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voodoo
This page
looks at dot com voodoo: perspectives on the dot com
gurus and the consulting industry.
As Hal Varian & Carl Shapiro note in the outstanding Information
Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy
(Boston, Harvard Business School Press 99) "Ignore
basic economic principles at your risk. Technology
changes. Economic laws do not".
witch doctor dot com
We enjoyed the cautionary tales in The Witch Doctors - What the Management Gurus Are Saying, Why It Matters & How To Make Sense Of It (London,
Heinemann 96) by John Micklethwait & Adrian Wooldridge and Dangerous Company (London,
Brealey 97) by James O'Shea & Charles Madigan.
They're entertaining and useful reading before hiring any
management consultants.
Stuart Crainer's Gravy Training:
Inside the Business of Business Schools (Oxford, Capstone 98)
offers a jaundiced but often perceptive account of the MBA factories and the
latest dogmas about doing business online. It builds on his irreverent
examination of Tom Peters - Corporate Man To Corporate Skunk (New
York, HarperBusiness 97). Lewis Pinault's Consulting Demons: Inside
the Unscrupulous World of Global Corporate Consulting (New
York, HarperBusiness 00) is an unpleasant self-absorbed
account by a former demon.
Connoisseurs of planning fads can't go past Henry Mintzberg's The Rise & Fall of Strategic Planning
(New York, Prentice-Hall 94), an incisive corrective to the reincarnations of Tom Peters &
Co, and Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour Through The Wilds of Strategic Management (New York, Simon & Schuster 98), co-authored
with Bruce Ahlstrand & Joseph Lampel.
Alfred Chandler's magisterial works - in particular The Visible Hand:
The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Harvard
Uni Press 80) and Scale & Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial
Capitalism (Cambridge, Harvard Uni Press 90) - are a starting point
for understanding what's lasted .... and why.
As a reminder that there are no silver bullets Paul
Strassmann in
The Squandered Computer - Evaluating the Business Alignment of Information Technologies
(New Canaan, Information Economics Press 97) provides a detailed analysis of outsourcing, usability, IT consultants and best
practice. His Information Productivity: Assessing
the Information Management Costs
of
U.S. Industrial Corporations
(New
Canaan, Information Economics Press 99)
is also provocative.
Michael McGill's American Business
& the Quick Fix (New York, Holt 88) retains its relevance as an
analysis of management fads, fixes and phobias: quality circles, matrix
management, managerial grids .....
When we first published this page we said that he writing today Prof McGill
would have a lovely time with the dot com mantras - embrace the free,
hug the void - and the spectre of one-minute managers competing on
internet time. Since that time we've read The 10 Second Internet
Manager.
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