NFIB

Be Cautious of Cookie-Cutter Management
12/ 22/ 2003

by Charles R. McConnell

When you roll out a batch of cookie dough and apply a cookie cutter, you get the shape you desired, clearly and neatly defined. But you also find there's some material left over, sometimes quite a lot. While the extra dough can be rolled out and cut again, eventually you're left with a remaining lump of dough that doesn't fit the required shape.

Most efforts applied to produce a desired shape from some sort of material involve cutting, trimming, grinding or otherwise removing material to leave the desired shape. Most of the time the material left over from the shaping process -- like the excess dough -- is ignored, for all practical purposes lost to future consideration. This is what occurs when we attempt to apply specifically named management techniques that are often described as "flavors of the month."

Management, especially the day-to-day management of people and their activities, is often a frustrating process lacking any apparent structure. So it becomes reasonable for us to wish for order in our approach to work. However, we sometimes tend to look beyond order and seek formula approaches to work -- recipes for performing certain tasks or handling particular kinds of problems. We look for cookie cutters, unconsciously willing to settle for the neat boundaries created by these instruments and equally willing to ignore what falls outside.

Cookie-cutter management is especially prevalent in the popular literature of management. Many authors have named their own approaches to management using labels that each fervently hopes will catch on and become the next big thing. This sells books, attracts speaking engagement and enhances an author's value as a consultant.

Consider, for example, the "excellence" movement inspired by In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman. This extremely insightful book did not itself espouse a formula approach to management, but the concepts it advanced were taken up by others who did exactly that -- created dozens of cookie-cutter approaches as they attempted to formularize these concepts into "excellence programs." A similar thing happened years earlier with management by objectives (MBO). The entire MBO concept sprang from a single chapter of The Practice of Management, an excellent book written by Peter F. Drucker in the mid-1950s. As Drucker presented it, MBO was largely honesty and common sense; it was not the periodic exercise with forms and notebooks that it became for so many managers. Drucker himself even cautioned against allowing such a process to become a paper mill, yet many of those who picked up on his work and ran with it turned it into one of the greatest wastes of time and paper ever to burden managers.

The major cookie cutters of recent years have also included many of the permutations of the principles of total quality management (TQM). There have also been many less notable approaches that have come and gone as author after author has attempted to originate the next "flavor of the month."

The good news about the cookie cutters is that they each encompass concepts of potential value to managers at all levels. The bad news is that they don't include everything that every manager might need to know. Cookie cutters offer technique, but technique will take one just so far in management. There is no procedural substitute for honesty, fairness, compassion and sound judgment.

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