Branding and Symbolism
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John Fraim, GreatHouse Company

The Race For The New "Blockbuster" Theory

Otto Rank (Letter to a friend, 1933)

Does management and business theory really progress or merely move through cycles, back and forth, somewhat like Schumpeter's economic cycles? Are new theories really old theories dressed a little differently for the particular time? Are business ideas and theories similar to products and brands with their own promoters and marketers who attempt to differentiate them from all the others?

In the "From The Editors" section of the March-April 1999 Harvard Business Review, the Editors suggest that this in fact might indeed be the case with their lament to the increasing "now more than ever" call to action hype of management pundits and business gurus. Within this increasing type of "data smog" of information, the HBR Editors see an increasing need to "cut through" all the hype of business "truth" to "explore the ideas that help managers unravel the complexities of the economy and of organizations."

Ironically, the quasi-science of business theory and management seems another victim to that post-modern condition where more information brings more confusion rather than more understanding. Paradoxically, the business pundits contribute to the "complexities" of the economy and organizations rather than clarify them. The increase in the number of consumer products offered each year, the increased amount of data, the increased segmentation of media and markets, has also brought forth an increase and segmentation in our scientific and intellectual theories. The area of business and management theories has been one of the hardest hit.

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THEORY AS PRODUCT

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It is time to ask if theories themselves are types of products and brands in our new information age. And, if they are, might they also be subject to the laws and cycles of products and branding, with growth and decline life cycles, economic value only in differentiation rather than relationship.

The implications of theories as products has far greater impact in the business area than in the consumer area. It is one thing when consumers become confused by the various brands of cereal in the local supermarket but quite another when our business leaders become confused from the increasing number of theories coming and going with the fashion of the season somewhat like the ups and downs of skirt length dictated by the runways of Paris fashion moguls.

One can trace the source of this to the tendency in a late system of capitalism to make commodities or "things" out of both objective and subjective forms of life. The result is that we all bear witness to the increasing branding and packaging of American thought and ideas. To work as products in this new marketplace, economic value comes from differentiation not commonality or alignment. This is the paradigm for business pundits, the American academia, the think tanks of Washington and the multi-billion dollar consulting industry. This is what makes them continue to shout like barkers at a great carnival "Now more than ever" listen to my ideas. There is economic value in segmentation and differentiation but little value in finding and integrating relationships. The modern marketing mantra confirms this viewpoint with its current buzzword of "differentiation." In fact, under modern marketing laws, sameness is a sure receipt for failure.

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THE PRODUCTS OF CONSULTING FIRMS

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The lesson of branding is practiced by American management consulting firms and is well documented in The Witch Doctors: Making Sense of Management Gurus by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, Staff Editors of The Economist. They find the business world overrun by fads created by management gurus who come from high-powered consulting firms, business school professors and motivational speakers. As the authors argue, these people are modern day witch doctors, promising the cure for what ails corporate America.

The findings of Witch Doctors is confirmed by Dangerous Company where journalists James O'Shea and Charles Madigan show the huge price and small solutions organizations receive from major league consulting firms. One example is AT&T which spent "by conservative estimate" nearly half a billion dollars on consultants between 1989 and 1994. The amazing thing, though, note the authors is that the company seems as confused today as it was from the start. "It has lurched and shifted from strategy to strategy, from consulting house to consulting house, all without landing anything that seems to have provided much help with the challenge of finding a strategic resting place, a market position, a plan, that could give it some leadership and some stability during troubled times."

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THE BUSINESS ADVICE INDUSTRY

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Eric Abrahamson of Columbia University teaches a course on management fashions. His research suggests there is a business-knowledge-producing community made from such components as business schools, books, publishing, periodicals and consulting. Abrahamson suggests that all of these that compete to advance/impart cutting edge business information/knowledge. In fact, business schools' long-term survival depends on their strategic positioning within this community.

Many are probably familiar with key management/business fads of the past fifteen years such as Re-Engineering, Management by Objectives, T-Groups, Matrix Management, Management Grids and Empowerment. Like a bunch of consumer products, they have come and gone and management is left wondering if the management field as been increased or simply confused to a greater extent.

One of the key management fashions Professor Abrahamson has investigated is Quality Control Circles. These reached their height of popularity in 1981 and 1982. He found that what was written about them was "unreasoned, emotional, unqualifiedly positive." However, when the emotional content plummeted and negative content arose, the number of articles fell. By 1993, the great majority of firms that had adopted Quality Circles had abandoned the technique. But Abrahamson notes that the academic press kept focusing on it even though the popular press had lost interest. The reason the popular press abandoned the concept, though, was that it had found a new "fashion" in Job Enrichment, a new concept replacing Quality Control.

Studying similar decline-replacement situations, Abrahamson reached the illuminating conclusion that "The collapse of a fashion leaves a void in discourse that management-fashion setters must fill with a discourse launching the next fashion." This is necessary to keep the entire industry of discourse production in business alive.

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THE DATA SMOG OF THE FUTURE

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Abrahamson's thoughts seem familiar to those Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) noted about scientific paradigms in his important book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn argued that scientific advancement is not evolutionary, but rather is a "series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions" where "one conceptual world view is replaced by another."

In many ways, it seems that the only true evolution in business theory has been the evolution of discourse with its increasing brands of theories propounded by our various business schools, marketing academics and consulting firms. Like new cars each year, it is imperative that this "business-knowledge-producing community" spew out new theories each year so that it will continue to grow. The growth of individual businesses takes on less importance in this scenario than growth of the business advice industry.

The overall paradigm pushed on us is that more data and information, more theories, will somehow give us more knowledge and even more wisdom. The paradigm is at the heart of the information economy and drives the idea-branding business.

Yet we need to ask whether more information without more connection between its various elements is desirable or even possible in a late capital economy of increased products and branding. We need to look around at our lives and businesses and ask how much we have truly learned from all the pundits and whether we have really progressed to new insights or whether we are caught in the seasonal parade of new ideas going nowhere except to the bank accounts of the advice givers.

But hope seems to spring eternal even in our era of increasing "now more than ever" hype. And that final "answer" might just be in that next seminar, that next business book, that new consultant.

It might be in this nebulous "data smog-filled" future for it certainly hasn't been in the clear blue information-free skies of our past.

© Copyright 1998, 1999, 2000 John Fraim - Greathouse Company
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