I wouldn’t even call that misuse of jargon. I’d just call that a massive exaggeration. Your decision to put a new cover sheet on your TPS reports is not a paradigm shift, no matter how revolutionary the cover sheet is.
I’m thinking more of “cloud computing” where it is a Real Thing, but if you just read about it on LinkedIn you’d either get breathless repetition of buzzwords or snarky, “the cloud is just someone else’s computer” commentary. Both largely vapid and copypasted from other commenters.
One Deming idea which was a bad thing was that 80% of workers were identical and so could be treated as such. This got adopted by Jack Welch and then others. I’ve done performance reviews using this and also treating people as individuals, and the latter works much better - though it is more work.
European school pencils often lack an eraser, reportedly because their market prefers to use higher quality more expensive erasers sold separately, not the crummy ones that tip American school pencils. (IMHO, the white erasers are indeed better than the US red ones, though the advantage is marginal. US erasers are legacy-driven, high brand recall, synonymous with heritage stationery solutions, while European ones are precision-engineered, German-grade performance with a focus on premium erasure fidelity. I could go on.)
Ostensibly, middle management serves several purposes:
Align leadership’s strategy to the people doing the actual work.
Feed information upward so leadership can formulate better decisions.
Provide management and oversight to make sure the work is getting done properly.
Similar to why an army has lots of layers of officers instead of just generals and privates.
To do this, companies try all sorts of different structures and methodologies
The reality is that while this function is served, the combination of different skillsets as you rise up the ranks, abstraction of work as it reported at higher levels, and individuals positioned into their roles due to politics, favoritism, reward structures, and so on creates a lot of noise and inefficiencies.
Agree completely that middle management needs to exist, has a real job to do, and that if that job is well-done, the org will do well for itself while also not eating its employees.
The challenge, as you say in your final sentence is what happens when those jobs are badly done.
My comment you reacted to was deliberately rather cynical. But IME (much less voluminous than your own; this is your wheelhouse) there is a real problem where bad = unskilled or un-/mis-motivated managers create a kind of cancerous pollution that causes both superiors and subordinates to likewise become unskilled or mis-motivated. As the cancer spreads, it can become impossible to work around those kinds of folks and still be a good performant manager yourself.
Like with biological cancer, prevention is much easier than in-place cure or even radical surgery. Unlike bio-cancer, it seems many business orgs are oblivious to, or in denial about, the cancer eating them alive.
I know you were just being funny, but when a draftsman has to erase a line it can be feet long, that tends to go through a lot of eraser. Much more so than erasing the occasional misspelling.
That and the fact that draftists use mechanical lead holders (or did) that are constantly getting replenished.
(Emphasis added.) I think that’s the key. There really are such things as paradigm shifts, but most things that some b-school type have called a paradigm shift haven’t been even close.
The one thing I remember being good was statistical process management - i.e. have the data to back things up rather than gut instinct, and attack the biggest problems for the most impactful results. I recall one place tried Deming manangement for a while - it also emphasized stistical process contro. But the thing that stood out was that he recommended doing away with annual reviews. Employee evaluation and feedback should happen 365 days a year. Middle management embraced the former, but continued the latter as irregularly as they always had.
One management consulatant at the time had already realized the field was becoming satturated with nonsense, he mentioned to us the term “BOHICA”. Employees received so many “fad of the month” management systems that the term was “Bend Over Here It Comes Again”. (Hence, “Last of the Bohicans”)
Yes, that’s it! Thanks, DD. There was a link on Weird Earls once that generated corporate sounding jargon. Paragraphs and paragraphs of it that almost made sense.
At this point in my career, I have come to the conclusion that much that is either by design or emergent behavior, possibly as a result of an inverse correlation between power, responsibility, and compensation vs technical competency.
That is to say, the higher you go up the ladder, the less the person typically knows about how the actual work they oversee actually gets done. So if they can create ambiguity or confusion with flowery, nonsensical language, it gives management an ability to fall back on “you didn’t follow my instructions”.