Deconstructing Management Maxims, Volume I

Kevin Wayne

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781631576478
• eBook ISBN: 9781631576485
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

A contrarian challenge to the status quo, this book vigorously champi­ons healthy skepticism in management theory and practice. Several com­mon management maxims — often taken for granted as truisms — are examined and debunked with evidence-based arguments. The constant repetition of these flawed tropes perpetuates their mythological status and limits personal and organizational performance. Far from a business as usual business book, Deconstructing Manage­ment Maxims has been researched with academic rigor yet written in an approachable style. Unafraid of taking on conventional business wisdom, it contains some controversial yet substantiated positions that will pro­voke critical thinking and debate. After all, sacred cows and long-believed tenets of management lore do not go away quietly. A clear message from this book is that you don't have to believe everything you read or hear—be it in the classroom or at work! It offers a refreshing break from the constant drumbeat of dronish corporate and academic clichés. This book is best appreciated by readers wanting to think critically about important management phenomena.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Deconstructing Management Maxims

It’s partly true, too, but it isn’t all true. People always think something’s all true.

—J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Thoughtful people mull over inconsistencies.

—Malcolm Gladwell

Tidy absolutes and truisms have always been problematic for those of us afflicted with healthy skepticism. However, if presented with objective data and other credible evidence, I’ll drop my guard and embrace the occasional maxim, aphorism, proverb, carbon-dated factoid, or immutable law of physics or chemistry. For instance, I don’t question that under normal conditions the freezing temperature and boiling point of water are, respectively, 0°C and 100°C, or that force equals mass times acceleration (F=ma), or the principle of Boyle’s Law (the volume of a gas varies inversely with the applied pressure).

But in the less precise realms of management and the behavioral sciences, it is unsettling to hear business people confidently dispense phrase-length wisdom that makes a Twitter post read like a Tolstoy novel. The impetus for this book stems from repeatedly witnessing common business axioms incorrectly presented as truisms. Many of these mendacious sayings have transcended our business lexicon by jumping species from management speak to the mundane language of our larger culture.

We casually drop these literary jewels to emphasize key points, using them as evidence to win closing arguments. It is often evidence with no backbone, such as these maxim-inspired assertions: It’s no wonder your business failed, you didn’t have a mission statement! And, If you had a business plan, you would have known what to do when the market shifted! Or, how about, Treat your customers right and they will be loyal. These absurd claims are representative of the general beliefs that mission statements are akin to oxygen for organizations, that a business plan is a ticket to entering a competitive market, and customer bliss is all you have to worry about to be successful. However, none of these statements are close to being a universal truth. At the root of these flawed exclamations are seemingly harmless maxims. For example, the guilty maxims for the assertions mentioned above are, respectively: Mission statements are a must; Business plans are required for entrepreneurial success; and the royally dubious decree of Customer is king.

The intent of this book is to debunk several sayings that I believe are the worst offenders when it comes to pretending to be global truths, when in fact they are often wrong even when presented as harmless suppositions. For starters, I refer to these pearls of business pseudo wisdom simply as management maxims, and often more succinctly as maxims. A maxim may be defined as a “general truth, fundamental principle, or rule of conduct . . . a proverbial saying.”¹ Even the great Aristotle weighed in on maxims, advocating:

One great advantage of maxims to a speaker is due to the want of intelligence in his hearers, who love to hear him succeed in expressing as a universal truth the opinions which they hold themselves about particular cases. . . . and people love to hear stated in general terms what they already believe in some particular connexion. . . . There is character in every speech in which the choice is conspicuous; and maxims always produce this effect, because the utterance of them amounts to a general declaration of what should be chosen; so that, if the maxims are sound, they display the speaker as a man of sound character.²

