Executive management (in the US, possibly elsewhere, but I cannot comment there) tends towards something like fads, the eras of which tend to be marked by a book describing exactly what the fads are, or at least the ramifications of them. These books have twice had titles like “The [Person’s Name] Principle”; I would be amused if somebody wrote a book like that for today, because the fads are plain to see.
Personally I see six broad eras in modern industry:
The Capital Era: Ended sometime in the 1910s, characterized by what we might, if we were uncharitable, describe as nepotistic management. A more charitable interpretation is that management was kinship-oriented; you hired managers because you knew them. The book marking its end was The Principles of Scientific Management. The major fault in this era is insufficient meritocracy in management; managers often had no idea what their employees did.
Technocracy / Efficiency Experts - Ended sometime in the 1940s or 50s, characterized by management by people who were experts in the subject matter of their employees, and a big push towards increasingly minute process improvements in human activities. I’d say the book marking its end was Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. The major fault in this era was that management was often oriented around the needs of the managerial unit, rather than the business as a whole.
The Nuclear Era - Ended sometime in the 1970s; I’d say three books marked its end; The Mythical Man Month, The Peter Principle, and Systemantics. Characterized by systems-building. The major fault in this era was, basically, bureaucratic red tape, created by the businesses themselves in the pursuit of process, including the processes for promotion.
The Dilbert Era - Ended in the 1990s, and The Dilbert Principle marked its end. (Okay, there were other books, in particular Competing on the Edge : Strategy as Structured Chaos). Characterized by a promotion approach which tended to prioritize “soft skills”, as an apparent reaction to The Peter Principle, it resulted in a lot of managers who were good at “talking the talk”. (If you think about the selection criteria involved in sorting by people with good people skills, and avoiding promoting your most productive employees away from what they’re really good at, what you’re disproportionately selecting for is incompetent people who can talk their way into a job they’re not qualified for.)
The Startup Era - Ended in the 2010s. I think the book that marks the end of this era most is probably Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography, but I wouldn’t necessarily exclude The Big Short, either. Neither of these books are management books, exactly - but neither of these books -aren’t- management books, exactly, either. Steve Job’s autobiography probably runs closer to the truth. Characterized strongly by credentialism in hiring and promoting - if you wanted to be promoted, you needed a degree. (If you want to know, ultimately, why so many millenials are so mad at the college system, basically, it’s because they were raised in an era when college degrees were the path to promotion and success - and that stopped being the case more or less exactly as they were wrapping up college and entering into the workforce. It basically had to be, because all the white collar workers had college degrees now, so it no longer distinguished you from the crowd.)
The Lateral Era - Still running, and the path to management in today’s era is, strictly, lateral promotions. So you start off as a junior, you typically have to switch jobs to ever be promoted to a senior, then you switch jobs again to end up as a non-manager with a managerial title (head of X department, or project manager), then you switch jobs again to reach a managerial position - and on and on and up and up.
I’d like to talk about today’s system. I’d say there are two advantages to this system.
First, information is transmitted between organizations relatively quickly; there’s no point in industrial espionage, just look for the low-ranking person looking for a lateral promotion and hire them, and they’ll bring over all the information with them.
Second, corporations are increasingly similar; you don’t have to learn your job all over again when you go to work for somebody else, because they’re probably already doing things the same way as the company you left.
These lead naturally into two of the four central disadvantages:
First, failure -also- propagates across organizations. There are two mechanisms for this, the first being that people don’t just bring good information with them, but also bad; insofar as incentives are misaligned at a societal level, things converge on bad consensus as easily as good. (Goodbye sound-absorbing cubicles, hello constant distractions.) The second is that the system as a whole kind of encourages failing upward; people hate changing jobs, and often do so only when they are about to get fired. So we’re back at a kind of cross-company Dilbert Principle, where we, at a more communal level now, tend to promote the incompetent. (Just not as bad, because competent people eventually get fed up and go somewhere else, also, at a rate somewhat proportional to the number of incompetent people in management, reaching a kind of balancing point where any additional incompetent people would increase the competent people moving.)
Second, corporations are increasingly similar; if you don’t like the way corporations are run, you’re kind of screwed, as a prospective employee. And there’s less of a testing bed for new ideas in general, which is remarkable given that everybody is trying to emulate Steve Jobs, who wasn’t exactly known for doing what everybody else was doing.
Third, institutional knowledge and corporate culture are fundamentally broken - and we don’t actually have good replacements for these things, so instead, we just kind of dumb everything down as much as possible, because we can’t actually count on anybody sticking around. (Indeed, the more institutional knowledge and corporate culture a given person has, the more likely they are to be looking to get a lateral promotion to somewhere else.)
And fourth - we run back into the nepotism framework a lot. If you’re hiring from the outside -anyways-, you might as well pick somebody you know. And the erosion of the insider-outsider distinction in management (at a certain point subject matter expertise is just one of many factors in picking a new manager from your pool of applicants) means we’re in many respects back to the era when management didn’t really know what their employees do.
Somebody should write a book, assuming somebody hasn’t already. Because there’s kind of a twenty-year cycle here, where it takes about ten years for ideas to be circulated, put into practice, and the problems slowly discovered, before new ideas get formed in response to the old. But we had a pretty big interruption to the way things work, and a new work-from-home era may be supplanting The Lateral Era somewhat early, so we may as well go ahead and just start early.