Knowledge Management

Progress Is Despite Management

A Harvard Business School professor’s notion about the managerial skills that got these remarkable endeavors to where they are today is no less important than the achievements themselves. Instead of attributing the performances to any matching management skills, Robert Hayes (ex-IBM and McKinsey employee) suggests that the achievements are despite management’s best efforts. Business pundits seem to be forever rediscovering the truths known to those who lived two generations earlier, he says (Hayes, 1984). He considered calling this the Hayes Law of Circular Progress until he discovered a similar proposition in an 1843 edition of the Edinburgh Review: “In the pure and physical sciences, each generation inherits ...