Management Trends: The Fast and the Furious

I was looking at the Fast Company blog today and they mentioned an article in the Wall Street Journal Online entitled Why Management Trends Quickly Fade Away.

The article discusses a recent management study that appears in the April/May issue of the Academy of Management Journal (by Robert David and David Strang). While the article covers several ideas for why new fads are so short-lived, it seems as though the study fixates on “marginally competent” consultants that market and sell ideas when they start to gain popularity even though they have little or no experience with them.

While I consider the point to be valid, it bothers me that the study does not seem to hold the companies buying these services accountable for their part in buying into these fads and applying them to their organizations.

Fast Company Now (the blog) is conducting a poll asking readers why they think new management fads fail. The choices they include are:

• Consultants offer services in which they lack expertise
• New ideas come and go faster and faster
• People try to apply the same idea to too many dissimilar problems
• New practices and processes don't work for every organization  

You can probably guess my two favorites from looking at The Change Resistors: The Good or Adapt and Adopt.

Interestingly, when last I checked, the respondents and I agree.

What’s your opinion?

Technorati tags: Business, Change Management

Comments

[ann michael]

Well shame on them!

Leaders need to be accountable for leading. Even highly competent consultants need strong support in defining how their knowledge and experience can be effectively applied to an organization.

There's no plug and play!

[Liz Strauss]

I agree with you. But most people wouldn't stop to think that a company should question a consultant until AFTER they hire that person as full-time staff and thereby decide he or she is a regular person with no credibility because he or she now works for the organization. I've never worked for an organization that hired consultants so I bear them no ill will, in fact I've often wished for their their help.

The further we are from a person or an idea the more important or glamorous he/she/it seems.