Alphabet Soup

The world is abound with management theories and methods.  All one need do is peruse the business aisles of either a brick and mortar or virtual bookstore.  Methods, theories, applications, approaches, and systems come and go.  Let’s just call them theories for lack of a better term.  

Management Theories come into and out of favor.  Older passe theories may be re-tuned, retreaded, and recycled with a spin nomenclature and nuance to make them seem new and fresh for today.  How many ways can management by objectives be recast?  How many times has business process engineering or re-engineering been presented?  There are countless numbers of new product development processes out there and probably more to come.  New theories are promoted as new or revolutionary while structurally and thus essentially they are are equivalent to one or more of their predecessors.  

The popular theories are often abbreviated and simply referred to by their initials e.g.  TQM for Total Quality Management, BPE for Business Process Engineering, MBO for Management by Objectives, and NPD for New Product Development.  There are companies that seem to always be chasing the latest management theory fad.  They have several of these programs running at once in various stages of launch, stagnancy, failure, or neglect.  There is a virtual “alphabet soup” of these theories floating around a company at any given time.  The problem is not that they are there but that that there are initiatives around them and the people never really know which they are following at any given time.

There are two reasons for this constant renewal and rehashing of theories.  The reasons are inter-dependent.  First, management is always looking for the next new and exciting thing.  They buy and read a book and think:  “wow... this is great stuff.  This is exactly what we should be doing.”  They then proceed to do it without providing the commitment and constancy of leadership to actually make the theory take hold and help transform the way the enterprise is run.  Management gets frustrated, loses interest, and reverts to their old ways until the next new theory catches their fancy.  The failed theories get a bad name and butt end of jokes. Management consultants, writers, and gurus mourn the passing of their prized theory and either fade away or set out to create the next new thing.

Both W. Edwards Deming and Kaoru Ishikawa would place the blame for this on management.  No significant change or transformation can occur without the sponsorship and involvement of the leadership of the enterprise.  Even this is no guarantee of success.  Organizational change and transformation is difficult to achieve.  It must be done while running the day to day operations and delivering results. We covered this topic in a February 2010 blog posting:  Leadership from the Top.  

Minimally, management must not create a confusing and debilitating alphabet soup culture.  People have to know what the key priorities and initiatives of the company are.  Everyone needs to know what their role is and is not in these priorities and initiatives. While the key priorities and initiatives will change over time, the changes should not be dramatic or abrupt unless there are dramatic and abrupt changes in the marketplace.