Management Science

I was at a conference this week that had Doug Ready as one of the keynote speakers. Mr Ready took us through a research he had conducted interviewing executives in 45 organisations that had just gone through some form of transformation. Quite a research muscle indeed, but how valid can one take the findings to be?

These pieces of research approach organisations as a unit (note some of the organisations researched were 100,000+ people strong). UK ex-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously said “society? there is no such thing! there are individual men and women and there are families”. I believe a similar working principle could be applied to organisations (though we shall discuss this some other time).

The issue that caught my attention is that we are deriving conclusions from the personal judgement executives have of what might have happened during these transformations. It is more likely than not that in their 15-25 years of professional experience the executives being interviewed would have read an average of 20 management books, attended an average of 30 management conferences and courses and been coached by a couple of management experts (my estimate). In their minute of insight glory, would you not expect them to describe their experiences with the same mental models and with the same words their admired gurus would (transparency, buy-in, consistency)?

(Not to do with Mr Ready himself) Management Theory needs to be careful in sifting out elixir doctors and finding its way into science. For one thing, self-feeding, executive-interview-based research, like marrying cousins, could throw its genetics down the drain.