Filled with fascinating insider anecdotes and featuring a who's who in the consulting world, including Peter Drucker, Michael Porter and Bruce Henderson, this wry, absorbing book will enlighten executives about the value consultants actually bring to their clients. Gleefully revealing the magician's tricks, Stewart takes readers on a whirlwind tour of how this industry came to be a powerhouse. Following in the footsteps of 'shamans,' consultants 'envelop their work with an aura of sacred mystery' and 'outrageously unjustified' levels of self-confidence to add to their perceived expertise. He offers an insider's perspective on the industry, revealing the astonishingly high routine consultant fees and the absurdity of leading firms depending on consultants fresh out of school to tell them how to run their business. In addition, Stewart, a philosopher by education and both a consultant and writer by trade, tells his own personal inside-story as a management consultant for almost two decades. How do so many who know so little make so much by telling other people how to do the jobs they are paid to know how to do? Why do people pursue expensive graduate degrees that have no demonstrable effect on their performance? Why do so many bad books of management advice sell so well? How can I get a job where I make millions in stock options and then leave my company in the dust?Īlongside his devastating critique of management “philosophy” from Frederick Taylor to Tom Peters, Stewart provides a bitingly funny account of his own days in an ethically-challenged management consulting firm.Stewart (The Courtier and the Heretic) reflects on his unconventional path to becoming a successful management consultant despite a complete lack of business knowledge or experience, let alone an MBA. In short, Stewart claims most of the management business is utter nonsense, but yet it has grown into a big business. Striking fear into the hearts of clients with his swift, sharp analytical tools, Stewart lived in hotel rooms and got fat on expense account cuisine – until finally, he decided to turn the consultant’s merciless, penetrating eye on the whole management industry itself – the business schools, the consultancies, the gurus, and those lavishly compensated CEOs. This complete summary of the ideas from Matthew Stewarts book The Management Myth shows how many believe that business management is a body of discrete. But soon, he was telling veteran managers how to run their companies. Fresh from Oxford with a degree in philosophy and no particular interest in business, Matthew Stewart might not have seemed a likely candidate to become a consultant. The Management Myth offers an insightful romp through the entire history of thinking about management, a withering critique of pseudoscience in management theory, and a clear explanation of why the MBA usually amounts to so much BSleading us through the wilderness of American business thought.

The Management Myth by Matthew Stewart