I was surprised that, in a book that was distributed years ago in an edition of the Manager Business Forum in Madrid, the Management by Objectives (DpO) was fused or confused with Taylorism, to condemn in passing the system proposed by Peter Drucker and defend, from there, a new management model that was declared superior. There the experts from the well-known Spanish club Top Ten acted as speakers, and one of them photographed himself with the book in his hands. No attempt could be made to misrepresent the PDO, but the system did seem to be judged lightly, by supposedly authorized voices.
I had just returned from a presentation in Buenos Aires, where another Spanish speaker had defended Management by Objectives without mentioning alternative or complementary models. And I was also already sensitive at the time to the criticisms made towards the DpO, which seemed to me more related to adaptations or particular applications than to the essence of the system. For example, it had seemed to me for years that the DpO was often used more as a pressure tool than as a management tool, and even that it did not always distinguish properly between tasks and objectives.
Forewarned me about what is said about the management of people and leadership in the company, and about the attempts to merge-confuse the DpO with Taylorism, I read yesterday on the Internet, in a context of employees and objectives, that Taylor was a key player in the development of the Human Resources function at the end of the 19th century. And I was also reading an article by Carmen Sánchez Silva in El País yesterday, in which some opinions of expert consultants were collected: a certain addiction to the DpO model advocated by Drucker came to insist.
Well it seems to call bread bread and wine wine, and to distinguish well Taylor's postulates for manual workers (today a minority), from those proposed by Drucker some 50 years later, for “ white collar ” professionals: a distance that left space, for example, for Harry Hopf and other contributions to the progress of business management. We can certainly consider Frederick Winslow Taylor one of the fathers of scientific management on the stage of the industrial economy, but in his time, more than a hundred years ago, a large part of the staff was basically manpower; It was then necessary for Taylor, as well as the Gilbreth husbands and other experts, to study the physical way of increasing the productivity of the operators.
As the reader will remember, the human side of business management would come later, especially with Hawthorne's experiments and Mayo's analyzes, and to that human side, later, in the middle of the 20th century, Maslow, Herzberg and McGregor, among other experts, would contribute. In fact and by the way, the DpO contributed to this trend, as well as that of the strategic management of Chandler, Andrews, Ansoff, Selznick…
To complete the memory of Frederick Winslow Taylor and immediately focus on the DpO, I would add that this great creator has the recognition of many experts of our day, and he certainly had the respect of Master Drucker; But perhaps the Human Resources function we know today is not so closely related to Taylor, and should be better linked to progress on the human side of business management. Says Stuart Crainer: "The most visible consequence of Taylor's scientific management is a dehumanizing dependence on measurement." I even think that the term “human resources” was already coined in the second half of the 20th century, and that it did not yet sound in our country in the 1970s. Today, by the way, perhaps we should talk more about “ human capital”And not so much of“ human resources ”, and avoid synonymy.
Let's go to the DpO. I would say that, having documented well or not so well, some executives have introduced goal-oriented work in their organizations in their own way; However, it seems that - it can be remembered the study by Rodgers and Hunter in the 90s - the best results in increased productivity occur when the chief executive bets on the genuine essence of the system. It is not worth limiting yourself to assigning quantitative objectives, even thinking that "I have to put 16 so that it reaches 8". Management by Objectives seems well thought out; It has been successful in many companies, some very well known (it was in Hewlett Packard, and Dave Packard was called to Washington by Nixon to introduce the system in the Department of Defense), and constitutes a commitment to professionalism and productivity.
The reader will have his own experiences, but I fear that, behind some supposed applications, there is mere direction by quantified tasks - which Taylorism could certainly remember -, perhaps framed in the DpO liturgy, or not even that; I am afraid that in some boss-subordinate relationships there may be more presence of complicity than commitment; and I fear that the label is used, yes, sometimes more as an element of pressure than as an instrument of direction.
