Business And Society

Are Our
Outdated? Management Theories
by Gianpiero Petriglieri
June 18, 2020

Marcelo Santos/Getty Images

Summary.   Management thinking and practice have reached an inflection point.

This “mid-life crisis” of management bears much resemblance to the same
phenomenon in our own lives, but in this case we are preoccupied as much with
the death of... more
“Where are the new management theories?” an acute observer of
management trends asked me at a gathering of executives,
academics, and journalists focused on the future of work. It was a
few months ago, and no one expected the future to arrive as
quickly as it has, or in the way that it has. I had heard that
question before — it’s a staple of those gatherings — but I’ve been
thinking about it a lot since work as we knew it has ground to a
halt. Theories bind analysis and action and, especially in times of
change, when the future becomes unpredictable and anxiety is
running high, managers need theories to provide clarity and
reassurance.

Scientific management. Human relations. Competitive

advantage. Shareholder value maximization. Disruptive
innovation. These are only a few of the theories that have moved
management over the past century, offering it a rationale, a script,
and at times a justification for action. They have shaped
management, too, conveying an image of who managers must be.

Take scientific management — best known as Taylorism —

arguably the most enduring management theory of them all. It
suggests that a manager’s job is to increase efficiency in a
production system. The manager then, rendered in the image of
Dr. Taylor, must be a detached engineer who sifts through data to
counter the most common source of error: people.

I should know about new theories since I am, after all, a

management professor. But I’ve been drawing a blank. To be sure,
there was no lack of new management hacks even before the
upheaval of the past few months. Management stories abound,
covering the whole range from epic to comedic to outright tragic
tales. Executives have visions, pledge their allegiance to evidence,
and even pen manifestos. But new theories? They seem to be
nowhere in sight. Even management academics are distraught,
doubting that old management theories still apply in
organizations ruled by algorithms, and wondering whether
anyone is up to developing new ones.

But this lack of new theories is a concern not just for me, my
conference friend, many a manager, and the authors I just cited. It
affects you, too. Regardless of your age, and whether you are a
manager or not, you are caught with us in a mid-life crisis of
management. The signs of that crisis transpire in many an
everyday experience. Perhaps you feel uneasy and restless,
sensing that we will not be going back to “normal” in the
workplace, if we even still have one. Or you feel stuck and swing
between frustration and despair, wondering who is in charge and
what is yet to come. You feel anger at the system, not to mention
mistrust; you feel loneliness and dearth of meaning. Those aren’t
just signs of grief at the way life has forced us to change in the past
few months and weeks — our unease and despair have been
brewing since long before that.

The more we reach for new theories, however, the more uneasy
and stuck we become. That’s because the issue that sparks mid-
life crises is unlike most of the challenges that management is fit
to analyze and solve. It is an existential one.

And yet it must be faced. Our lives depend on it.

It is the issue of death — and the question of what to do with

whatever freedom, time, and energy we have left.

You read that right. I am arguing that the unease that many have
felt at work over the past months and years and feel most acutely
now, in the face of a global health and social crisis, is not due to
managers’ inability to prepare for the future. It is due to
management’s unwillingness to contemplate a shortage of its own
future that is only becoming more obvious and urgent. A shortage
of future that concerns management as an idea and a practice, not
just the fate of individual managers. Such denial, still on display
in many organizations even today, is dangerous as well as
unfortunate.

Mid-life crises are often unpleasant but productive affairs. Death,

when we can confront it, forces us to consider not just how we
live, but also why we exist. It mobilizes our intellect and
imagination towards better ways and bigger whys. While it begins
as the absence of meaning and hope, a mid-life crisis can be a
source of both. It can transform us — changing us in pervasive
and permanent ways. It can free us up — helping us defy dated
obligations. And it can humanize us — deepening connections
with others and ourselves. That humanization is much needed, as
many have been pointing out, but it must go much further than
the usual rhetoric of purposeful leadership, an airbrushing of
humanism to make management nicer. It must become its core.
There is much to gain, if we can work through the crisis. But first
let us consider where it comes from.

***

A mid-life crisis needs not be sparked by the realization of our

actual, physical death. It can be sparked by awareness that the
world as we knew it, or a worldview we held dear, is failing.
(Though, indeed, a failing worldview often begets physical death,
since fraying social bodies amplify the frailty of the individual
ones that make them up.) Mid-life crises erupt at existential
turning points, between a state that is no longer viable and one
that is not yet conceivable.

Seen that way management has been having a mid-life crisis for a
while. Because capitalism — the worldview that most
management theories and tools have long been drafted to sustain
and advance — is at an existential juncture. We are no longer just
asking how to make it work. Many now wonder why (and for
whom) it exists. Some are even asking if it is viable any more.

