Holiday Reading: Friends Don’t Let Friends Read Business Books

I don't read business books. And I carefully avoid conversations with anyone spouting the latest management ideas. Their arguments tend to be puerile and their thinking uncritical.

As a going concern, management theory is bankrupt. Its canon of ideas offer highly simplistic views about how the world functions. There are four shopworn falsehoods trotted out in every business book.

First, that business is increasingly competitive. It's not. The corporate landscape is characterized by consolidation and oligopoly. Bigger companies and less competition. 

Second, that we live in an age of disruptive innovation and entrepreneurship. We don't. Most start-ups fail and the ones that get big turn to the government for protection. The goal of most business thinking is rent-seeking not disruption. 

Third, that the pace of business is accelerating. While we are busier than ever fighting back the tsunami of email, Slack notifications and meetings, there is no proof that decisions are being made any faster. The overload from the current fad for "collaboration" is having a stultifying effect on corporate agility.

Fourth, that globalization is both expanding and inevitable. This is the greatest weakness of management theory, its utter na?veté about politics. The globalized economy is not an independent entity magically put in motion by the laws of the universe. Globalization is the result of myriad choices, rules and ideas that were decided upon by people in government. The economy reflects embedded power structures.

The recent rise of populism and nationalism that seeks to reverse the gains of the global liberal order will have a profound effect on the business landscape. Management gurus have nothing to say on this topic.

To gain a real edge in business, I'd suggest the following list of thinkers to inform an understanding of business within the capitalist state:

Adam Smith, not so much for the invisible hand, but for his withering indictment of monopolistic capitalism.

Karl Marx, not so much for socialism, but for his clear-eyed assessment of the dynamism within capitalism.

John Locke, consent, property, and the role of the state.

Robert Nozick, the night watchman state, and the libertarian ideal.

John Rawls, a theory of justice.

Antonio Gramsci, cultural hegemony.

David Harvey, neoliberalism, social justice, and the spatial fix.

Francis Fukuyama, not so much for the end of history, but for unpacking the deep human desire behind the success of the liberal project.

Joseph Schumpeter, not so much for creative destruction, but for his formulation of democracy as competition.

As for my holiday reading, I’m going to dig deeper into understanding the current role of China in Africa. I am reading The Looting Machine by Tom Burgis, and China’s Second Continent by Howard French. I’m hoping to see beyond the Western media narratives that cast China as a neo-colonial exploiter of Africa’s natural and human resources. There’s much more to this story than meets the eye, and understanding it is largely predicated on using the analytical toolkit of political economy.

See you in 2017.

I owe much of the exposition on management theory to a recent article in The Economist. Link here.