Teresa Green:
Nobody has ever been able to work it out, and I can well remember back in the eighties, they hired a company, called by staff "munch and crunch" who fired just about anybody who had achieved anything.
Actually "Crunch, Munch and Punch" - Cresap, McCormick and Paget. Such dear fellows, that brings back memories.
Every four years or so a new set of management buzzwords are released in the form of a book from Harvard Business School and management consultants around the world dutifully transcribe them into management babble and then begin selling their services to the easily gulled as a way of improving their business. I know. I've done it.
I'm not up on the latest buzzwords, the last I heard was "emotional intelligence". Then there is the whole "empowerment" thing. Then there are huge and complex computer systems sold as "decision support systems" allowing senior management to "drill down" through layers of complex data - a micromanagement facilitation tool.
Then we have "knowledge management" - systems designed to allow companies to suck the knowledge out of their employees brains so they retain it after they sack them. "Core competencies", "Business process re-engineering", "Lean sigma" and on it goes.
The list is endless, only limited by the fertility of academic minds at Harvard.
Then of course we have had three waves of centralisation/decentralisation.
Centralisation was the thing in the 60's - economies of scale and all that, plus the need to use the new IBM computer for something useful.
In the 70's and 80's it was all about decentralisation into strategic business units, devolving decisionmaking downwards, demerging, getting rid of "non-core" activities.
..And of course in the 90's, it's all about centralisation again, driven by the possibilities of the internet and wet dreams of the CEO being able to detect the lowliest employee skiving off for a few minutes.
It's a wonder that you all aren't being required to be microchipped...