Comment by neilk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neilk | Hacker News Reader

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Management theory, at least the aspects of it which become popular, seems fad-driven.

Matrix managment, holacracy, consensus, etc etc.

Is this a field where people discover things that last? For instance, fundamental limits to human communication, fundamental quantities that are conserved no matter what the configuration of management is.

Computer science has Brooks' observations on team size and communication, but that was only ever a guess, it's not really a law.

Generally people seem to adopt decision and management mechanisms that purport to address the pain they were having in their previous organization, while being proven enough to be plausible ("$FAMOUS_COMPANY does it") and not quantifiable enough to be a definite failure yet. Probably someone is writing a new airport book on "Founder Mode" right now!

So... what is known about human management? I'm not a fool, people are ever-changing and complex and what they want from their organizations changes all the time, but are there any eternal truths?

Ashby's law is the only law. [1]

That is, a control system (management structure) needs to match the system it controls in complexity. [2]

This book lists many of the major variables you need to control to run a project [3] such as "hiring/managing employees", "communications with stakeholders", ... A project has a beginning and end, unlike the activities of an ongoing business, but the list in PMBOK is pretty exhaustive. A small project/organization doesn't required a dedicated part for each one of them but as you get larger you need HR, PR, the dedicated project manager and such.

[1] A reductivist statement, yes, but Ashby's law takes the reductivism out of reductionism.

[2] The index case is the Wright Brothers' flier. People thought aviation was a matter of lift and thrust but it's actually a matter of controlling roll, yaw and pitch so you don't tumble and had Galileo understood that he could have built a glider.

[3] https://www.pmi.org/standards/pmbok

Didn’t Norbert Wiener come up with some during his work on cybernetics?

Yeah, there are other laws. But I'm trying to develop a joke where a criticism of reductivism (too simple analysis, see Marxism or Looksmaxxing) is capped off with "Ashby's Law is the only Law"

> but are there any eternal truths?

I think you know effectively the answer is no. Once you get past physiological needs, there aren't really any eternal truths for people. They need food, water air and to maintain a body temp.

After that, there are mostly generally observed things that hold for large groups of people. But there are always exceptions.

Is there any food that everybody loves? Any sport, any activity? It's hard to believe there would be a single thing that everyone wants in a system as complex as management in a company. Nothing that can be an eternal truth.

A bit tongue in cheek, but the closest is probably, keep your manager happy with you or get fired. But even that has exceptions.

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