What is Reddit's opinion of The Management Myth: Debunking Modern Business Philosophy?

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A useful term that I learned relating to this topic is Rhineland Capitalism, coined to label the difference between how the corporation is treated in Germany vs the US. In Europe, co-determination is mandatory, which is having workers represented on the board, fundamental to the decision-making of the company. There are also far more robust unions, something called workers councils which are unions on a local level, and unions that are more national in scope. The US has laws prohibiting this kind of scenario, like the Taft-Hartley act.

This is one of the most enjoyable books I've read on the subject and functions as a good introduction: The Management Myth. It's written by a philosopher who worked as a management consultant for a time and takes the reader through some of the history and the illogic of some corporate thinking.

When people think of managerialism, it's typically centered around the macro level, for example, mass layoffs of middle management in order to boost share prices, or CEO bonuses awarded while a company is going bankrupt. It's a morality arising from what's taught at business schools, thinking in terms of a cost-benefit analysis without care to what the downstream effects are on people's lives, a hierarchical approach to thought that is often at odds with the actual well-being of a company or the community. This is the book where the term was first articulated.

When you describe management on an interpersonal level, this is a more traditional understanding of management. People don't need to get an MBA to understand how to treat people well, we all learn as children that the surest way to be socially unpopular is to follow all the rules. Within corporate management, there is pervasive gaming of the system to increase profits while providing no value, for example with stock buybacks. Jamie Dimon recently testified on the overdraft fees JP Morgan made over the pandemic, well over a billion dollars that nonetheless wouldn't have substantially cut into the companies profits of 20 some billion dollars. His defense was that they waived fees for people who asked.

That's managerialism in action, this idea that if they don't ask it's ok to take their money, the fact that people are overdrawing on their account doesn't necessarily mean they can't afford to give money to JP Morgan. Credit card companies did the same thing raising interest rates, people had to call and waste hours of their lives to contest the interest rate hike.

It's the normalization of greed as an ethical good. The explanation of greed as being economically savvy. The misrepresentation of economic ideas as laws of nature to justify sociopathic behavior. Where managerialism is applied is typically where people don't have contact with the people who experience the consequences of their decisions.

I'd highly recommend "The Management Myth". It's a highly readable, thoughtful debunking of a lot of management tropes.

There's a summary article by the author on the Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/06/the-management-myth/304883/

Edit: Management Myth – link to Kindle page.