good set of numbers, they get a big tick in the box.  But in reality, the past numbers are history and the future numbers are pie in the sky.  There is generally an obsession with profit but in the words of Peter Senge:

"Profit for a company is like oxygen for a person....unfortunately most businesses operate as if their purpose is breathing."

So in my opinion, understanding business is part of understanding life, because each business is a sub system within life's system.  Now to get from that level to tangible day-to-day actions to improve business performance, will not unfortunately lead to self-contained simplistic processes.  There might be some simple processes  but they cannot be viewed in isolation of the whole.  You might create the most efficient typewriter factory on the planet, but if the world has moved on from typewriters and doesn't use them anymore, you have wasted your time and money.

Now if you have read this blog post and ended up confused, I am not surprised.  I haven't attempted to answer any questions but merely to issue a health warning on the misuse of management fads.  There are no standard prescriptions for business success and in the words of Dr Deming:

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"Improvement is a process, and not a pill.