This is an important book. We know that, because it says so. The cover tells us that The Witch Doctors reveals "what the management gurus are saying, why it matters and how to make sense of it." It is, therefore, quite definitely, a book we ought to read. Rosabeth Moss Kanter of Harvard enjoins us to "read it before buying any other business book!" This is, in other words, a book with attitude.
I mention this front cover language not because I did not make it through the text itself. I did, right through to the bitter end. Indeed, the immodest market positioning positively spurred me on, because my own relationship with management punditry has, over the years, been something of an on-off romance. I was destruction-tested at Stanford Business School and, subsequently, spent a few perplexing years at McKinsey. Perplexing, because I found it hard to understand why my clients were prepared to pay decent money to employ someone who knew so much less about their business than they did.
But in spite of these impeccable management credentials, I have always found the guru industry's productions rather hard to take. From Peters and Waterman onwards, I have stocked up my office bookshelves with the latest tomes, promising to reveal the secrets of success, but two chapters into even the most hyped volume I find myself repelled by the usual combination of illiterate prose, bogus anecdotes, non sequiturs and wrong-headed "do-it-yourself" economics. I know that a million managers cannot be entirely wrong, but I do not have the patience to mine the nuggets of wisdom embedded in the slurry.
So a book which purports to have done the mining for me, and to "sort through the muddle of modern management theory and explain it in plain English" has my vote, sight unseen (whatever that might mean). Or should I say had. Because if Peter Drucker, Tom Peters, Charles Handy and the rest are witch doctors, then Micklethwait and Wooldridge are scientologists-purporting to seek out truth but actually retailing a hocus pocus of their own.
I wish I thought that The Witch Doctors was an elaborate pastiche because, in style terms, it exhibits every weakness of the gurus' patent remedy books, with a few more added for good measure. The style is "by Economist out of Tom Peters," a crossbreed which might run well over six furlongs, but which labours grindingly over a full length course. We all know the charms of "Economese." And I mean that seriously. At 800 words of caustic comment it has few equals. But applied to some frankly flaky subject matter, at incontinent length, the result is exquisitely dreadful.
A nice phrase: "exquisitely dreadful." I was proud of it. But it is an extravagant verdict, requiring much supporting evidence. A veritable Michael Howard of a sentence. One which needs much justification, so let me detail the charge sheet.
I find the authors guilty, jointly and severally, of six related charges.
First, the authors ridicule the gurus for their use of jargon, and yet liberally lace the book with their own. How, they trenchantly ask, can "a discipline be so influential but also so flatulent?" Well, the answer would seem to be that there is something in the water. Their own debunking chapter on "Rethinking the Company" has as its side headings: "The end of certainty"; "Reasons to panic"; "The virtues of virtuality"; "Big is back"; and "The death of a model." There may be some kind of distinction to be drawn between jargon generated by men with tongues firmly lodged in their cheeks, and that which emanates from those with their noses embedded in the trough, but the distinction is not evident to the naked eye.
Second, they adopt the most tiresome of all management book habits; the piling up of unrelated anecdote on anecdote to create the spurious impression of systematic research. To me, it reads like the product of William Burroughs' "fold in" technique. Burroughs "wrote" a couple of books by jotting down thoughts on index cards, then shuffling them together. Micklethwait and Wooldridge do the same. One chapter ends with Bill Gates's vision of the future of the PC. The next chapter hurls us into the annual general meeting of British Gas in May 1995, with some quite gratuitous references to the unfortunate Cedric Brown. Of course the truth is that these "chapters" are nothing of the kind. They are very loosely related essays. But they have been packaged as a book.
Third, the text is dotted with trite observations, grotesquely simplified anecdotes and cheap jibes. For example, we are invited to believe that British Airways failed to respond promptly to competition from Virgin Atlantic because it was "an upstart founded by a man BA refused to take seriously because he didn't wear a tie." I do not find this a plausible theory. And we are told that "the knowledge economy is not going to be the workers' nirvana many people envisage." That I can believe, but I have never heard anyone argue that a workers' nirvana was on the cards. The truth is that no one ever has. The authors have made it up, for effect.
