Overview
Praise for The Management Myth
“At last, a book that knocks the Kings of Consulting off their thrones. The Management Myth is a rare and often very humorous exposé on the shenanigans behind the corporate empire that has catapulted us down the current road to economic turmoil.”—John Perkins, best-selling author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and The Secret History of the American Empire
“Filled with fascinating insider anecdotes and featuring a who’s who of the consulting world . . . this book will enlighten executives.”—Publishers Weekly
Synopsis
A brilliant, not-to-be missed account of the reasons why management thinks the way it does—and why they are flawed.
The Barnes & Noble Review
Matthew Stewart, the proud but virtually unemployable holder of a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford, found himself rather suddenly -- and virtually without qualification -- hired as a management consultant by one of the field's leading firms. He was an "experiment," one of the wild-card, non-MBA types that big consulting groups make a practice of taking on. The career that would supply him with a large inventory of material to support his merciless indictment of the whole idea of business consulting appears to have begun -- given the book's interweaving of autobiography, philosophy, history of management theory, and on-the-job anecdotes it's hard to tell for sure -- with a company called A. T. Kearny. Most of Kearny's employees had learned to make believe they knew what they were doing at the notorious McKinsey & Company -- a firm that, according to Stewart, resembles Kearny in being useless and in fact risible in the final analysis. Some of those Kearny "experts," Stewart included, went on to form the "boutique" firm called the Boston Consulting Group. The BCG is at the center not only of Stewart's personal story but of his jeremiad against the entire "profession," which is extremely convincing and therefore appalling. But as we'll see, there are a few kinks in the hose with which the author beats his subject nearly to death.