Management Speak

Why We Listen to What Management Gurus Tell Us

David Greatbatch, Timothy Clark

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134402045
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

Based on primary research into the public lectures of management gurus, this fascinating new volume analyzes how such gurus disseminate their ideas, values and visions on the international management lecture circuit. Adopting a novel conceptual/theoretical perspective, it brings together insights from the fields of management, sociology, media studies, communications and social psychology.

Written by leading figures in the field, this topical book covers such broad ranging areas as the live presentation of management ideas, using rhetoric, legitimating ideas, values and visions, the grammar of persuasion and charisma and oratory and is a valuable resource for students academics and researchers in the fields of management, sociology, and communications.

Chapter 1

Management gurus

We live in a televisual and mediated age in which communication technologies continue to proliferate and privilege indirect communication. In spite of this, live oratory remains important and significantly influences our opinions about individuals in the media spotlight. One only has to think about the amount of interest in the live debates between the two presidential candidates. In a different vein, many people will remember the shock-waves sent through Westminster Abbey and beyond when the Earl of Spencer turned on the royal family during his funeral oration for his sister Diana in 1997. In politics live speeches can still be decisive. In June 2000, the UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was slow hand-clapped, jeered and booed for a speech he gave to the Women’s Institute national conference. The speech was deemed too political for this non-political meeting. This incident was seen as symptomatic of the end of the long honeymoon period he had enjoyed since first becoming Prime Minister in 1997. In the following months his public standing fell dramatically as the press criticized him for being arrogant, overly concerned with spin and out of touch. In the run-up to the Labour Party Conference in September 2000 the newspapers were calling his keynote speech the most important of his career. The speech he delivered received an enthusiastic response from the delegates and a five-minute standing ovation. The following day the broadsheet newspapers were positively effusive as they hailed it a resounding success. By the end of 2000 his poll ratings had improved and in May 2001 he won a second election landslide. This conference speech was subsequently seen as the start of the very successful Labour General Election campaign and marked the resurgence in their popularity with voters. Tony Blair proved that, if a speaker can convince the people in the auditorium, and – crucially – impresses the journalists present, the climate of opinion can change.

These examples show that live oratory is still a powerful tool and remains an important source of the public’s perception of a politician’s image and popularity. New visual technologies rather than killing-off live political oratory have perhaps increased its importance as speakers and their messages are exposed to an audience of millions rather than thousands. Political speeches live on not just as single performances in the context in which they are given but, if they are recorded or broadcast, through their constant replaying on television. To a large extent, politicians from previous eras are remembered through the clips of their speeches that are shown to subsequent generations. Martin Luther King is forever associated with his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. President Kennedy is remembered for his speech delivered at the Berlin Wall in which he declared ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ (I am a donut). Similarly, Winston Churchill is remembered more for his war-time oratory rather than his actions as a peace-time Prime Minister.

The speeches of more recent politicians are subject to unprecedented levels of scrutiny as they are continually featured and analysed on the main news bulletins. Well-written and well-presented passages are noticed and replayed on television news programmes with the consequence that they reach a mass audience and sometimes capture their hearts and minds as they crystallize the public mood. Just as importantly for the speaker, the media audience is also reminded of their failures as gaffes and poorly received segments of their speeches are broadcast and rebroadcast repeatedly to the detriment of their public image. This means that a speaker can no longer control and restrict the audience response to just the people sitting in the auditorium. Although these speeches ostensibly retain a traditional format, their impacts have been widened from the immediate confines of the auditorium as they have become a significant input into news programmes. In the UK a party leader’s speech at the annual party conference is a major media event broadcast live on television. Similarly, in the United States a President’s inaugural speech or a candidate’s acceptance of their party’s nomination is also a significant event carried live on television. For the media audience, perceptions of how a speech is received at the time it was given can have crucial reputational consequences. Leading political figures, as perhaps never before, are therefore under enormous pressure to be skilled orators as they perform regularly in front of live audiences. In the political arena an individual’s oratorical skill is often viewed as a proxy measure of their broader abilities. It is therefore unlikely that anyone could achieve or sustain a senior position without being a technically proficient orator. It should come as no surprise that leading politicians surround themselves with speechwriters to assist in the crafting of what they hope will be well-received and high-impact speeches. This is not confined to the contemporary period since Presidents as far back as Lincoln used speechwriters.

In this book we examine another group of highly skilled and influential speakers – management gurus. These individuals are portrayed as the outstanding creators and proselytisers of purportedly innovative management ideas and techniques. As we shall discuss later in this chapter, they partly communicate their ideas to the managerial audience through writing best-selling management books. Some of the most successful include In Search of Excellence (Peters and Waterman, 1982), The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (Covey, 1989), When Giants Learn to Dance (Kanter, 1989), The Fifth Discipline (Senge, 1990) and Re-engineering the Corporation (Hammer and Champy, 1993). In addition, they disseminate their ideas on the international management lecture circuit. As perhaps the highest profile group of management speakers in the world, they use their lectures to build their personal reputations with audiences of managers. Many gain reputations as powerful orators and subsequently market recordings of their talks as parts of video-based management training packages. As the popularity of their book begins to wane their continued success on the international lecture circuit helps them to maintain their star status. Indeed, many gurus become better-known for their live performances than their books as they attract and sustain a mass live following.

