The author has an unusual incoming perspective. He applied for a position at a consulting firm on a lark. A he has a basic degree in physics and a masters in German philosophy he wasn’t inherently qualified. Hired, though, as an “experimental”, he did bring an unlikely and powerful mental toolkit to a business populated by MBAs.
He was overequipped for the job. His philosophical training seems to have given him the intellectual confidence to cut through the smarmy jargon, the circular reasoning, the general cruddiness of the business culture academic pretension.
Thus he wrote a double book, chapters detailing his specific work experience interleaved with chapters investigating the conceptual foundations of “management theory”. In this, he is showing the deductive method by example, how the specific instance and the general case mutually inform one another.
He decided to check up on the credibility of Fredrick Winslow Taylor and unearths the probable truth that he was a massive, shameless, utter, self aggrandizing fraud. This isn’t the way I was was exposed to F.W. Taylor in my early 20th century history class. Taylor, it seems, was little more than a well compensated pimp.
Then he takes on another seminal figure, Elton Mayo, a preposterous mountebank embraced by the Rockefellers, who believed that workers were driven by unconscious thoughts hidden in the “night minds” who provided some of the rhetorical undergirding for modern authors like Tom Peters…
Then he takes on the epic gassbaggery of no less than Peter Drucker, who seems to have built for himself a mini-empire of non-falsifiable gnomic utterences that consistently, and foggily have been predicting some form of grand transformation right around the corner since he began writing in the 1940s.
To mention but a few of the many sacred cows he roasts to a well browned perfection.
Interleaved are chapters detailing his personal experiences in what may have been the most dysfunctional organization to have ever defined itself as an ongoing enterprise, populated with sociopathic narcissists, lupine neurotics spending phenomenal sums on “industrial psychologists” who conducted psychotherapy during office hours, in the offices of his employers, shit spewing phonies whose words weren’t worth the oxygen they consumed, bogus analyses driving pointless consulting contracts…
I’m telling you… there aren’t too many books in this genre that would dare reveal what Matthew Stewart did in this one…
By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.
-Confucius