‘Meet the new boss, same as the old boss’, most people might have muttered cynically at the news that the Global Peter Drucker Forum had launched a five-year initiative to renew and reform the discipline of management for the 21st century. For them – and who could blame them – management is just a given: at best a yawn and at worst a bullying boss or a set of inscrutable work rules emanating without appeal from above. 

But whether they know it or not, management affects everyone’s life. It’s critical for the achievement of human purpose, and improving its effectiveness, improbable as it sounds, is the most powerful lever we have for making life better for almost everyone on the planet. 

Paradoxically, that’s partly because the present version leaves so much to be desired. Consider the evidence of the UK, transfixed this winter by the scandal of hundreds of sub-postmasters, prosecuted by the state-owned Post Office and wrongly convicted for fraud, that has dominated headlines since Christmas. Like the earlier suicide of a primary-school head teacher after an unfavourable school inspection, the tragic human story has implications that go much further than the individual organzations involved. 

Missing from the analysis is any recognition that these are peas from the same pod – failures of management that speak volumes about what is wrong with the present rules of the game. Thus, every other sentence uttered about the Post Office calls those responsible ‘to be held to account’. In this case the accumulated injustices were so flagrant that it was impossible for former CEO Paula Vennells to escape the rap. But it’s no accident that for 20 years no one did – just as, notoriously, no one went to jail after the Great Crash of 2008, another management-made crisis, while those implicated in the debacles that regularly disfigure our public and privatised services all too frequently crop up later in senior management positions elsewhere.

Today’s management might have been designed not to hold people accountable. Built as it is to a top-down, command-and-control design philosophy, it uses performance measures that rarely have anything to do with purpose as the customer understands it, instead relating to internal concerns such as activity, budget, sales or other financial consideration. In this context doing a good job means ‘making the numbers’, which not only entitles managers to a pat on the back and a bonus, but also neatly immunises them against accountability for anything else. 

This is why no one, including the 17 successive ministers with oversight during the period, wanted to rock the Post Office boat. It’s also why so many scandals occur in organisations that have been given glowing reports by inspectors, the latters’ exercises in box-ticking having zero relation to the experience of those on the receiving end. So inspections often yield false positives. But the case of head teacher Ruth Perry is a terrible reminder of the tragic human consequences of the reverse.

But then as soon as you’re aware of it, mismanagement is currently the distinguishing feature of the whole UK economy (a matter of some irony, considering the prominence of its professional services sector, including Big Consultancy). Beyond the Post Office and education, think of the crisis-ridden NHS, beyond shambolic railways and HS2, bankrupt local councils, sewage-spattered rivers and coastline, shamefully deficient social care and institutionally incompetent and sometimes malevolent police. Right on cue, the National Audit Office recently put a figure of £20 bn a year on the savings that could be reaped from better governance and management of UK infrastructure alone. 

Turning it round, try a thought experiment: if trains got us on time where we wanted to go, you could see a doctor within a week, crossed the odd policeman walking the beat, weren’t ripped off by greed- and shrinkflating companies or stalked, surveilled and targeted all over the internet – might the UK be a calmer, less fractious society, less prone to disappearing down conspiracy rabbit holes and being drawn into vicious witch hunts for identitarian scapegoats for anything that goes wrong? To ask the question is to answer it. You bet.

For a final exhibit in our management chamber of horrors , and one more proof of the urgent need for change, look at another crisis-hit organisation, Boeing. Reduced to the elevator pitch: proud engineering-led aircraft manufacturer Boeing makes ill-advised merger with smaller, more financially oriented rival, leading to culture clash in which finance wins out and an ‘investor-friendly’ strategy of cost-cutting, outsourcing and stock buybacks prevails. Subsequent design and safety short cuts are blamed for catastrophic crashes of two Boeing aircraft in 2018 and 2019, with the loss of 346 lives, grounding of the fleet, and large financial losses. On 5 January this year another Boeing plane experienced a mid-flight incident, raising fresh quality and supply chain questions and leading renewed operating restrictions. Takeaway (there are countless other examples to underline it, many of them casualties of private equity ownership):  governance based on maximising shareholder value, the current norm, is unsafe at any speed, not least for shareholders. And it can be lethal.

The bottom line is that management is both critical – ‘almost nothing in economics is more important than thinking through how companies should be managed and for what ends’ – and ‘a mess’, in the words of the FT’s Martin Wolf: to the point where, its costs having outweighed the benefits, it has morphed into the problem to be solved instead of an answer to the world’s issues. Hence the significance of Richard Straub’s announcement at the December Drucker Forum of the five-year project to develop a new and more reliable management template, in time for the 20th Forum in 2028.

The plan is ambitious as well as timely. Management’s ‘mess’ is foundational – an unsatisfying mash-up of ideologically-inflected economics, unrealistic assumptions and a crudely behaviouristic idea of motivation, protected by a hard shell of vested interest. Changing it won’t be easy. Yet despite some knotty philosophical issues, it’s not by any means all bad news. Over the years, progressive and open-minded managers and researchers, many of them regulars at the Drucker Forum, have made good progress with stuff that works in practice if not in theory, in areas such as customer focus, work design, and systems thinking. A few leaders and companies have been bold enough to strike out and follow their own path to excellence. Although these ‘positive deviants’ have attracted few imitators, they provide rich case material for those looking for a better way.

When Peter Drucker first launched into management in the 1950s, he saw his priority as bringing  together scattered islands of expertise into a coherent discipline. In the same way, today’s challenge is to build out the areas of evidence-based practice into a structure that reconciles business and planetary needs, reflects and reinforces more realistic and less gloomy underlying assumptions, and is capable of performance sufficient to compete in the market for management ideas with predatory variants such as private equity and surveillance by making people not only better off materially, but happier as well.

Buckle up for an eventful ride.