Gurus, get lost

management guru who freely confesses that everything he has written so

far has been wrong?

Insurance? Insecurity? Or perhaps a feeling of inferiority? In truth,

it is probably a combination of all three, compounded by the belief that

home truths are unpalatable and that an expert is someone who comes from

far away with a multi-media presentation.

During the 1960s and 1970s business and management were almost dirty

words in the US. (''Trade'' always has been in the UK.) In the brave new

world after the Second World War, a new generation of baby boomers

aspired to Kennedy's Camelot, with an absence of want and equality for

all.

Consumerism and environmentalism were born to challenge the unfeeling

exploitation by big business and its unholy alliance with the military.

But by 1980 the US was under economic siege, its markets being attacked

from the east by the Germans and the west by the Japanese.

As Hayes & Abernathy pointed out in a seminal article entitled

Managing Our Way To Economic Decline (Harvard Business Review) the

United States had enjoyed one of the lowest rates of economic growth

over the past 20 years. Lower even than the United Kingdom.

Their diagnosis was that the short-term, financially driven

''milking'' approach -- followed by most American (and British)

companies with an emphasis upon the transaction -- had led to them

neglecting the task of building a relationship with their customers.

It is unsurprising that against this background, besieged executives

should flock in their thousands, and subsequently millions, to any

source which challenged the conventional wisdom that business, and

especially big business, is bad for you. And so the 1980s were to become

the decade of the managerial best-seller and see the birth of a new

generation of management guru.

First of the genre, and still all-time best-seller, was In Search Of

Excellence: Lessons From America's Best Run Companies by none other than

Tom Peters & Bob Waterman. Others such as The One Minute Manager,

Iaoccoca, The IBM Way and Britain's own John Harvey-Jones' Making It

Happen all followed in quick succession.

While many factors account for the success of these books, certain

common elements are shared by them all:

* They assert the superiority of American management systems.

* They stress entrepreneurial values and the money-making ethic so

strongly challenged by the consumerist movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

* They are based upon the analysis of practice and procedure in firms

or of people who are leaders in their field and manifestly successful.

* They reduce the ingredients of success to simple catechisms or

formulae.

* They emphasise that the essential catalyst and hero of the piece is

the manager.

In sum, they are simplistic and superficial. Long on ''what'' but

short, if not silent, on ''how''. (For those who have read these books

or, better still, have attended a major management seminar like that

given by Tom Peters in Edinburgh some weeks ago, can you identify three

actions you have taken as a result of what you read or heard? Actions

that have improved the performance of your organisation?)

It is a well-established fact that many of the companies featured in

In Search Of Excellence were in serious difficulty within two or three

years of its publication, while by 1990 almost all the excellent

companies had suffered setbacks.

The implication? There is no single formula which can guarantee

corporate success. Competition is a dynamic and interactive state in

which there are winners and losers.

In a study of competitive success by Susan Hart of Heriot-Watt

University and myself, we came to the conclusion that the best and most

professionally managed companies were those which were succeeding in the

low-growth, less glamorous and often ''sunset'' industries like textiles

and shipbuilding.

Why? Because, in the absence of growth and the entry of low-cost

competition from newly industrialising countries, any drop in

performance could lead to irretrievable loss and even failure.

By contrast, in those industries enjoying rapid growth like

information technology or electronics, or quasi-monopolies like water or

energy, mistakes or lack of performance are rarely punished or seldom

fatal. In the absence of retribution, complacency is commonplace ---

remember In Search Of Excellence?

More to the point, however, will Scotland and Scottish companies

succeed if they depend on the evangelical exhortations of ''a global

management evangelist (who) is selling the same message he would preach

in Auckland, Austin, or Frankfurt?'' (Alf Young, The Herald 17/6/94.)

Of course we should listen to what is being said, but how are we to

adapt this to the Scottish context? Perhaps it is time we looked closer

to home for a solution to our problems.

Scotland has a long tradition of innovation and excellence. Its

inventions and discoveries have transformed modern society; its people

have settled in and developed many parts of the globe; its engineers are

eponymous (beam me up Scotty).

In a knowledge-based society, education is everything. We have one of

the finest educational systems in the world. Our business schools aren't

bad either.

As the fever of mid-summer madness abates and the evenings draw in,

perhaps more of Scotland's managerial classes might turn to us for

advice?

Michael Baker, Professor of Marketing at Strathclyde University, was

talking to Yvonne Wightman.