Apparently even back in ancient Greece it was commonly thought, “We hear what we want to hear.” Similarly, management practitioners become conditioned to the general belief systems and lingo of their particular disciplines. Author Chris Mowles, in Rethinking Management, alludes to a form of managerial peer pressure, warning of a “universal and dominant currency of management language one must accumulate to be recognized.”³ Buttressed by the writings of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, Mowles views leadership theories and trends through the lens of managerial social capital. Mowles acknowledges the difficulty with going against the prevailing winds of management thought, speaking about fashionable leadership practices with:

As they become ubiquitous so they are harder and harder to oppose. To put forward an alternative understanding of leadership, to worry away at the taken for granted assumptions that are left unexplored in currently accepted formulations, is to risk calling one’s own professionalism into question.⁴

Bucking the trend or party line can indeed be an occupational hazard. In Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-truths & Total Nonsense, Stanford’s Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton caution us about the incorrectness of conventional wisdom. They claim practitioners in most fields are “unwilling or unable to observe the world systematically because they are trapped by their beliefs and ideologies. Their observations are contaminated by what they expect to see, or because they aren’t logical enough in their thinking.”⁵

Indeed, hardly just a recent phenomenon, Aldous Huxley alluded to this occupational conundrum and “intellectual inconsistency of men” by writing:

Men have to live before they think; and to one who would live efficiently, peace of mind is of vastly greater consequence than logical consistency. If peace of mind can be obtained only by sacrificing logic, then logic goes by the board, not merely unregretted, but unnoticed by its generally quite unconscious sacrificer.⁶

Like popular management trends, maxims are hard to dislodge when they attain mainstream appeal. Given that maxims are notoriously succinct and loose in the evidentiary department, many have a corresponding contra maxim. These paradoxical pairs allow the teller to present whichever side of the parable he or she is partial to depending on the situation. For instance, consider the following dueling maxims: The bigger the better versus Good things come in small packages; Birds of a feather flock together juxtaposed with Opposites attract; and It’s better to be safe than sorry pairs neatly and disharmoniously with Nothing ventured nothing gained.⁷

A business leader or investor can easily gravitate to a two-sided maxim. For instance, The bigger the better is a bite-sized rationale for extolling the economies of scale, market clout, and synergies sure to be had with a large corporation, say a McDonalds’s, Toyota or General Electric. It also helps set the table as simplified justification for merger and acquisition activity. While in contrast, Good things come in small packages is equally poignant when applied to the nimbleness of small, entrepreneurial ventures or autonomous new product teams unencumbered by large bureaucracies. It works just as well when playing up the benefits of miniaturization or selling smaller cars or shrunken food portions.

In some ways maxims are the ultimate implement in a spin master’s communications toolbox: a versatile, two-way convincing device. A maxim permits you to begin a discourse with an innocuous claim. Debaters can enrich an argument with a strategically placed aphorism as filler in between real data or evidence. Additionally, an apropos maxim can be used to seal the deal, for final buy-in or icing on the case, if you will. Why take a chance with an original thought when you can rely on concise epigrams of conventional business wisdom?

The maxims treated in this book are, by and large, not of the dueling variety. The lack of dichotomy found in management maxims contributes to their controversy (at least when rebuked). The one-sided nature of management maxims makes them different from general, nonbusiness aphorisms. My attempts at dulling the absoluteness of these proverbs will likely provoke disagreement with some readers. You may not subscribe to the maxim reorientations presented in these pages. My goal is not to reverse the polarities of these statements by hailing their opposite forms. Instead, my objective is to uncover flaws and expose maxims that are incorrectly presented as absolutes. For example, my fight is not with Customer is king as an ideal, but with Customer is king as a patronizing, given, and necessary mantra for a successful business enterprise.

