Burden | Change | Desire | Emotions | Excellence | Labor | Leadership | Management | Success | Techniques

MANAGEMENT TECHNIQUES
Every few years business leaders celebrate the birth of “new” management techniques and new gimmicks that promise to solve employee, customer and product quality problems. It’s as if new were synonymous with better. Well, it isn’t. New techniques do not improve morale, productivity, quality or profits. At best, they offer short-lived hope and excitement, which any changes, even superficial ones, usually engender. Experience shows that technique-oriented programs eventually die, but not because the techniques themselves are bad. The problem is that many users are not true believers of the emotional and intellectual assumptions the techniques reflect. Suppose, for example, a manger learns how to use the techniques of Management By Objectives, but really believes that the only objectives that count are the manager’s. MBO is doomed to fail. Many managers employ techniques that do not represent their basic values or true feelings. Yet, they go through the motions because they would like to think that the techniques they’ve learned have powers-independent of…