[Publib] Management fads

[Joe Schallan]

John Richmond wrote:

 > Since Karen has mentioned wicked thoughts on management....
 > For a year (1993-1994) I worked as a chaplain at a large hospital
 > in Peoria.  Said hospital was in the throes of Total Quality 
Management.

Ah, yes.  TQM.  Or alternatively, TQC -- total quality control.

When I was in library school (1976-77), MBO (Management By
Objectives) was the rage among several of the faculty.  This technique
was the product of the famous management guru Peter Drucker:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_by_objectives

At the time, I was puzzled by the term.  Management by objectives?  As
opposed to? Had everyone up to that point been managing without setting
any goals whatsoever?  Did it really take us until nearly two millenia 
after
the birth of the Lord to discover that we really should have an 
objective
when we set out to do something?  I'm sure -- Mr. Drucker being Who He
Was -- there was a sophisticated methodology involved.  Whether this was
a case of elaborating That Which Is As Plain As The Nose On Your Face
into something impressively grandiose -- what Kurt Vonnegut calls
a granfalloon -- I am not prepared to say, and will not say as I have
no plans to delve back into the MBO literature of the 1950s - 1970s.

Predictably, MBO came and went.  In the late 1980s, the TQM
fad emerged, hand in hand with the "customer service revolution."
After 10,000 years of bartering, buying, and selling, mankind had
discovered the customer!  Woohah!

In about 1990, the university I worked at went absolutely bonkers
over TQM and customer service.  Previously sensible managers,
as if afflicted with ergotism, embraced the new program with
wild enthusiasm.  Workshops and all-day retreats were held;
quality circles were formed; quality-monitoring feedback loops
were established.

Two years later everyone had forgotten about TQM and the
quality circles were moribund.  It was back to business as usual.

At about the same time manufacturing enterprises discovered
the Deming Management Method.  Just as managers in the
service sector had wildly embraced TQM, industrial managers
(or their consultants) went nutzo over the Deming Method.
American manufacturing would be revolutionized!  Product
quality would soar!  Reliable toilet flappers, if not the Rapture,
would at last be at hand!

Numerous Deming books were published by the business
presses, and the formerly obscure W. Edwards Deming suddenly
found himself lionized.  "60 Minutes" did him.  I think Charlie Rose
may have done him, too.

Do we hear about Deming methods today?  Was American
manufacturing revolutionized?  Or did American bosses find
it just so much easier to ship the lot of it overseas where
industrial efficiency could be borne on the backs of fifty-cent-
an-hour workers?

In fairness I should note that there *was* great substance to
Deming's techniques.  They were the basis of Japan's success
in manufacturing, particularly the basis of their success in making
high-quality products.  I've owned both a Chevy and a Toyota, and
anyone who has can tell you in a very direct way about how well
Mr. Deming's techniques work.

(Even in this case, however, a critic may point out that in Japan
Deming was working within a culture that esteemed carefulness
and deliberateness, and therefore was working with managers
and employees predisposed to adopt techniques that promoted
quality of workmanship. I suppose this is a way of saying that
quality is cultural, something ingrained and not accomplished
through the ministrations of managers.)

I especially treasure W. Edwards Deming for one very
specific recommendation he made:  Abolish annual reviews
of performance.  Don't tinker with 'em, don't try to improve
'em.  Just get rid of them and never do them again.
Deming reported that this assertion never failed to elicit
a horrified gasp from the managers who were often assembled
to hear him speak after he became a management celebrity.

Deming maintained that annual reviews of performance were
excruciating to give, humiliating to receive, and contributed
NOTHING to the betterment of either the enterprise or the
individual, and in fact caused damage to the enterprise
because of the company time, and manager and employee
stomach acid, invested in doing them.

If I were a library director (though I never will be one), the
FIRST thing I'd do is abolish annual reviews.  I'd be willing to
go to the mat with city H.R. to make that happen.  If Andrew
Carnegie could build the world's greatest industrial enterprise
without annual reviews of performance, we ought to be able
to run a library without them.

Deming left behind an institute but, alas, seemingly little
lasting impact on The Way We Do Things:

http://www.deming.org/

But, given human nature, who actually does leave a lasting
impact on The Way We Do Things?  That was a tall order even
for Jesus.

Being an old goat, I've now seen wave after wave of management
fads wash over the big beach of the American service enterprise.

You know what? The beach looks exactly the same now as it
did in 1977.  We've had MBO, TQM, the Customer Revolution,
Employee Empowerment, and god knows what else roil the sands
and then ebb and disappear, never to be seen again.

(Raise your hand if, sometime in the early 1990s, you were on
a library committee charged with drafting your Mission Statement.
I bet that mission statement hangs in the staff lounge to this day.
I hope from time to time someone dusts it and gets the spider silk
off the frame.)

Librarians, being people who are well intentioned, literal minded,
and insecure, and thus gullible, seem especially susceptible
to management fads.  There is a fairly new one that may visit your
library soon:  Managing for Results.  ALA will even sell you a book
about how to do it:

http://tinyurl.com/hwhbd

(My apologies for tinyurling this, but as it is a link to an ALA
URL, the original is so long it stretches from Chicago out past
O'Hare and all the way to Arlington Heights.)

Managing for results . . . hmmmm . . .

Dang!  All these years we've been managing for no results
whatsoever!  Just floundering about, giving no thought to the
idea that we were supposed to be accomplishing something!

