Book Review - False Prophets: The Gurus Who Created Modern Management and Why Their Ideas Are Bad for Business Today
by James Hoopes
James Hoopes is a historian who has written numerous books on business management. One of his best-known books is False Prophets, which covers the phenomenon of 'business management gurus' in the USA that started towards the end of the 19th century and has continued to the present. First and foremost, this book is a series of biographical sketches of the key business management thinkers, from Frederick Taylor (the 19th-century industrialist who created scientific management theory) to Peter Drucker (the academic accredited with founding modern management in the 1950s). However, the book also reads as a series of reviews or critiques of the various business management theories advanced by those gurus. This is where Hoopes' credibility wanes; he's prone to unsupported generalizations and seems to have his own agenda, ultimately promoting a theory of the proper role of management that is both ill-defined and also outside the scope of his biographical treatments.
Hoopes traces the division of management theory into two broad schools: top-down, which emphasizes the power of the manager and concentrates on convincing (or forcing) workers to do what they don't want to do, and bottom-up, in which managers believe that the workers are the ones with the control and the best a manager can do is persuade them. Frederick Taylor, who pioneered a top-down style in the 1870s, is heavily criticized for embodying all the worst qualities of the bullying boss in his quest to improve efficiency.
Many of the management thinkers in the early part of the 20th century were also looking at how to improve efficiency. The husband and wife team Frank and Lillian Gilbreth and Henry Gantt (who advocated bonus pay, rather than threats, as a motivational tool) either tried to soften Taylor's tactics or disdained them altogether, while trying to combine efficient processes with consideration for the workers. Then there's Mary Parker Follett, the influential political theorist and philosopher. Along with Lillian Gilbreth, Follett represented a pioneering female voice in American business. Maybe more than any other business management guru, she added new, substantive theories, which are still reflected in management practice today.
Looking across all the biographical sketches, we see that many of the gurus have a similar background, which allowed them to promote their management theories. So Taylor and Frank Gilbreth each had inventions that helped give them the success and notoriety that in turn allowed them to advocate what were separate management theories (often, not surprisingly, theories that they in tum used to promote adoption of their inventions, with all the associated personal gain that entailed). Taylor and Follett undoubtedly leveraged their upper-class upbringings to ingratiate themselves with business owners.
There is limited coverage of the more modem management theories. The history of W. Edwards Deming's public service for the U.S. government in the 1940s before he became A business guru is welcome, because many books about Deming omit or minimize that phase of his life. Hoopes sometimes gushes over Peter Drucker, who, along with Follett, is clearly one of his favorites of the gurus. What seems lacking in the biographical sketches, though, are detailed treatments of the most recent theories put forward by significant gurus such as Tom Peters and Jim Collins.
Hoopes, refreshingly, does not try to hide his opinions about these people and pretend to be neutral: his biases are evident from the start. Hoopes labels Taylor "the demon," but he does not automatically give support to more humane management thinkers, either. Thus Elton Mayo, whose psychological approach to management inspired much of the bottom-up theories in the mid-20th century, is even more heavily criticized than Taylor. The Mayo chapter is one of the best, in part because Mayo's disciples gathered so much data that Hoopes can pick it apart and demonstrate with specificity how Mayo proffered theories that contradicted his own research findings.
Hoopes' biographical approach-each guru gets his or her own chapter-has its pros and cons. On the one hand, the biographical details sometimes get in the way of the analysis: it remains an open question whether Hoopes dislikes Taylor and favors Mary Parker Follett for their different approaches to management theory, or because Taylor was a bully and Follett a nice person. But Hoopes' prose is clear and remarkably free of academic pretensions; he presents complicated ideas simply, but without condescension.
So, let us tum to the more problematic part of Hoopes' book: the critiques of the management gurus' theories. It might help to break down the key theses that Hoopes advances, to better pinpoint where he goes wrong. Bottom-up management, he argues, is even worse than top-down; rather than limiting the potential abuses of managerial power, it cloaks such abuses in a false morality. He also argues that Americans believe in sociopolitical democracy but that most workplaces lack such democracy. He claims that top-down workplace hierarchies produce better results than democratic organization structures and concludes that people need to accept that top-down management power is necessary to some degree, though its importance is overstated by the management gurus.
Basically, this book sets out these theories, but it never gets around to proving (or disproving) most of them. It would be possible to make evidence-based analyses of each of these points but Hoopes does not even attempt to do so. Instead, he merely draws his own personal conclusions based on the anecdotes and observations contained in his biographical sketches.
