"Modern management (VII)"

La siguiente cita del libro The Management Myth de Matthew Stewart (p.264)

"To dispute gurus on questions of fact, however, is a fool's game. When Peters and his fellow gurus contrast the innocent past with the present danger, they are not describing phenomena that can be observed in real time. They are invoking a certain emotional state of being. They are expressing our fear of change -and, ultimately, our fear of death. The pressure from which they seek refuge has its ultimate source not in managerial experience per se, nor even in a particular economic system, but in our own mortality. They are, in fact, taking the first step in the long-established formula for success in any democratic religion, which is to tie this fear of death and destruction to our particular time (whenever that may be), and so to link our existential anxieties with a claim about the peculiar wickedness of the age.

The gurus, like their evangelical predecessors, undersatnd instinctively how to exploit a fundamental flaw in the human intuition of time. Reason tell us that time is a continuum, and that yesterday, today, and tomorrow are in reality no different from one another. But the primitive, chthonic mind disagrees. It tell us that yesterday is very unlike today, which is nothing at all like tomorrow. The past is innocent and stable, like childhood, like Garden of Eden, or like the father who went off to work every morning with the same briefcase in hand. The present, which really exist only as the immediate future, is a source of perpetual instability, fearsome threats, and relentless anxiety. The far future (see step 3 below) resolves this instability in the form of calamity or rapture, permanent doom or eternal salvation.

The gurus understand that to invoke this particular state of being, this anxiety before the present/immediate future, has a salutary aspect. It is a way of predisposing us to action. It shake us out of complacency and bring focus to our energies. What the gurus may not always be willing to say is that invoking this state of being also happens to be a highly profitable move for the gurus themselves. As America's evangelists understood, fear sells. Bad news for you is good news for the gurus. Management theory has its feet glued to superstition, and superstition floats only on an ocean of fear." :-) :-) :-)