A "planning for results" set of workshops (and the documents they
are to produce) may be headed your way soon.  What I'll want to
know is whether ten years from now anyone in the library world
will remember "planning for results."  (That is, this particular
program, not the humdrum usual planning for results we've been
doing all along.)

I'm skewering the above with some trepidation, since I know some
of the people involved in the "planning for results" fad.  I can report
that they are exceptionally intelligent and good people who
believe in what they are doing.  In fact, though I am having fun
on Publib being snarky about management fads, I acknowledge
that the people who have been behind them have been intelligent,
good, and sincere people.

These considerations beg the question, Why are there
management fads?

First, it is an American trait to want to improve things.  And insofar
as we are a people in love with numbers, methodologies, and
the idea of objectivity, we believe that we can use these things to
alter human nature to effect improvements in efficiency.  We are,
collectively, still haunted by the ghost of Frederick Winslow
Taylor:

http://www.netmba.com/mgmt/scientific/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Winslow_Taylor

Second, since library managers are subject to annual reviews of
performance by their higher-ups, be they city managers, directors
of community services, or library boards, they must each year
demonstrate that they have provided, through Unique Leadership,
Vast Improvements and Striking Innovations. Library managers'
promotion to the next career level depends on this. Keeping things
humming along will not do.  There must be deep and visible notches
on the handle of the revolver.

Third, library managers must convince themselves that they
are important and needed.  Those of us who have been in the
profession for a long time have all had the experience of having
a manager or director depart and of having the city human
resources department drag its feet for months in finding a
replacement.  And we've discovered that the library does
not implode, and that, in fact, the workers left behind pull together
and keep the place humming along just fine.  Library managers
know that we know this, and in their understandable insecurity
feel compelled to afflict us with various Programs and Innovations
that will prove that they are indispensable.

The purpose of a management fad isn't to effect improvements;
the purpose of a management fad is to reassure managers about
their role.

So what should frontline librarians do given these contexts?
How can we keep going the extra mile for the patron, as we have
always done, with a minimum of upset and frustration?

First, ride it out.  Management fads ALWAYS ebb and then
disappear. The beach will be exactly the same.

The disappearance of management fads is a fundamental law
of business and may be relied upon.

Second, when an out-of-control manager pushes an innovation
that is not just an annoyance but will actually do damage, point
out the problem as deferentially as possible and suggest that
there may be another way.  If you can work it so "another way"
appears to be the idea of the manager, do it.  If these techniques
do not work, don't push it.  Ride it out.

Young librarians will be amazed at how often and how
effectively riding it out works.  I know they are filled with ideals
and enthusiasm (and lord knows the profession needs those),
but when an innovation-smitten manager is roiling the sands of
one's professional beach, riding the wave until it peters out
inevitably works.  Managers, like management fads, come and
go.  Yours will be promoted to roil someone else's beach.

[Unless you are working in the Siberia Branch, the place in your
system where inconvenient managers (and incovenient workers)
are sent to die.  Dealing with this is, properly, the subject of another
posting at another time. The short version is (a) discern that you are
in Siberia and (b) get out.  Even in this extreme circumstance,
putting in your request for a transfer and being willing to ride it out
will work.]

-- Joe Schallan
      Phoenix

PS.  As long as I'm dispensing advice, here's advance warning
of another management fad headed our way, one that has
implications for all the young MLS recipients waiting for jobs --
Baby Boomers Must Keep Working, a notion I will now formally
dub B2s/TD at TD (BabyBoomers: ToDrop at TheDesk).

Indeed, the Harvard Business School Press has published
a book about it:

Workforce Crisis -- How to Beat the Coming Shortage of Skills and
Talent, by Ken Dychtwald,  Tamara J. Erickson, and Robert Morison,
Harvard Business School Press, 2006, ISBN 1591395216.

I have no doubt that these three management consultants are
sincere and have carefully researched the matter.  In fact, I know
one of the authors (Morison) and he is an extraordinarily honorable
man.

But it is interesting that baby-boomer consultants find that the
impending retirement of their generation poses such grave risk to the
intellectual resources of the nation.  Baby boomers are so exceptional
and irreplaceable that younger workers cannot possibly take their
places!

(Aside from the authors' thesis, the prospect of continuing to press
the noses of boomers against the grindstone certainly deflects
the pension and healthcare funding crisis everyone says the boomers'
aging is about to inflict upon the nation.)

Anecdotal evidence suggests that aging librarians are indeed
not retiring fast enough.  I will leave it to the younger librarians
to comment on whether boomer-librarians'  knowledge, skills,
and abilities are so utterly irreplaceable.

For my part, when my time comes, I'm going to hang it up.
If I want to sleep until 10, then I will sleep until 10.  If I want
to listen to Donizetti's Maria Stuarda, Anna Bolena, and
Roberto Deveraux all in one day, two times each, by damn
then I will listen.  And if, alternatively, I want to blow the
day watching every goddam baseball game on the tube,
then I will watch.

Unless I'm spending all day trying to understand my
prescription-drug-benefit program.

Barring the latter, retirement will be great.

And the library will hum along just fine without me.

And after someone forwards this to my masters, they may
very well decide that the library can hum along without me
NOW.

But first they will have to do an annual review of
performance. <g>


PPS.  I hearby formally dub boomer-librarians BLIBs.
And boomer-librarian bloggers are BLIBLOGGERs.