Stan Glaser Professor of Marketing, MacQuarie University, Sydney, Australia
Management Duckspeak deutsche Übersetzung
Argues that much management terminology is, in George Orwell’s words, “duckspeak”, nonsensical noises which have nothing to do with business issues, and which debase and block out useful thought. Illustrates with examples such as shareholder value management, TQM and benchmarking.
As he watched the face with the jaw moving rapidly up and down, Winston had a curious feeling that this was not a real human being but some kind of a dummy. It was not the man’s brain that was speaking, it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck. There’s a word in Newspeak said Syme, I don’t know whether you know it: duckspeak (1984, George Orwell)
Some years ago a cynic said that you can trace a country’s economic decline from the time management books started to appear on the shelves. While this may be unduly pessimistic it does bring us to one of the great paradoxes of education – management education included. It is both liberating and restricting. So if we turn to philosophical issues for a moment, education should be like a torch in Plato’s cave. As we move through the cave it becomes apparent that the reality we thought we saw is just shadows. Unfortunately much of education is like a mirror. It is used to reflect spectres, not to explore reality. Our behaviour as human beings is governed by complex sets of rules. Within organizations these rules are codified by procedures manuals. And within the normal flow of human interaction language plays a major part in communicating these rules, giving us permission to undertake some behaviours and avoid doing others. Unfortunately a lot of management thinking is coloured by what philosophers call the doctrine of misplaced concreteness. What this means, very simply, is that sometimes we make the mistake of thinking that because something can be named or described it actually has an existence. Or because there is a new way of describing something we may think that the new description reflects a new phenomenon. Management tends to be afflicted with this disease. And I call it a disease quite deliberately because in some cases it can debilitate and destroy an organization. Even august commentators like Peter Drucker have commented that “no one is more fashion-conscious than executives”. Give them a new catchphrase and there is a tendency to think that this will represent some real course of action that will do to the organization what penicillin did to venereal disease. What I’d like to do is to deal briefly with these fads and fashions. Some are relatively harmless and trivial, others more serious because they do have the potential to drive organizations into a terminal spiral. Let me start with the latter. We have moved into an era of accountability. This is reflected in marketplace initiatives directed at improving customer service, the popularity of ethics programmes for managers, the clear recognition of fiduciary responsibilities and in the explicit emergence of the shareholder as a key stakeholder in the organization. These are, of course, only a few examples. I have no quarrel with the latter but its more extreme operational manifestation is in the application of value-based management in organizations. Most simply put, the concept has at its core notions of investments or courses of action which are value-creating and valuedestroying. And the notion of value is linked back to shareholder value. How does one calculate value? The answer is with great difficulty. An inevitable consequence of attempts to make these estimates is that the organization is tied up in knots simply trying to get the data. And if we then want to take on the strategic link (i.e. what do we have to do to be value creating?) the management issues which flow from this question are overwhelmed by dividend, not strategic, considerations. The link between shareholder value and strategy is well nigh impossible to make. But more profoundly, what is built into the concept are accounting considerations which discourage investment and innovation. Which is why, if one looks at Japanese management thinking, the notion of managing for shareholder value alone is considered so quaint and nonsensical it gets dismissed in a sentence or two. Another fad, which is less pernicious but probably sillier is the concept of total quality management. Drucker stated his views fairly pithily. “TQM”, he said, “is for morons”. Harsh words, indeed. But what drove Drucker to reach this conclusion? Let me suggest two reasons. The first is the notion of “quality management” implies that quality is a specialized or somehow peculiar part of an organization’s functioning. As such it must be managed in ways that are characteristically “different”. This, in my view, is plainly nonsense. An organization is precisely what the term denotes. An integration of parts. Indeed if you look at the relationship between quality and the overall functioning of an organization what you find is what you would expect to find. Organizations which function well as entities have “good” quality; where organization functioning is inadequate, poor quality follows. Hence it is not surprising that TQM found its natural home in the mass production system. To be fair to the TQM adherents this was precisely the task for which it was