This column is read by many students of management, so I will have to be careful. I have tried to read management literature. I once almost became a professor in a management school, but had to give up because the school’s tax on professors’ outside earnings meant that I would be paying the school to work for it. But I always had the feeling that much of management literature was pretentious nonsense or moral sophistry. Now I can attribute that view to someone else — Matthew Stewart.

Stewart is a chronically stray animal. In college, he had thought of doing astrophysics. He somehow lost his way and studied metaphysics instead. After doing a postgraduate degree in philosophy, he needed a job. Some of his friends were going to join management consultancies, so he too shot off a few applications, and landed a job in one. He must have been abnormally successful, for he set up his own management firm. And it must have done well, for now he does philosophy full time and still lives in comfort.

But after he left management consultancy and had time to himself, he decided to read management literature and find out what he had missed. He found nothing; he was just bored to death. He calls management literature toothless wisdom, and compares it to the sermons of Deepak Chopra. It is not entirely useless, but just as people can live satisfactory lives without listening to Chopra, they can manage with reasonable competence without doing a management degree.

All sciences rely to a greater or less extent on quantitative techniques. Stewart is scathing about their use in management. I can hardly believe it, but he says one of his colleagues invented a technique called two-handed regression: if the data do not fall on a well-behaved straight line in a bivariate graph, he would remove the recalcitrant observations with both hands. According to him, management consultants are as little interested in finding out whether their prescriptions for their clients worked as in what happened to their ex-wives. They are engaged by CEOs of firms in trouble; they just help a CEO keep a sinking firm afloat till he finds another job.

Stewart traces management theory to two early 20th-century pioneers. Frederick Winslow Taylor measured how much work labourers did, and advocated management by measurement and control. Elton Mayo attributed higher productivity to better relationships, and advocated creation of a friendly, egalitarian environment. These two ideas management experts repeat in new, impressive words. W.B. Given favoured bottom-up against top-down management in 1949, James C. Worthy celebrated flat as against hierarchical structures, Tom Burns and G.M. Stalker favoured lateral as against vertical information flows in 1961, and Rosabeth Moss Kanter said in 1983 that integrationist organizations would win over segmentalist ones. Every new expert put the dichotomy in new words, but it could be traced back to the earliest management experts.

Management education does have bits usable in business. Accounting is a good way of recording and summarizing financial transactions. Statistics is a good instrument for extracting robust conclusions from figures. Economic modeling can be used to clarify decision-making. And management students are made to talk a lot and make many presentations; that teaches them to communicate. Thus, management education is not quite useless. But all its useful bits come from other disciplines which evolved their techniques without ever thinking about their use in management. And since management pays well, it attracts bright students; that explains part of their higher market value.

Is management science then bunkum? Stewart would not go so far; at this point he becomes polite. He says it consists of religious beliefs that can be traced back to two schools of philosophy — rationalism and humanism. Thus in essence, management is just elementary philosophy dressed up in fancy words — a minor branch of metaphysics. Which, then, is the right management philosophy? That is a wrong question to ask. For in philosophy, no school of reasoning finally triumphs against another. But having been a management consultant, Stewart can hardly end on that indeterminate note. So he gives three pieces of advice. First, expand the domain of your analysis. Second, hire people with diverse experiences. And finally, communicate, communicate, communicate. That is the message of Stewart’s article in The Atlantic Monthly. It may not be the last word in management — in fact, it is somewhat old — but it is superb writing.