“Capitalism as we know it is dead,” Marc Benioff declared, three

weeks into the 2020s. Speaking from the main stage to a packed
auditorium at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum
in Davos, the Salesforce CEO made an unlikely eulogist. Benioff
was inviting his peers to put to rest the ultra-capitalism
concerned only with itself, obsessed with growth and profits and
blind, if not outright hostile, to its environmental and social
context. The strand of capitalism on display daily in macro trends
like the emergence of “winners take all” societies, and micro
moves like a concern for ailing markets during a pandemic.

We might debate whether ultra-capitalism is dead. But as the

planet burns, inequality rises, people suffer, and geopolitics
become ever more tense, there are few doubts that it is deadly.

Much of the harm ultra-capitalism does occurs through its

management, more precisely, through the unquestioned practice
of a dehumanized view of how management works and should
work. It’s an instrumental view that casts it as a technology of
sorts, a means to an end, a tool to maximize efficiency, alignment,
and performance—even when seemingly acting with concern and
care for people. It neglects anything that does not affect
performance, and its influence reaches so deep we often use it to
manage even our own selves, say, every time we tell ourselves that
we ought to sleep, exercise, or read a novel so we can be more
productive at work, rather than because our lives are healthier
and richer and freer for it.

Consider, for example, most management research or popular

management writing. It is predicated on a portrait of
management, when done well, as the way to predict and solve
practical problems. And it is dedicated to offering prescriptions
for managers to address those problems. How do I make
decisions? How can I be heard? How can I stay productive? How
do I help my team succeed?

In many circumstances, the theories and tools that help answer

instrumental questions suffice. But they are of little help when
existential questions surface, such as, How long will we be
around? Do we matter? Are we in charge? Those are mid-life
questions, for individuals. And they are the very questions we ask
ever more often of management at this existential juncture.

***

Those questions are growing louder, and those who were meant to
bury ultra-capitalism, if anything, are rushing to its deathbed to
resuscitate it, arguing that their previous success makes them
best equipped to solve social ills, or selling out our health and
privacy for profit.

Trying to change the world without wanting to change our world

is a classic sign of mid-life and a common defense when our
worldviews collapse. Only offering to lend one’s hand and means
can be a way to assure that one will remain valuable and central
even in a new world. (It’s also a way to pursue the most ultra-
capitalist of aspirations—a revolution without revolutionaries).

“Everything must change so that everything can stay the same,”

utters the Prince of Salina facing his loss of standing in Giuseppe
Tomasi di Lampedusa’s masterpiece “The Leopard.” I have heard
the quote used as a positive example of managerial pragmatism,
but in the novel, the fictional Prince urging his family to forge
bonds with the armies of a rival monarch and the family of a
business leader is the epitome of shapeshifting power. He is
interested only in remaining in place and postponing collapse
until after he is gone. His words, I am afraid, would not be out of
place in the mouth of those who seek new ideas and tools only to
remain in charge.

Ultimately, however, this approach is not enough. If we want to

change the world, we need to change our world first. That means
that those who aspire to give birth to a new brand of capitalism
must kill the old brand of management first.

When I say that we must kill management, I do not mean

terminating managers, the people.

Replacing them with algorithms, for example, risks making

management more instrumental than it already is. The AI-run
workplace achieves degrees of control that surpass Frederick
Taylor’s wildest dreams. Replacing old managers with new
managers will not do either. It would be useless, if new ones
embody the same principles with a different style.

Instead, When I say we need to kill management, I mean putting

to rest the way we conceive and portray and practice
management. We — you and me, people who attend gatherings
and read magazine features on the future of work, and everyone
else who brings management to life in words, in writing, or in
their daily work — need to change our conception of
management, of its function in any enterprise.

What do we replace it with?

We need a truly human management, one that makes room for

our bodies and spirits alongside our intellect and skills. That cares
for what work does and feels and means to us, not just for what we
can do at work and how. A management that abjures the
relentless pursuit of efficiency and alignment — and celebrates,
or even just acknowledges the inconsistencies that make us
human. A management that pursues existential growth as
passionately as it pursues instrumental growth — that is, one that
pursues the expansion of our consciousness alongside that of our
powers. One where we can be fully human, with all our
contradictions, in pluralistic institutions.

A human management will demand that we incorporate a

concern for the freedom and well-being of those we manage as
much as for their productivity; that we consider the
environmental as well as the economic consequences of strategic
choices; that we stop pleading powerlessness in the face of the
tyranny of technology and take responsibility to reject
technologies that enable tyranny. That we hear and amplify a
broader set of voices, not only those that fit a narrow view of
management and of its concerns, but also those that defy it, and
in so doing, enliven it.