Our purpose in this book is to contribute to emerging debates about the guru phenomenon by reporting the findings of a research project that developed an empirically-based understanding of gurus and their work. In doing so, we focus on their live oratory and presentations. Our main concern is to understand the intricacies of how management gurus communicate their ideas to live audiences. As we shall discuss later in this chapter, despite gurus having very different opinions on how to manage contemporary organizations, they share a number of common features. Critical is the extraordinary ability to convey their messages in live presentations to large audiences and in the process to captivate their audience members so that they feel enthused about the ideas they have just heard.

It is commonly recognized that effective public speaking is a special skill. Many people dread giving a public speech, fearing exposure to the audience’s gaze and that their shortcomings as a speaker will cause them considerable social embarrassment. Despite the plethora of self-help books, few of us ever master the ability to design and deliver a truly captivating speech. Yet we can all recognize when we have heard an inspiring public speaker. We can be pretty certain that we will not be alone in our judgements, and that others will share our opinions as to who is an effective and ineffective speaker. In part we can ascertain this from the kind of audience response a speaker receives during and after their talk. This suggests that while we may be unable to successfully imitate accomplished orators, we are nevertheless implicitly aware of the methods that underlie the delivery of a stimulating rather than a tedious speech. As we shall discuss in this book, researchers have begun to identify the verbal and non-verbal techniques that speakers deploy in order to generate a positive response from the audience. But, as we highlight, research in this area has been focused primarily on political oratory. To what extent these skills and techniques are transferable to other contexts and situations is unclear. The earlier example of Tony Blair’s speech to the Women’s Institute suggests there are limitations. Those features that characterize successful political oratory are not necessarily acceptable in other contexts.

This book therefore contributes to debates on the nature of public speaking as well as those on the role and nature of management gurus. With respect to the former, it considers whether oratorical skills are universal regardless of the context within which a speech is given. In other words, is what we presently understand to be deployed and effective within the political sphere also applicable to the management community? What skills do we need to be an effective speaker in both contexts? In terms of the latter, it asks what are the verbal and non-verbal techniques used by gurus when giving a live talk. How do they successfully communicate their messages to audiences of managers so as to receive a positive response? Overall, this book asks what underpins effective oratory in this context?

In the remainder of this chapter we begin by discussing the nature of management gurus and the reasons for their impact and popularity. We then provide an outline of the chapters to come.

What is a management guru?

The term management guru has become the label of choice when commentators discuss influential management analysts and thinkers whether they are academics, consultants or practitioners. It has not been in use that long. A thorough search of a range of electronic databases reveals that its earliest use in newspapers was an article in the UK’s Sunday Times in 1983. This coincides with the emergence of the guru phenomenon in North America in the early 1980s. With a few notable exceptions, such as Edward de Bono, Charles Handy and Kenichi Ohmae, most of the leading management gurus are American. Given this situation it is possible that certain features of American society support the development of management gurus and guru theory. These could include the focus on a dream, an idealized sense of possibility, the assumption that individuals are adaptable to a dynamic and changing future, and the relatively poor performance of American organizations in the face of (mainly) Japanese and south-east Asian competition, especially in the 1980s, and the subsequent emergence of a conviction of the inherent inadequacy, even dangers, of modern US management techniques and the need to (re)discover (borrow) previous principles of organization.

In the first academic study of management gurus Huczynski (1993) argued that ‘guru theory’ is the latest in a series of management idea families that have established themselves in the consciousness of academics, consultants and practitioners during the twentieth century. The earlier families included Bureaucracy, Scientific Management, Administrative Management, Human Relations, and Neo-Human Relations. Guru theory, although a diverse collection of apparently unconnected writings, involves the presentation of ambitious claims to transform managerial practice and organizational performance, often through the recommendation of an almost magical cure that ‘reinterprets’ the organization, its employees, their relationships, attitudes and behaviour. Much guru theory can be explained in terms of a project that contributes productively to the problems of organizational management, particularly the management of new forms of organization, by making the informal, the irrational, the intuitive, the emotional, the cultural, manageable. It is argued that these aspects can be legitimately and effectively managed. Peters and Waterman (1982), for example, are quite clear about this:

what our framework has done is to remind the world of professional managers that ‘soft is hard’ … It has enabled us to say, in effect, ‘All that stuff you have been dismissing for so long as the intractable, irrational, intuitive, informal organization can be managed.

