By John Micklethwait & Adrian Wooldridge
Times Books, New York, 1996, 369 pages.

By James O’Shea and Charles Madigan
Times Books, New York, 1997, 355 pages.

John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge credit Shelley with noting that, in his day, poets were “the unacknowledged legislators of mankind.” In their 1996 book, The Witch Doctors, the co-authors suggest that today’s poets have lost that role to another kind of artist. “[W]herever one looks, management theorists are laying down the law, reshaping institutions, refashioning the language and, above all, reorganizing people’s lives.” Exaggeration? Think of the new meanings and implications Tom Peters and Robert Waterman gave to the word “excellence” (In Search of) and what Michael Hammer’s term “reengineering” has done to the fortunes of thousands of companies and to the lives of millions of their current and former jobholders.

During the first half of this century now waning, barely a handful of individuals formulated potent ideas about the way that organizations ought to be managed. Those ideas affected profound changes in corporate structure and led to the creation of new social expectations about work. The ideas of Frederick Taylor, the inventor and promoter of so-called scientific management in the early decades of the century, for instance, informed the assumptions that most people (until just recently) held about work — the idea, for example, that efficiency and productivity matter more than, say, job satisfaction or innovation. In the 1920s at General Motors, Alfred Sloan decentralized the manufacture of cars to separate operating divisions while maintaining strict centralized financial controls, thus defining the organizational structure that most companies still retain. Beginning just after World War II, Peter Drucker’s articulation of the responsibilities and practices of management and managers largely defined that role for subsequent generations of managers. Much of what Taylor, Sloan, Drucker, and a few others thought and taught passed into the conventional wisdom and for years shaped not just the practice of management, but our culture’s assumptions and expectations of managers.

But in the last 10 years, those assumptions and expectations — along with everything managers thought they understood about running organizations — have dissolved in chaos. Rather suddenly, the old truths don’t hold, the old practices don’t work. How should companies and other organizations be managed today? Just ask Michael Porter, Charles Handy, C.K. Prahalad, Ken Blanchard, Stephen Covey, Michael Hammer, Kenichi Ohmae, Christopher Bartlett, William Bain, Alvin Toffler, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, or the author of Jesus: CEO. Just don’t expect to get the same answer twice. Do any of these people know what they’re talking about? The authors quote Peter Drucker as saying that people use the word “guru” to describe these folks only because they do not want to say “charlatan.”

A complex world breeds complex coping theories, and today’s world is awash with new management theories and theorists. The subtitle of The Witch Doctors, “Making Sense of the Management Gurus,” suggests that Micklethwait and Wooldridge, both editors at The Economist, are going to help readers sort through the chaos, and that’s exactly what they do. The Witch Doctors is about management, but it is not a management book. There is no jargon, and this is not the place to learn about the latest, state-of-the-art wrinkle in, say, incentive-based compensation.

The Witch Doctors takes a user-based approach to its subject. Rather than examining management theory in the abstract, its core chapters start with the issues that are bedeviling organizations and the people who work in them and then ask whether and how the theories and theorists are helping. By anchoring their analysis in the real world of management and daily work, Micklethwait and Wooldridge have made The Witch Doctors not merely interesting, but useful.

The book opens with a chapter on reengineering — “The Fad in Progress,” as the authors call it. The chapter is a kind of warm-up look at how management theories get thought-up, promoted, and applied — sometimes by means that aren’t intellectually very honest even if they’re perfectly legal. We’re reminded, for instance, that certain (named) consultants used company money to purchase thousands of copies of their own book so as to place it on the best-seller list and thereby elevate their own market value as gurus.

Then there’s an overview of the management theory industry: what does it look like, who’s in it, how did it grow? The authors find it telling that 80 or so years ago the stopwatch-toting Frederick Taylor, arguably, the first management consultant of the 20th century, charged clients $35 a day — $630, corrected for inflation. Today, in contrast, Tom Peters charges $60,000 for a one-day seminar. Clearly, Peters is a better marketer than Taylor was. Or maybe there is just greater demand for guru services. “Management theory,” Micklethwait and Wooldridge write, “has always appealed to thousands of people who want to get ahead; now it has tapped into the market of the millions who are scared of being left behind….And the industry’s relentless appetite for more ideas to process, print, sell, and regurgitate has helped to make it a peculiarly faddish discipline where ideas are grabbed at, rather than matured. In other words, the industry has often driven the theory, rather than the other way around.”

Micklethwait and Wooldridge divide the management theory business into three segments. The first is management consulting, which, according to their research, employs more than 100,000 people worldwide, in 1994 generated $11.4 billion in fees, and has been growing at twice the rate of the world economy for the last 10 years. Their second segment consists of the business schools, about 700 of them in the United States alone, “teeming with academics desperate to make their name as management theorists.” And the third segment is what Micklethwait and Wooldridge call the “guru business” — consisting largely of enterprising individuals like Peters, Swim with the Sharks author Harvey McKay, Stephen Covey with his Seven Habits, and others. The boundaries separating the segments are highly permeable, with academics, for instance, consulting on the side. One man, the Harvard Business School’s Michael Porter, easily spans all three. He has created his own consulting firm, Monitor, and his books on strategy have made him, as the authors put it, “something of a god to planners.”

Public sector managers and those who believe that we the governed should expect better than we’re getting from our government’s agencies will be disappointed by The Witch Doctors — on two counts. First, the authors segregate most of their discussion about the management of public sector organizations into a separate chapter, because, they argue, government and management “are not interchangeable concepts.” They find that management theory developed for the private sector fits government operations “like trousers fit a chimpanzee — almost but not quite.” And they don’t see much that is new in management theory that applies specifically to government. “In general, all the public sector does is to borrow ideas from the private sector.” And then, they say, it misapplies them. “[B]ecause politicians and administrators have failed to distinguish between the different sorts of management theory, they are often most exposed to its contradictions. The three most popular public sector fads — downsizing, reengineering, and total-quality management — are, on many points of substance, mutually incompatible.”

