Management Science? Only management science I read so far (with actual measured outputs and ideas) was Peopleware. Everything else was more like philosophy. Has anyone ever measured, long term results from multiple management methods? What I saw when I looked into it was simple - the Toyota Way was the model for a lot of successful companies, including Pixar.
Peopleware is extremely old, and if you were to crack open a modern MBA text you'd find statistics and statistical process control type of thinking integrated everywhere, in all the MBA subjects. Management being soft and opinionated ended a long time ago, but then again, "the future is unevenly distributed" so who knows what conceptual envelope you find yourself.
What I’ve seen in the wild is that this is entirely a veneer. It’s important to have numbers. It doesn’t matter if they mean anything. In fact, management is full of numbers that a slightly-clever high school sophomore who’d paid attention in science classes could tell you are totally useless, because they were gathered all wrong. They mean nothing whatsoever. They’re just noise.
But nobody wants to hear stuff like “well first we’re going to need a baseline, and if you want it to be any good we’ll probably need two years or so before we can start trying to measure the effects of changes”. They just want something convincing enough that everyone can nod along to a story in a PowerPoint in four months. Two years out? Lol you’ll be measuring something totally different by then anyway. Your boss may be in a different role. You’ve asked something the company is literally incapable of.
Meanwhile, last I checked, measuring management effectiveness isn’t something we can do in practice for most roles, except bad ways that only pretend to tell us something useful (see above). Good scientists, excellent and large dataset, just the right sector, just one layer of management under scrutiny, maybe you get lucky and can draw some conclusions, but that’s about it, and it’s rare to see it happen in an actual company. Any companies that do achieve it aren’t sharing their datasets.
This kind of thing has been consistent everywhere my wife or I have worked. Similar things reported by many friends. Companies want to pretend to be “scientific” and “data-driven” but instead of applying it to only a couple things where they might do it well (enough data, cheap to gather metrics, clear relevant business outcome) they try it everywhere, but don’t want to spend what it would take to be serious about it, with the result that most of their figures are garbage.
This trend has become just another “soft”, as you put it, tool.
"In the wild" is everything from wishful moronic overly technical to systems that worked 75 years ago still in place and no one knowing how or why it all continues to work. We've got a huge diversity of understanding, and thanks to a relatively stable society all kinds of inarticulate nonsense has been accepted by people as their reasonings for things that do not and could not work in a million years, but no one is going to tell them. So they continue in their belief. I think I was lucky to land in some seriously scientific groups that had personal grudges against emotional decision making, and they went overboard being analytical.
> In fact, management is full of numbers that a slightly-clever high school sophomore who’d paid attention in science classes could tell you are totally useless, because they were gathered all wrong. They mean nothing whatsoever. They’re just noise.
The whole point of SPC is to separate signal from noise. Pointing out that some change that everyone is obsessing over is well within the expected range is useful, it can head-off knee jerk reactions to phantom issues.
...assuming people want to know that the change is in the expected range. That's often not the case. People's careers are built on phantom improvements and being able to say that regular process issues were one-time occurrences.
Having numbers and formulas doesn’t make you scientific. It’s prediction power that does that. And a lot of those showed weak or negative prediction power to me.
You could read The Long Twentieth Century by Giovanni Arrighi.
Fiat money is not the problem, the financialization of economy is actually a common by-product of aging great monetary powers. The US chose to become a monetary power in 1945, rejecting Keynes' Bancor proposal.
Then in 1971, it found it couldn't keep it working, due to the very reasons Keynes explained to them at Bretton Woods. Arrighi argues this has happened 4 times already.
So Fiat money and the financialization of life is just an outcome of something else - that being a monetary superpower is just not sustainable.
I don't live in the US but I'm definitely feeling the negative effects of the fiat system really harshly. From my perspective, I believe that the effects would be similar regardless of which country had the superpower status. Interlinked fiat currencies are just a perfect mechanism to allow militarily or economically dominant countries to manipulate the global economy in their favor. As a superpower, you can leverage corruption in foreign countries to load them up with debt denominated in your currency to allow you to export your inflation to them... You can also leverage foreign corruption to sign large, unjust trade deals or oversized military contracts which will prop up your currency.
Still, at the root, I blame the system itself, not specific participants.
Yes that is literally what the fiat money system is about.
By using fiat, dollar as a reserve currency and the petrodollar, the US gets to export inflation and devalue everyone's currency against their own (I think). The best explanation I've seen of this are by Varoufakis, but there are others.
I'm keen to read the book suggested by the previous commenter and have my view challenged but my current understanding is that money printing plays a major role due to incentives.
People are far more willing to spend large amounts of other people's money on frivolous things than they would if it was their own money. Also, the ability for a government to create large amounts of money on demand allows them to spend on destructive activities which can create opportunities for certain connected people in the private sector. Price discovery in the markets cannot work if one party has a theoretically unlimited amount of currency. It just devalues the currency.
If the government knew that the budget was limited and they only had x amount of money to spend that year as an absolute maximum, they wouldn't be sending it to foreign countries as foreign aid.
You’re right that money printing is a problem, the point Arrighi has in his book and writing is this has happened 4 other times and seems basically inevitable.
Other powers have had monetary empires and they all go through this.
I recently met a guy that goes to these "San Francisco Freedom Club" parties. Check their website, it's basically just a lot of Capitalism Fans and megawealthies getting drunk somewhere fancy in SF. Anyway, he's an ultra-capitalist and we spent a day at a cafe (co-working event) chatting in a conversation that started with him proposing private roads and shot into orbit when he said "Should we be valuing all humans equally?"
Throughout the conversation he speculated on some truly bizarre possible futures, including an oligarchic takeover by billionaires with private armies following the collapse of the USA under Trump. What weirded me out was how oddly specific he got about all the possible futures he was speculating about that all ended with Thiel, Musk, and friends as feudal lords. Either he thinks about it a lot, or he overhears this kind of thing at the ultracapitalist soirées he's been going to.
It seems quite a reasonable output to the current input we are having. Elon having an army of robots is... well it is what it is. Yet that is the direction we are going.
reply