I’m the product of a business school education, and plenty of experience in highly respected organisations. Sometimes I find myself wondering if I suddenly found myself back a century, whether I would actually be able to do business better than the folk at those times, or whether the “6 Sigmas” and all the other flavors of the month that have become part of my life would for whatever reason be overwhelmed by larger and less subtle issues.
Even thinking back 50 years, have the tools used by people running businesses in 1958 paled in comparison with the understandings and techniques we have today, or are they all just different flavors of the same old common sense?
I don’t think it’s so much a matter of “new” discoveries, as much as it’s the systematic codification and dissemination of best practices and concepts.
I’m sure that some things were intuitive to various businesses over time; the difference these days is that it’s a major research topic, and there is a lot of use of this learning.
For example, Frank Bass’ diffusion model is something that I’m sure someone, somewhere realized in an intuitive sense, but it took Bass to actually write it down and do the legwork to show that it’s a valid way of modeling the adoption of products.
Same goes for many organizational behavior and HR type concepts- someone likely KNEW that keeping your best workers by treating them well is a better proposition in the long term vs. working the hell out of them and possibly running them off is. The difference is, now someone’s done the work to show it conclusively and explain why.
I think that overall, companies do better business than they used to (otherwise we wouldn’t have all those HBS case studies, huh?), but that many think they’re applying business school type concepts, but there are fundamental short-circuits in thinking/understanding.
How many people don’t REALLY get the lowest cost/differentiated division in strategy? How many people don’t really get the “Hire for attitude, train for skill” concept? Or elastic/inelastic demand?
You can read these boards for plenty of examples, and if they’re representative of the general intelligent population, it’s likely that in any company of any size, you have plenty of people both less intelligent, less educated and not business-school trained who are calling all sorts of shots, with somewhat predictable results.
One thing to consider, computers have made night and day changes to the speed and volume of many businesses. When I was working heavy inventory analysis, the things I was doing in excel/access would have taken a team of probably 20 people several weeks to manually calculate the forecasting work that took access about .15 seconds.
By the same token, if you look at the effect of Blackberries and PDA’s on communication, it is now possible in seconds to transmit a badly formed snap judgment to tens of thousands of people, where only decades ago it would have taken weeks to achieve this kind of miscommunication. I have seen managers wipe out years of work with just one poorly conceived text message. Just food for thought.
Hard to say. A lot of industries that are around today didn’t exist 50 years ago.
Echoing what** Cosmic Relief** has said, the pace of business has increased dramatically. Gone are the days where people picked careers they worked at for 20 years. Everyone expects to be “fast tracked” in their careers or they leave in 18 months. People come and go so rapidly that they basically have time to fuck things up royally and leave before the consequences hit.
Take my company for example. We promote people to management-level positions within 1-3 years of working there. We’ve been promoting people faster than we can hire replacements so now we have a middle heavy organization filled with project managers, “thought leaders”, business developers and no one to do the actual work.
I am the ONLY member of management with an MBA and it’s a constant source of frustration watching the impotence and incompetance with which the group is run.
I have to think things were better years ago where you actually had to spend years proving yourself before you were given a leadership role. Not just perform the technical aspect of your job well enough to justify declaring you to be the new 26 year old Wunderkind.
We went to an olde-style manufacturing company client of ours. A fellow manager and I remarked how this guy, the 50-something director of the company who spent decades working his way up from the bottom, must view our army of 24 to 35 year old lawyers, consultants and whatnot all with fancy titles as a bunch of ignorant uberdouches.