What is The Management Myth about?

Matthew Stewart spent several years as a management consultant at a prestigious firm before concluding that much of what he was selling was not knowledge but the performance of knowledge. The Management Myth is his account of that realization, a history of management theory from Frederick Winslow Taylor's scientific management through the twentieth century, and an argument that the discipline's claim to be a science is largely unfounded.

The central target is the business school's promise that management can be reduced to teachable principles that produce predictable results. Stewart traces this promise back to Taylor, whose time-and-motion studies in steel mills produced a system that claimed to be the one best way of doing any task. Taylor's influence on how management thinks about work is enormous and largely invisible: the idea that tasks can be broken down, optimized, and controlled by technical experts is embedded in most modern organizations. Stewart argues that Taylor's actual studies were fraudulent — the numbers were invented — and that the edifice built on them reflects this shaky foundation.

The book moves through the major schools of management thought: human relations theory (Elton Mayo), systems theory, strategy (Porter), and more recent frameworks. In each case Stewart identifies the gap between the claims made and the evidence supporting them. He is not arguing that management is unimportant — organizations require coordination and direction — but that the academic discipline of management studies has consistently overclaimed its knowledge and under-delivered on its results. The consulting industry, which sells this knowledge as expertise, has benefited enormously from the pretense.

Stewart's own background as a philosophy PhD who stumbled into consulting gives the book its particular tone: the account of what it felt like to charge enormous fees for advice derived from frameworks he'd constructed the previous week, the recognition of Taylor's ghost in every project management methodology, and the conclusion that the humanities offer better preparation for management than the MBA. It is a provocative book, occasionally polemical, but grounded in real history and entertaining throughout.