Rubber Knives Have "Cutting Edges," Too

 

As my last contribution to the Cutting Edge meme for Gantthead in September, I want to examine how one particular really dopey idea has made inroads into the Management Sciences, became popular, and then kind of stuck around, despite being, well, dopey.

My target is the business fable genre in literature. Wikipedia lists the following as New York Times bestsellers in this arena:

• Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson
• The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
• The Treaveler's Gift by Andy Andrews
• Surviving Your Serengeti by Stefan Swanepoel

The point of the business fable is to assert some management science theory through fictional characters in environs both real and fictional, and – wouldn’t you just know it? – the management science theory being “tested” ends up working wonders. I believe this writing approach to be disingenuous, and in Cecil B. DeMille proportions.

Probably the most famous version of this in the Project Management realm is Eliyahu Goldratt’s Critical Chain (North River Press, 1977). In this novel the management “science” theory being propagated is essentially that resources can be transferred from non-critical path activities onto the critical path, thereby shortening the overall schedule network’s total duration. There are several problems with this idea, besides the most obvious one of what happens if the workers already assigned to the activities on the critical path are employing any specialized talents at all. A temporary excess of concrete pourers won’t, in all probability, be able to help any other team on the job site. The next biggest problem with Critical Chain is that it’s hardly original. Adding resources to a schedule network, particularly the activities on the critical path, is a trick that’s been around since the beginning of CPM scheduling. It’s called “crashing the schedule,” and every professional scheduler in the world knows it. But not the characters in Critical Chain! No, the protagonist just kind of swerves into it, and tries it out. Success and happiness follow in abundance, which it is what tends to happen in a fictional universe where a management idea is being sold.

I was actually asked by a very famous project management organization, that had its own publishing arm, to review a manuscript they were considering publishing. What I received was the management science version of Santa Clause Conquers the Martians (1964 film that is regularly included in lists of the worst movies ever produced). The manuscript followed the business fable template, but with well-known characters: Santa Clause and his elves! I swear I am not making this up. As Christmas Eve loomed, the elves were faced with production problems, supply problems, organizational behavior and performance problems … the list went on and on. Santa himself, in the role of toy production CEO, was trying his jolly best to resolve these issues, but was having little success until he began receiving anonymous notes bearing extremely cryptic bits of advice. Now, I know how dear manuscripts are to their authors, and I didn’t want to be so churlish as to let on that I thought the work was laughably bad. So, my evaluation was couched in terms like “I’m not completely confident characters that are so well-known in modern popular culture provide the most advantageous vehicle for furthering management theories of this kind.” What I wanted to say was, “Are you freakin’ kidding me? Bwa ha ha ha ha ha…”

In ancient Greece, the cradle of modern drama, there was a literary device known as Deux Ex Machina, literally, god from a machine. This device worked like this: the central conflict of the play would be introduced, and would drive the rising action towards the play’s climax. Then, when all seemed lost, one of the Greek gods would appear, “flown” in suspended from a crane. This god would use his powers to set all of the conflicts and participants aright, and the play would end. Even in ancient times, this was viewed as an extremely cheesy device, and ipso facto evidence of poor writing.

The business fable device is simply Deux Ex Machina, dressed up for a management profession crowd. The characters are introduced, the central conflict is recognized, the rising action begins. Then, when all seems lost, the management science theory is plugged in, and, voila!, everything is set aright. To get a sense of the utter absurdity of this device in the furthering of management theories, think of the reaction to a theory of surgical practice that was advanced, not through clinical trials, but through a New York Times best-seller – in fiction!  The very act of choosing that venue would render the author a laughingstock, if they were serious about advancing that particular surgical technique. But not so in “cutting edge” management. Small wonder the practitioners of the hard sciences tend to roll their eyes at the very mention of “management science.”

Back on the stage, actors react as if they have been stabbed when the prop in use is a rubber knife. But, off the stage – that is, in a non-fictional setting – rubber knives are literally (get it?) useless, “cutting edge” and all. Remember that the next time you see a business fable title on the New York Times best-seller list.