Should Al Gore abandon his hope of reinventing government? Well, no. Micklethwait and Wooldridge judge that, on balance, governments’ attempts to improve their own workings has done more good than harm, and in support of that tepid thesis they offer an incomprehensible case study of the reform of the British National Health Service — the second reason to be disappointed in this chapter. Finally, they suggest that what the public sector needs is more theory, not less. “The future lies in pushing ideas like delayering and contracting out farther still, not in returning to the old world of theory-free administration.” They may be right, but on this point they are not persuasive.

Because management theory is at best a woozy concept, it would have been easy for Micklethwait and Wooldridge to have trashed the industry. “There is,” they acknowledge, “a wealth of material for anybody hoping to produce a ‘hatchet job.'” But they don’t. Their objective, they say, was to “separate the good (or, at any rate, the influential) from the bad and the irrelevant….If ideas or thinkers fail the test completely, we have usually left them out, rather than wasting ink on debunking them….In short, we have tried to judge the gurus on the same terms that the foremost of them – such as Peter Drucker and Michael Porter – have themselves insisted that they wish their theories to be judged: as a serious ‘intellectual’ discipline.”

Not so, James O’Shea and Charles Madigan, co-authors of Dangerous Company: The Consulting Powerhouses and the Businesses They Save and Ruin, published a year after The Witch Doctors. O’Shea and Madigan, both journalists at The Chicago Tribune, take the easier path. They have tossed together a sneering, derisive, sensationalizing book, written in breathless tabloid-style prose, in which they seem intent on blowing the lid off one part of the management-theory industry – the consultants who not only dream up new ideas but charge companies lots of money to help them put those ideas into practice. Thus, the consulting firms they write about never produce reports or deliver advice; they produce “high-priced” reports and deliver “high-priced” advice. The Fortune 500 is that magazine’s “infamous” list. Most of the book’s nine chapters consist of case study horror stories in which a venal (or worse) consultant takes advantage of an inept (or worse) management so as to leave innocent employees the ultimate losers. Worse than their transparently biased reporting is that O’Shea and Madigan don’t seem to understand the businesses and the issues they are writing about, and when they can’t explain something themselves, they substitute long, jargon-laden quotes that clear up nothing.

It would have been fascinating to learn how the major management consulting companies, most of which are American and many of which are home-ported in and around Boston, work with their clients — how they succeed and fail in their endeavors. What is frustrating about Dangerous Company is that O’Shea and Madigan have done so badly a job that so badly needs doing. If the people running the corporations that comprise the production side of our national economy take management consulting seriously enough to spend – by the estimates quoted in Dangerous Company – upwards of $20 billion a year to buy its advice, someone should take a serious enough look at the industry to tell us what we – because ultimately it is customers and shareholders who pay the bills – are getting for our money. Dangerous Company does not; it only titillates and demeans.

I read somewhere that the definition of a critic is someone who minds when a work is rubbish, but a charitable critic of Dangerous Company might say that, if nothing else, the authors’ disrespect for the consulting segment of the management theory industry at least raises the question of whether management theory should be taken seriously. Does it in fact exist? Are there principles of management that transcend time and place? Is management a science that can be taught, and can results produced in one organization be replicated in others? Or is management more art? Is its theory mere technique that managers wield idiosyncratically? Do great managers, like great artists, have to be born? What about the merely competent?

Dangerous Company may suggest such questions, but it doesn’t take them up. Micklethwait and Wooldridge in The Witch Doctors do. They call such conundrums “management’s equivalent of psychology’s nature-versus-nurture debate. The notable scarcity of leaders who can change organizations, and the unorthodox ways in which those few people persuade others to follow them, is a powerful argument on the side of nature.” The dozen or so pages they give over to this debate are among the most illuminating in their book. Not that their discussion yields an answer. Writing about leadership, they admit, “is a little like invading Russia. Even writers of Drucker’s class tend to run into deep snow.” And even though lots of people can tell the difference between leaders and mere managers — “The manager relies on control; the leader inspires trust,” etc. — knowing the difference “is not the same as being able to turn the former into the latter.” Neither Rupert Murdoch nor Lee Iacocca has formulated a theory to account for their respective successes. Is theory thus irrelevant to practice? Their answer is (roughly), not quite. “The general separation of theory from practice is, arguably, a reflection of the [im]maturity of management theory,” which they take to be “in roughly the same state that economics was a century ago. Many of its fundamental tenets have yet to be established. The discipline still awaits its John Maynard Keynes…” Is management theory faddish and bedeviled by contradiction? Yes, but, as they say, the thinking world does not turn up its nose at poetry just because bad poets continue to compose bad poems.

Micklethwait and Wooldridge, in other words, hold that management theory and management theorists count for something in the high-stakes game of business and thus are worth studying and understanding. I would argue that the consulting subset of this larger industry also plays an important and perhaps even crucial role. Consultants are the leading-edge users of the ideas the theorists generate. That is, they are disseminators. They are also part of a feedback loop that reports the experience of practitioners back to those who primarily think about management. And consulting firms and individual consultants are cross-pollinators, who apply the lessons they have learned from working in one organization to others. Thus, their work, too, should be worth serious critical study.

Tom Richman, formerly a writer at Inc. magazine and an editor at the Harvard Business Review, is currently at work on The Urban Trekker, a book of hikes through the neighborhoods of Boston and its close-in suburbs.