(Peters and Waterman, 1982: 11)

For Huczynski (1993: 38) guru theory is also distinctive because each idea ‘relies for its authorization upon the individual who developed and popularized it’. The credibility of the idea is related to the perceived legitimacy of its author and this stems in large part from the source of their ideas. He therefore identifies three types of management guru: 1) ‘academic gurus’, 2) ‘consultant gurus’ and 3) ‘hero managers’. The first group are generally located within a small number of world-renowned business schools (London, Harvard, Sloan, Stamford and so forth) and are exemplified by such people as Charles Handy, Gary Hamel, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Michael Porter and Peter Senge. The second group is composed of independent advisers, writers and commentators and includes the likes of Peter Drucker, Michael Hammer and Tom Peters. The final group is comprised of successful and high-profile senior managers who either write a book based on their approach and experience of management or are featured in a book devoted to understanding their success. In the first type of book, managers are seeking to pass on their experiences to other managers. Notable examples include John Harvey Jones, Lee Iacocca, Luis Gerstner, Alfred P. Sloan, Donald Trump and Jack Welch. In the second type of book, a non-authorized biographer seeks to identify the factors accounting for their subject’s success. The individuals featured in these books, such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, continue to manage and do not participate on the international management lecture circuit. Rather, their public speaking activities are limited to settings which promote their business activities rather than a management idea.

Despite differences in the backgrounds of individual gurus they nevertheless share three common characteristics: they are purveyors of management fashion, authors of best-selling books and accomplished orators. We discuss each of these features in the remainder of this section.

Guru ideas are fashionable

Gurus are purveyors of management fashion. The popularity of their ideas waxes and wanes as they evolve through a series of discrete stages:

1 invention, when the idea is initially created;

2 dissemination, when the idea is initially brought to the attention of its intended audience;

3 acceptance, when the idea becomes implemented;

4 disenchantment, when negative evaluations and frustrations with the idea emerge; and

5 decline, or the abandonment of the idea (Gill and Whittle, 1993).

A plethora of empirical studies have examined the diffusion patterns of a range of fashionable guru-led discourses within the print media. Using citation analysis the number of references to a particular idea in a sequence of years are counted and plotted in order to identify the life cycle of a fashionable management idea.¹ The results of these studies demonstrate that the life-cycles of a number of fashionable management ideas are characterized by an initial period in which the frequency of citations increases, peaks and then declines; although the shapes of the curves for different ideas are not necessarily identical nor symmetrical (i.e. they do not necessarily rise and fall at the same rate) and vary between countries (Abrahamson and Fairchild, 1999; Benders and van Veen, 2001; Spell, 1999, 2001; Gibson and Tesone, 2001). Furthermore, while the life spans of recent management fashions are considerably shorter than those for ideas that came to prominence in earlier periods, their peaks are much higher. Carson et al. (2000: 1152) show that the period of time between the introduction of a fashionable management idea or technique and the peak in its popularity has fallen from a mean of 14.8 years in the 1950s to 1970s, to 7.5 years in the 1980s and to 2.6 years in the 1990s.²

Abrahamson (1996: 256) notes that management fashions are ‘the product of a management-fashion-setting process involving particular management fashion setters – organizations and individuals who dedicate themselves to producing and disseminating management knowledge’. Management gurus are therefore part of a management knowledge arena, the other members of which are typically identified as consulting firms, business schools and management academics and publishers (see also Ernst and Kieser, 2002; Suddaby and Greenwood, 2001).³ This group of knowledge entrepreneurs is concerned with the creation, fabrication and dissemination of ideas and techniques to the managerial audience. A range of commentators has noted that they are in a ‘race’ to sense consumers’ emergent collective preferences for new techniques. They either thrive or falter depending on their ability to identify and satiate inchoate needs. They have to articulate why it is imperative that consumers should pursue certain organizational goals and why their particular technique offers the best means to achieve these goals (Abrahamson, 1996; Kieser, 1997). Gurus’ success is therefore dependent on their ability to create a shared sense of which management techniques are state-of-the-art and are likely to meet the most immediate needs of the managerial audience.

Best-selling books

Gurus are the authors of best-selling management books. These books have perhaps been the publishing phenomenon of the last 20 years. Prior to the publication of In Search of Excellence management books were deemed unfashionable and a minority interest. They rarely sold in large quantities and never in the millions. There were modest hits which included, for example, The Organization Man (Whyte, 1957), Parkinson’s Law (Parkinson, 1957), My Years with General Motors (Sloan, 1964) and Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (Drucker, 1974). But the sales generated by the best-sellers of the 1980s and 1990s were of a different order of magnitude to these earlier books. In Search of Excellence sold 122,000 copies in the first two months of publication. Within one year it had sold more copies than any other book except the Living Bible in 1972 and 1973. The book has sold more than five million copies world-wide. Stephen Covey’s book Seven Habits spent four years on the New York Times best-seller list and has sold more than six million copies world-wide. Hammer and Champy’s book Reengineering the Corporation has sold over two and a half million copies to date and was for a time the ‘management’s world’s most fashionable fad’ (Lorenz, 1993).

The success of In Search of Excellence, and subsequently a number of other titles, has raised the profile of the genre as a whole and resulted in management books enjoying a more prominent position in bookshops and a broader readership. These books have become an essential companion for thousands of business travellers with the consequence that they are heavily promoted with floor-to-ceiling displays at airport bookshops. Indeed, they account...