Some of the maxims you will encounter in this book have degraded to the status of, dare I say it, cliché! Cliché is a harsher, more insidious term, summed up as “a trite phrase or expression . . . a hackneyed theme, characterization, or situation . . . something that has become overly familiar or commonplace.”⁸ To dramatize the deep, 2,400-year-old roots of this device, we turn again to Aristotle as he expounded on the more pedestrian utility of a maxim with, “Even hackneyed and commonplace maxims are to be used, if they suit one’s purpose: just because they are commonplace, everyone seems to agree with them, and therefore they are taken for truth.”⁹

A prime example of such a hackneyed phrase is the management maxim we examine in Chapter Two: Customer is king, a variation of the cliché the customer is always right. Oddly enough, the customer is always right has limped along as a passé, outdated joke of sorts that remains nostalgically popular via some bizarre form of disaffected group pride. Many regard it as patronizing and untrue, even when stubbornly referring to it. The muttering of customer is always right is often accompanied with requisite eye-rolling by both its perpetrators and listeners alike.

Yet Customer is king prevails as a surprisingly believable and overused tenet borne of good intentions yet violated by nearly all of our cellphone and cable television companies, city halls, and departments of motor vehicles. What makes Customer is king a management maxim worthy of a chapter in this book is that it is often blatantly untrue. We’ll get into specifics as to how and why it is so deceitful in Chapter Two, but suffice it to say there are glaring examples of wildly successful firms that only give lip service to this maxim. Indeed, we’ll explore how many organizations feel no obligation to subscribe to this battle cry despite our consumer society’s insistence that they must. For instance, your cable television provider is very likely a large, profitable company with little regard for you as a customer. Customer is prey is a more accurate maxim in many of these cases.

Before previewing the remaining chapters and their respective maxims, we should answer the following question: Why all the fuss about these seemingly harmless proverbial sayings? Surely we can navigate our way around frivolous elements in our vernacular. We must know when we are bending the meanings of these half-truths and corporate myths to fit our sense of style and argumentative purposes, relying on the safety of generalized figures of speech. Are we justifying being close enough in terms of the clichéd language and superficial evidence we employ when arguing a point? The problem is these maxims have become so ingrained in our business communication patterns that we have taken them as absolute, literal truths without questioning them in context. Our very notion of truth silently erodes each time some nebulous piece of folklore masquerades as fact. The status quo selfishly guards the implicit approval of our collective naiveté.

For example, when employees hear Failure is not an option over and over again from their boss, from films (e.g., Apollo 13), and from National Football League (NFL) coaches on television, we internalize and think of it as an absolute truth, a truism. The danger of internalizing this falsehood about failure is that we may not try hard enough, or try at all. We may not discover our performance limits. We may sheepishly avoid all risks, playing not to lose instead of maximizing our potential. Think of the implications on research and development if failure were prohibited. If Failure is not an option becomes an involuntary, hard-wired response to challenging work situations, we may just sit back defensively and let events unfold around us. Better to be safe than sorry, I guess. We will cover some specific examples relating to the repercussions and benefits of failure later in Volume Two, or at the very least we’ll try!

To their credit, maxims are convenient, simple statements that help us explain our world. Maxims function as guidelines and mental models that serve our harried agendas and time-starved decision-making events. For example, a manager may tell her employees to use Customer is king as a rule of thumb, so whenever in doubt just be sure to do whatever it takes to make a customer happy. However, the trade-off of this simplification and so-called efficiency may lead to the misreading of problematic situations. Making every customer happy at all costs is not always prudent or possible. Some demanding customers, based on their value to the organization, are not profitable enough for the organization to over serve, or maybe even serve at all.

Reliance on maxims is not just a problem confronted by businesses. We find a propensity for passive acceptance of the short and sweet even in science. Physicist Leonard Mlodinow, author of The Upright Thinkers: The Human Journey from Living in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Introduction: Deconstructing Management Maxims
• Chapter 2 Customer is King
• Chapter 3 People are Our Most Important Asset
• Chapter 4 Diversity Improves Performance
• Chapter 5 Competitive Advantage is Necessary to Compete
• Chapter 6 A Business Plan is Required for Entrepreneurial Success
• Index