Some of what you learn in business school may be wrong!
We’re sorry to be such downers to those of you who just received your MBA congratulations, by the way, and those of you getting ready to start business school congrats to you, too. But the truth is, there are some “best practices” taken as gospel at many business schools that may actually do your company—and, by extension, your career—more harm than good. Here are some bits of management gospel you should question:
Structure follows strategy
This may be true up to a point, but like many B-school truisms, it breaks down in the face of complexity. If your organization has to meet many conflicting requirements, and you create many structures to address them—compliance departments, quality assurance departments, safety czars, logistics czars, units in charge of standardization, and units in charge of customization—then you wind up with burdensome rules, contradictory demands, and breakdowns in work processes.
Dispatches From The Front 