The Five Worst Management Concepts in Business.

Geoffrey James published an article last week in BNET which is a good springboard for contemplation and discussion.
See the entire article at http://www.bnet.com/blog/salesmachine/the-5-dumbest-management-concepts-of-all-time/13630?pg=2

Geoffrey highlights some very common sense and sometimes humorous ideas. Although I agree with many of these ideas, I doubt industry will make any fundamental change….companies are too engrained, set in their ways. The larger the company, the more beaurocratic and less likely to make any significant departure from tradition. Below are the five areas Geoffrey James mentions.

#1 Downsizing
“Downsizing is a sign of failure. It means that management has failed and rather than doing the right thing — which is to quit without severance — they’re passing along the penalty for that failure to the people who, in good faith, tried to execute the flawed strategy that top management pursued. That’s why top managers (and the kiss-butt journalists in the mainstream business press) love the word “downsizing.” It makes the results of failure sound like a strategy, rather than a desperate way to remain profitable after top management has made a complete pig’s breakfast of things.”
“… As we go forward [in business] let’s stop calling it downsizing. Let’s call it what it is: firing productive workers because top management was a bunch of overpaid pinhead losers who shouldn’t be allowed to run a company again.”

#2 Leadership
But what is a “leader,” anyway? What does a “leader” do?

“… As we go forward [in business], let’s stop enabling all these tin-pot “leaders” by pretending that they’re doing anything other than grandstanding. Let’s value the real managers, who actually do the hard (and largely thankless) work of making other people productive.”

#3: “Human Resources”
“When you talk to people who work in “Human Resources”, they pretend that they’re all about helping people to become more successful. But the truth is that the entire concept of HR is really just a way to make sure that employees don’t act uppity…. What better way to let people know that they’re expendable commodities than calling them “resources”?

So, as we go forward [in business] let’s stop talking about “human resources” and start calling people what they are: people. People who have real lives and real ideas and real emotions and who, frankly, are doing work that’s often more important than that of the top executives.

#4: “Empowerment”
“it’s abundantly clear that technology isn’t empowering employees; it’s empowering management to spy upon employees. And technology isn’t empowering small organizations; it’s making it easier for large organizations to drive the smaller ones out of business.

So, as we go forward [in business], let’s stop talking about technology as “empowerment” and start talking about what really counts: human creativity freed from the limitations imposed by bonehead “leaders” who think they’re managing “human resources”.

#5: “Business Warfare”
“A glance at the titles of popular business books-Marketing Warfare, Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun, Guerrilla PR-offer ample testimony for this widely held viewpoint. We’re told that we must imitate generals and warlords if we want to be successful managers…….So, going forward [in business], let’s deep-six the militaristic jingoism and start talking about business in terms of relationships, agreements and profitability. Then we’ll all be better off.