In 2006, the CEOs of the Fortune 500 averaged $15 million in compensation In formal evaluations, as well as in my own estimation, those who did not have MBAs performed better, on average, than those who had MBAs.Ī 1988 study sponsored by the business schools themselves stated the obvious when it concluded that “key managers pay little or no attention to research or its findings.”

As of 2008, it has passed 140,000, representing one out of four master’s degrees of all types.

Note that the 2008 Statistical Abstract has 142,000 master’s degrees in business for 2005,ġ988, the year I started work, that number had grown to 70,000. In 1968, the nation’s universities awarded fewer than 18,000 master’s degrees in business subjects. Roughly one-quarter of graduates at top business schools and up to one-sixth of undergraduates at elite universities now begin their careers by advising other people how to manage their businesses. Twenty-five years later, it employed about 10 times as many. In 1980, the consulting industry, in the broadest definition, employed about 18,000 professionals worldwide. How do so many who know so little make so much by telling other people how to do the jobs they are paid to know how to do? Why do people pursue expensive graduate degrees that have no demonstrable effect on their performance? Why do so many bad books of management advice sell so well? How can I get a job where I make millions in stock options and then leave my company in the dust?Īlongside his devastating critique of management “philosophy” from Frederick Taylor to Tom Peters, Stewart provides a bitingly funny account of his own days in an ethically-challenged management consulting firm.Management consulting dates from the early decades of the twentieth century, it had been for much of its existence something of a gentlemen’s club. Striking fear into the hearts of clients with his swift, sharp analytical tools, Stewart lived in hotel rooms and got fat on expense account cuisine – until finally, he decided to turn the consultant’s merciless, penetrating eye on the whole management industry itself – the business schools, the consultancies, the gurus, and those lavishly compensated CEOs. But soon, he was telling veteran managers how to run their companies. Fresh from Oxford with a degree in philosophy and no particular interest in business, Matthew Stewart might not have seemed a likely candidate to become a consultant.

The Management Myth by Matthew Stewart