Let's stop pretending that managers and executives care about productivity

Let's stop pretending that managers and executives care about productivity

I’ve just been on a bit of a summer break. Did a bit of travel locally. Visited Hvalfjörður. Walked a lot.

I know from experience that if I don’t take a summer break, the winter becomes more of a slog and my thoughts become groggier.

Often, as soon as you rest, your mind starts to “helpfully” come up with ideas to help fill your time. One of the invasive thoughts that kept prodding my brain during my break was about modern management theory and how modelling various “AI” tools using those approaches and practices might play out.

I kept thinking that an analysis of productivity interventions with high variability in both time and outcomes (like “AI”) might be interesting.

Most of the fields that touch on modern management – systems-thinking, work psychology, even economics – have strong opinions on the kinds of variability and information asymmetry that seem baked into how generative models work.

But this thought immediately shatters on the cliffs of reality:

Businesses today don’t care about management, productivity, or even costs.

Manifestly and demonstrably, businesses only care about control over labour and stock prices and they ignore anything resembling modern management theory or related fields.

Modern management theory itself isn’t that modern. It was born out of US’s World War Two efforts, that’s where people like W. E. Deming came up, and matured during the rebuilding of Japan – where, again, Deming was hugely influential – got reimported into the US via Japan in the seventies and eighties but then has almost entirely been ignored by tech and increasingly ignored by the rest of the economy as the influence of tech and financialisation increased. Today, big chunks English-language management and executive culture are effectively the opposite of what we know works when managing organisations.

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