Management Fads

I ran into a new one in today's perusing of job notices. I'd never heard of a, "Scrum Master," and it sounded to me to be dirty work. Off to our other friend (via our BFF Google), Wikipedia.

"Scrum is an iterative and incremental agile software development framework for managing product development. It defines "a flexible, holistic product development strategy where a development team works as a unit to reach a common goal", challenges assumptions of the "traditional, sequential approach" to product development, and enables teams to self-organize by encouraging physical co-location or close online collaboration of all team members, as well as daily face-to-face communication among all team members and disciplines in the project."

I think what all those trendy words and misplaced commas mean is everybody playing nice in a sandbox with minimal parental supervision and a desire to build a pretty sand castle.

That sent me on a trip down memory lane to visit management fad pull-outs of the years gone by. I missed, by only a year, our entire organization being taken through the ordeal of everyone literally wearing different colored hats. Why? For reasons that no one could articulate to me because they either dissolved into giggles or became nauseous.

I did get to go through the Lewis Allen navel-gazing. We all, I mean all but the managers and executives, spent many hours in many meetings and off-sites figuring out who was a Circle 1 (decision-maker) and who was a triangle (obstructionist - my interpretation, nor Mr. Allen's). For every element of our regulatory work. I did enjoy staying in Monterey at the Asilomar Conference Center, though. For months, you could hear cubicle arguments about someone not being the shape or number that they thought they were. All the project managers continued to do whatever necessary to get around the downtrodden and shrill support people, and all was back to right again.

We did matrix management until one executive decided he'd be matrixed out of budget. After that, it became a phrase to utter with disgust and disdain, frequently associated with (spitting sound) Management by Objectives. Management By Walking Around was favored for a few, the others finding they had nothing to say to the likes of, "The girls in the typing pool." We had a typing pool because of the firm belief that engineers and scientists didn't need early word processing equipment to type. Typing, you see, was beneath the dignity of those men and we had girls for that. I got myself in trouble having a righteous feminist fit about that.

On, and what engineer could resist business process re-engineering? Every time I asked an engineer what made them special, I got the same response. A moment of silence, followed by a misty-eyed stare to the imagined horizon, and the utterance of the word, "Design." I gave up asking. I did, however, learn that Civil Engineers rule. Chemical, or comical engineers, depending on whether you  were one or not, were regarded as nothing more than domestic engineers. In other words, girl's work.

We were all touched by so many other management schema. Total Quality Management, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Zero Based Budgeting, and on and on. So many taught and embraced by the girls but not so much the men. Or for that matter, the girls who pretended to be men.

When I retired, our organization was still recovering from Six Sigma. What six had to do with the 18th letter of the Greek alphabet escaped me, and the notion of having a black belt in it made me dizzy to contemplate. All I know is that we wasted a ton of time and energy failing to realize that business management models don't work with doing the work of the People of the Great State of California.

I tried to get two books identified as required reading for all employees:  Miss Manners' Guide to Impeccably Correct Behavior and The No Asshole Rule. This chick thinks that would have solved a lot.