designed. But managers, in their quest for the holy grail, in the early days of its use saw it as the universal panacea. Let me say, that in management there is no such thing. Of course, this spills over to another current fad – benchmarking. I don’t rush to add the usual appendix “for best international practice” because it tends to promote a retching response. In the sense that the concept encourages organizations to be efficient and competitive it is relatively harmless. And in so far as it encourages an organization to get data about its performance it is also relatively innocuous. But is it any more than organizations have been doing since Adam and Eve saw their inventory of apples reduce? And do data have any meaning at all unless they are comparative? Even wrapping grandiosity around this activity, like the management speciality now known as competitive intelligence, is simply a reflection of mankind’s natural proclivity to find things out. Of course, given one has the data the real question is what does it mean and how do you get to a different set of numbers if you deem that necessary. And this leads us into the whole murky area of strategy. Let us look at some of the more popular uses. We speak of human resource strategies like “downsizing”. Or corporate strategies like “sticking to the core business” or “sticking to the knitting”, “differentiation” so the organization does not get “stuck in the middle”, “niching” strategies and so on. The notion of strategy has some fundamental considerations implicit. The first is time. A strategy implies a reasonably long time horizon. Why? Because strategy only makes sense when it is viewed in relation to the broader environment, including the other players in that environment. That is, the issue of how I move in relation to these forces and my further moves in response to their reaction to me is critical. Otherwise it is simply a statement of things to do, nothing more. So to dignify these shopping lists with the word strategy seems unduly generous. You might think that this is carping, simply a word game. But it is part of that complex with which clinicians are well acquainted – the syndrome we can call the fruit salad of managerial delusion. Because managers have a list of things to do, their shopping list, there is the tendency to think that they actually have a strategy in place. The notion of strategy is difficult to conceptualize and even more difficult to put into practice. It requires people to throw off history, the way it was done, and think divergently. This in turn means that the organization allows them this freedom. Now we are not in the business of holding up mirrors. But the reality is that only a very few brave-hearted managers will enjoy being confronted by the corpse of their mistakes. So the reality is that formulating strategy is difficult and may involve significant psychological costs to key players in the organization. Managers must resist the delusion that an action plan is a strategic plan. Shopping lists remind you what you want to buy. They do not tell you whether these are the things that are good for you or what you should buy in the future. And what is the evidence for the strategic nostrums which have been advocated? For example, is being caught in the middle a bad thing that organizations should avoid? If we look at the evidence, the answer is “no”. Take, for example, Marks & Spencer in the UK. And does the precept of sticking to the core business hold water? Again, the answer is firmly negative. The Swire group, an incredibly diverse conglomerate is a telling example. The obvious question is if the evidence is negative how does this sort of strategic direction become incorporated into the management bible? Let me suggest two reasons. The first is that management uncritically accept these assertions as facts. Underlying this uncritical acceptance is management’s strong tendency to look at the shadows and an unwillingness, in the main, to carry the torch. And second, this seems to reflect a belief that management is a set of techniques to be learnt and applied rather than a process to be managed. This means that management is about steering continuous adaptations of the organization to its environment. Because the environment always presents new challenges, texts on business strategy should be regarded as history books. They will always be outlining a rapidly fading wisdom. So what is to be done? Well, I can’t do better than proffer the advice of Thomas Watson, the founder of IBM. THINK. Which brings me my final point. If we accept that management is about continuous adaptation, the resource to accomplish this is people. This, of course, is blazingly obvious. Let me state something which should also be quite apparent. If this is the mechanism by which the manager achieves this adaptation why do we have human resource departments, human resource managers? Why is this seen as some sort of discrete organizational function when it should be a cardinal managerial facility? George Orwell long ago coined the phrase Newspeak to describe the way in which governments try to massage our perception of political issues. Let me finish on a few examples of management newspeak, or management duckspeak: • 360 degree feedback – people talking to each other; • empowerment – asking people to do things; • the learning organization – claptrap.