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Call a fad a fad

R. Sundaram

YOU can, perhaps, muster the courage, on occasion, to call a spade a spade. But not a fad a fad, particularly, if you are a management preacher. Your cash till will stop ringing should you confess. Of all the subjects diligently studied, nothing is more 'fad' ridden than the study of management.

``Fiddle-faddle,'' from which the word is derived, means the aimless movement of the fiddler's bow. However, many a management fad during the course of its ``life cycle'' gathers enough critical mass to become a craze despite almost everyone privately ac knowledging it as all froth. In the process of ``culturing'' a fad, the banal and trite acquire an unwarranted and ineluctable dignity and by association they are turned into exotic concepts, verbalised and dished out as mantras.

Imagine! We think we know competence but we have to be taught core competencies. What is this plural for? Evangelism comes in a torrent; `a walk in the woods', `think outside the box', `leverage brand equities', `achieve conformance', `fitness for purpos e' and `right first time' and so on, in this new religion. Fad needs a guru and a few apostles and a multitude of evangelists, corporate honchos, airy-fairy slogans, mumbo jumbo and rhetoric. As our own Indian contribution to this tower of Babel, we can add Sanskrit slogans from Vedic management now which will be as arcane and unexplored as Vedic astrology. And to wit, it will be supported by the Government.

And then, there are real money-spinning avenues for management consultants if a particular fad can be somehow elevated to the status of haute couture and sold to the government and industry associations. For instance, after paying hefty sums to ISO consu ltants' organisations (preferably, from abroad and not much heard of European countries) with exotic sounding acronyms including a mandatory Q, companies can proudly proclaim that they have achieved a world-class cost overrun with the introduction of ISO 9001-2000.

Not to be left behind, politicians asked to address the inauguration of management or industry seminars add to the lexicon, high-sounding untranslatable idioms coined by their ghost writers to impress the audience. Of course, the notable exception is Mr George W. Bush who, in a industry meet said, ``I understand small business growth. I was one''.

Richard Pascale says that all promising ideas in management peter out after their moments of glory in the sun. It is his belief that management science despite its vitality is a kind of fashion industry, and helps as much to ensure long-term organisation al health as ``black robed physicians of Dark Ages did prolonging biological health''. Most fads fail as they traverse from ``success to excess''. When Baldrige winners fall on hard times, corporate naysayers go to town proclaiming that TQM does not work . When reengineering's own proponents concede that it does not work, they blame it on poor implementation. CEOs who are famous for managing-by-walking often lose their way.

It is not that management ideas or pejoratively the fads, by their very nature are bunk. But every time the paradigm shifts, a new thought process has to evolve to meet the challenges in this age of discontinuity and phenomenally tough competition. Survi vors are those who can spot the right ideas from the bill of fare and implement them honestly and quickly.