Fourth, there are areas in which they are just wrong. The technique known as 360 degree feedback is not "letting the workers tell the bosses what they think of them." That is generally known as "upward feedback." The 360 degree element involves bringing in suppliers and customers, as well as people above and below the manager in the hierarchy. The Treasury, to their credit, are doing it now.
They are also wrong to say that "virtually everywhere, the inequality gap between rich and poor is widening." Not so. There are some sharp differences between developed countries. That is the interesting part about it. Technological change and new competition has resulted in greatly increased income inequality in some parts of the world; in others, restrictive labour markets have helped to hold income relativities roughly stable, but usually at the expense of high and rising unemployment. That is true in most of continental Europe. The UK and US have experienced greater growth in inequality. This is not a trivial point. Micklethwait and Wooldridge know little of Europe. Their world is centred on a Virgin Atlantic upper class lounge, halfway between New York and London.
Fifth, the book does not grapple seriously with the most interesting parts of the current debate about management and the setting of corporate objectives. There is a sketchy chapter on stakeholding but, having described the fence to be jumped, the horse refuses. There is little or no discussion of the tensions between different models of corporate behaviour, or of the implications of adapting corporate aims other than that of maximising shareholder value. Indeed, the chapter ends with a lengthy quotation from the "greed is good" speech by Gordon Gekko-the fictional raider in the film Wall Street. Whether this is a straight, or an ironic commentary, it is hard to discern.
Sixth, the authors do not appear to know what they think management theory is, or should be, all about. Where the book attempts to break new ground, to push the debate forward, or synthesise complex material it does so in a banal, plonking kind of way. So we are told that "Strategy is clearly in trouble. But the announcement of its death is somewhat exaggerated. The past few years have seen more and more managers pining for the halcyon days of strategic thinking, if not quite strategic planning."
This paragraph encompasses all the main problems with the book. You can recognise the Economese in the first, short, punchy sentence. We have weighed the evidence, it seems to say, and here is our firm conclusion. Yet the second sentence leaves us a little unsure. Who has made this "announcement?" What has Mark Twain got to do with management strategy anyway? And the third sentence makes things even less clear. "Pining" is clearly meant to diminish the "more and more managers" (unidentified) whose innermost thoughts we are invited to share. Yet "halcyon" points in the opposite direction, suggesting that the old days really were the good days. And are we meant to understand that there is a move back to strategic planning? Well, it is not at all clear. The import of "if not quite" is obscure.
So, we do not know whether strategy is back, or is still in trouble. We do not know whether, if it is back, we are talking about something new or something old. And reading the rest of the chapter does not help. Two opposing views are caricatured, and we close with the old jibe: two men say they're Jesus; one of them must be wrong. Someone, somewhere, might once have thought that was amusing. I hope never to meet him.
The case for the prosecution rests. But perhaps it would be right to go one step further. What should the book have covered? It should have asked, and tried to answer the question which is preoccupying the University of Oxford. Not whether a recreation ground could be used as the site of a business school. But, rather, whether "management" is an academic discipline at all: whether the thoughts of those who have sought to illuminate the processes of management amount to an academic discipline which can be taught and even learned.
My own view is that there is a core of theory, developed mainly in the finance faculties of business schools so far, which does amount to a useful way of thinking about business problems. And that it is possible to link that core of scientific analysis with some useful lessons from the behavioural sciences about how managers go about achieving their objectives through other people.
It is also possible to add on a competitiveness dimension, certainly at the level of the individual firm and perhaps even, courtesy of Michael Porter, at the level of the nation state. That is where the debate on management education is currently focused. It is an interesting debate, with some serious intellectual content.
Micklethwait and Wooldridge have written a bluffer's guide to bluffers, which avoids the main question. It is all good clean fun, I am sure. But there is, still, a book to be written on what the management gurus are saying, why it matters and how to make sense of it.
The witch doctors
John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Heinemann 1996, ?9.99 (pb)
