Cargo Cult Management

gigaom.com

22 points·diego··7 comments

Here comes the requisite five minute manager hate.

If the suits are so incompetent, why are they in charge of everything? Perhaps they aren't optimizing for what you think they're optimizing?

I'm not attacking the suits, just managers who lack intellectual honesty and the appreciation for the difference between causation and correlation.

Probably because a lot of smart people find doing other things less managerial more rewarding.

Every time I have to fill a spreadsheet that could be generated by a computer program, I die a little.

Or, as pg could put it, sometimes a promotion into management resembles being scheduled for daily waterboarding sessions. Being dragged into a cargo cult is no fun.

Eric Lippert wrote an article a while back about "Cargo Cult Programmers" (http://blogs.msdn.com/ericlippert/archive/2004/03/01/82168.a...)

It would appear to be a meme that can be applied to almost anything...

Some writers, when faced with a problem, think "I know, I'll use a cliche". Now they have two problems.

Some writers, when faced with a problem, think "I know, I'll use a cliche". Now they have two problems.

Is that "Cargo Cult Writing?"

Is this "Cargo Cult Meta-commenting?"

Nope, it's Cargo Cult Recursion. (Which is the application of the "Cargo Cult" metaphor by imitating the surface details of other such applications. We keep using those words. I do not think they mean what we think they mean.)

My verdict: Cargo cult critics ("Somebody else criticizes, so I can do as well, in a cargo cult way, by treating what they do a prori mocking, and without real understanding of matters") of management practices.

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