Beyond Numbers and Material Rewards

Published in The Express Tribune, November 30^th, 2015

Today the dominant paradigm in the business world is Result Based Management (RBM), which is taught to MBA’s the world over. This is unfortunate, since this is a seriously flawed model for management. RBM maxims like 'If you can't measure it, you can't manage it' are widely accepted as pearls of wisdom, while debunkers call it a ‘costly myth,’ and ‘patently ridiculous garbage’. Creating good managers is essential for development but, as Henry Mintzburg points out in a devastating critique, we need “Managers, not MBA’s”. The alternative to RBM is Procedure Based Management (PBM) which is the dominant practice in Germany and Japan, where it has produced excellent results. As opposed to this, Professor Zuboff who taught Harvard MBA’s for fifteen years writes that “I have come to believe that much of what my colleagues and I taught has caused real suffering, suppressed wealth creation, destabilized the world economy, and accelerated the demise of the 20th century capitalism in which the U.S. played the leading role.” Our purpose here is to clarify the difference between RBM and PBM and advocate switching to the latter paradigm.

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