The Myth of Management

Soon on Amazon!

For more than a century, management has been taught and practised as if companies were machines and business success a function of correct formulas. We built a managerial religion endowed with sacred terms like strategy, engagement, and competitive advantage—and we convinced ourselves that, with enough analysis and control, outcomes would follow intention.

Yet step into any company and reality feels very different. Strategies fail despite knowledge, rationality, and coherence. Engagement programmes flourish while paradoxically causing fundamental harm to employee well-being. Unpredictability seeps into every plan. And success often appears not because of any clean causal design, but in spite of it.

Drawing on various disciplines—physics, complexity science, social sciences, history, management, computation—and the author’s own experience, the central argument of this book is simple, though uncomfortable:

Modern management is built on the wrong epistemological foundations.

You’ll discover why managers cling to coherent narratives that don’t reflect reality, why conventional practices mislead more than they guide, why success cannot be designed, and why survival and variation drive eventually success.