That kind of management might advance a capitalism based on

curiosity and compassion, therefore one that is much better at
innovation and inclusion than its current form.

One can see glimpses of such a human view of management

already. You can see them in the CEOs who talk about caring
about purpose as much as about profit. You can see them in
people’s longing for meaning and community at work. But for
those claims not to ring hollow and those longings not to go
unmet, management as we know it, really, it has to die. There is
no other way. Because, in truth, it does not have a problem. It is
the problem.

***

The challenge facing management is not the lack of new theories;

it is the strength of the old ones. It is impossible to build the
future using the blueprints of the past. It is like going to a plastic
surgeon to restore our looks when we should see a psychoanalyst
to free our mind instead.

That is what management could use more of these days, I have

argued in a recent paper on which this essay is based. More
psychoanalysis, that is. I kid you not. Especially the branch of
psychoanalysis concerned with systems of organization and
people’s experience in organizations. A line of work that
challenges organizations’ dysfunctional cultures and people’s
fascination with neurotic leaders, one that aims to free us up from
constraints of the past.

You could call psychoanalysis a theory, or a tool. I would not

disagree. (There’s my management theory for our times). But I am
using it here as shorthand for a subversive conversation. A
relationship that helps us examine why we fear what we want and
what our theories cost us when they become beliefs. That is, when
solutions to old problems become reasons for our stuckness.

Seen through this lens, the essence of a mid-life crisis is

confinement. Theories that we learned early on, and kept us
going, have come to keep us captive.

For individuals, those are usually personal theories about how to

get on. You must always work hard. (What for?) You can rest after
the next promotion. (Really?) Prove that you can make it alone.
(But why?) Always work to fit in. (At what cost?) For management,
these are theories we picked up at school, from books, and from
role models at work. Popular theories like the ones I mentioned
earlier, or more local ones in our organizations. Managers, say,
must put shareholders first, or keep people in line. Those theories
might have kept us safe and made us successful, at one point.
They worked for us and so we worked for them. Until their magic
stopped, usually because we could not change, were confronted
with death, or both.

Those theories fail us then because they show us how to keep

going without telling us why. When change is needed or death is
in the horizon, that will neither soothe us nor suffice us. The
question we need to answer is no longer, “what works best?”; it is
“what is worth living for?”

Psychoanalysis asks that question and in so doing frees us when

the confinement becomes too much. “People come for
psychoanalysis—or choose someone to have a conversation with
—when they find that they can no longer keep a secret,” writes
renowned British analyst Adam Phillips. “What was once private
has become, in spite of oneself, unbearable.”
A mid-life crisis is a euphemism for the realization that the
instrumental answers that theories generate from data do not fit
existential questions. Theories are of limited use without a
purpose. They are, eventually, unbearable. So is the idea of
management we have clung to for a century.

This is why existential threats, when we confront them, can end

up freeing us up. They broaden our horizon, by reminding us that
we need more than theories and that we are more than tools.

With insight and support, we often emerge from a mid-life crisis

with more spacious view of who we are, more forgiving, more
generous, more resolute and tolerant at once, more likely to
balance our concern for the mechanics and morals of our actions.
If it can face its own mid-life crisis, then, management might be
on the brink of a real transformation. It might even use the
current health and social crises as opportunities to demonstrate,
not just tout, its commitment to humanity.

For that, however, we do not need new theories of management.

We need a broader purpose for it. And we need that purpose to
emerge not in bold pronouncements but in ongoing
conversations, with ourselves and others, that challenge
instrumental theories. Those conversations are far more useful at
existential junctures like this. They are a far better means to free
us up and join us in bringing about a human turn in management
—and ultimately in our relationships with each other, with
technology, and with the planet in the workplace.

Those who are still skeptical of pronunciations such as

“capitalism as we know it is dead,” and mistrust the commitment
to transformation of those who have benefited from ultra-
capitalism, base their critique on a sound principle. We usually
like to change the world if we can, but not to the extent that it
puts our identities are at stake. Unless we are in a mid-life crisis,
that is. Then, an existential view suggests, people are often
capable of becoming a threat to their old world-views, of killing an
old self that gets in the way of the future.
If efficiency is the aim of instrumentalism, freedom is the aim of
existentialism. Deepening our humanity, in business, politics, and
every other field, requires an equal devotion to both. The day that
freedom is as central as efficiency to its practice, we might declare
management dead and welcome it to a new life.

GP
Gianpiero Petriglieri is an associate professor of
organizational behavior at INSEAD. A medical
doctor and psychiatrist by training, Gianpiero
researches and practices leadership development.
He directs the INSEAD Management Acceleration
Programme, as well as leadership workshops for
global organizations. You can learn more about
Gianpiero’s work on his website, and follow him
on Twitter (@gpetriglieri) and Facebook.