Earl Mardle nails it. But so long as there is demand from insecure executives for rules they’re supposed to follow, there will be gurus to provide them with exactly that. ~Sébastien Paquet
“My kvetch about management gurus is that they observe patterns of behaviour in successful people,enterprises, etc. and then convert them into rules which other, less successful people or organisations are supposed to follow in order to be successful.
“[…] Instead of trying to get people to shoehorn themselves into some executive straightjacket, we should be looking through our businesses for people in the ranks who display the characteristics he talks about. We should be encouraging and challenging and testing those people, just as we do with athletes, pushing them to push their envelopes to see if they can break through to become one of the “effective executives” and making sure that when they do, we have given them plenty of reason to be loyal, or at least grateful as they move on.
“[…] Effective Executives are not a product that we can make, but an emergent property of correctly functioning organisations.” ~Earl Mardle
