The rise and development of the modern enterprise has prompted owners, managers and their advisors to devise and apply better ways to run organizations. The methods, recipes and management gurus continue to change but no one has yet found the one best way. It is safe to say that it will be a while before anyone does, if indeed they ever do. The one-size-fitsall approach is an outmoded and retrograde way of trying to manage the modern business. One constant, however, is that any management method, like any recipe, works only when applied in the proper context, with the proper timing and in the proper way.
An example will serve to put this in perspective. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Frederick Taylor, arguably one of the first management gurus, devoted a large portion of his life's work, timing how long it took people to perform certain operations at work. His goal was to create a set of standards to improve productivity and many companies succeeded by implementing his ideas. Today, he is recognized as one of the founding fathers of modern management. However, most of the current management theories and tools advocate the opposite of what was central to Taylor's method and ideology. Taylor's method conceived of shaping competitive advantage by taking individual thinking and initiative out of the production process. Today, most effective corporate leaders agree that competitive advantage is built through harnessing the thinking and the collective initiative of their employees, what Hamel and Prahalad (1994) referred to as the democratization of strategy.
At the end of the day, the value of a management tool lies in its results in the real world. Does it create profit, generate revenue and focus management thinking? Alternatively, does it create meaningless and wasteful activities or, worse, precipitate organizational disruption?
Regular surveys of management tools and techniques, such as that run by Bain & Co. (see, for example, Rigby and Gillies, 2000) attempt to discover which management tools senior executives use and how satisfied they are. What emerges from the evidence is not wholly surprising but it is nonetheless quite intriguing.