With these paragraphs, I would invite the interested reader to document themselves around the authentic Direction by Objectives, because it seems to me a current system and, above all, a true professional management system. Perhaps, instead of dividing the business world into leaders and followers, it would be necessary to speak of professionals -of management or of the technical function- who, to a large extent, self-lead after agreed goals (Drucker, let's remember, spoke of management by objectives and self control). I think that we should not follow the leader as much as we should follow and achieve objectives; I think that professionally attractive goals would attract us purely by magnetism, and that perhaps there would be plenty of nonsense.
It is true that the PDO has been repeatedly criticized. One of the most forceful criticisms was that of William Edwards Deming, the great preacher of quality, who came to ask, in the 80s, that the DpO be replaced by the leadership of the managers. But what Deming, rather critical of executives, had seen of the DpO were somewhat turbulent applications lacking the necessary systemic perspective; applications more oriented to the quantitative than to the qualitative, which worried people. Deming himself admitted that Drucker had already warned about the need for a systemic vision in the implementation and practice of Management by Objectives; a warning that Deming (as well as Drucker at the time) considered quite disregarded.
Obviously, Management by Objectives is also criticized - a great deal of this doctrine, by the way, in seminars given by consultancies and business schools in the last decades of the 20th century - to try to impose other models and sell more books; But it seems unquestionable that companies set goals and pursue results, and that they have all the available human capital for this. Of course, it is necessary to identify well the missions entrusted, such as cultivating good habits and some well selected values; But it is not possible to renounce the pursuit of objectives - the achievement of results - nor reduce the expert workers of the knowledge economy to the mere performance of tasks entrusted to them by their supposed boss-leaders.
But, even if you bet on the genuine essence of Management by Objectives -for its scientific side and its human side-, even in this case, without a doubt, mistakes can be made and are made. Bill J. Reddin (1930-1999), author of Effective Management by Objectives (1973), already pointed out the most frequent errors of the early days, according to the Cuban professor Alexis Codina in his valuable article Rescuing Management by Objectives (2007)., widely spread on the Internet. Among these first mistakes were excess bureaucracy, the empire of the quantitative over the qualitative, short-termism, the lack of a systemic perspective, a certain isolation from the outside world and, of course, a poor deployment of objectives.
Dale McConkey added that sometimes goals were set, but not the corresponding action plans, and that sensible rewards for achieving them were not always contemplated either. On the other hand, it seems to me that perhaps there has been (even today) a certain tendency to achieve the objectives "at all costs", bypassing some of the explicit or tacit norms provided for in the organization's policy or culture, and even parking the sense common. And I also believe, also from my own experience, that sometimes contradictory objectives have been assigned to different individuals or to different areas of the company; It seemed that for some people to achieve their goals, others had to fail in theirs.
Drucker himself added two important issues to consider to prevent failures in the DpO application: teamwork and the use of reports and procedures. He said that any company must build a team in which individual efforts contribute to the community; that the preaching of teamwork did not come to question the application of the DpO, but that it is deployed for the benefit of the latter. Drucker demanded a panoramic vision in the executives of the different functions, to avoid the kingdoms of taifa and the excesses of emphasis in some key areas. Perhaps, in companies, teamwork has been related to the formation of temporary teams for certain purposes, and not so much to the desired and organic collective synergy.
Regarding reports to the boss, rules and procedures, Drucker - remember that he insisted on talking about management by objectives and self control - defended self-control, and maintained that these should be of help to those who use them, and should not interfere in the deployment of the DpO. He, without prejudice to the fact that the end does not justify the means, was not in favor of " proceduralizing " the actions of individuals, and came to identify a twisted use of reports and procedures as a superiority control tool; I even thought that procedures sometimes come to replace good judgment and common sense. The individual would, of course, have to be evaluated by the results, and not so much by their reports or by the adherence to established procedures.
In short, it is convenient to take care of the adaptation and application of the Management by Objectives wherever it is suitable, to ensure the desired increase in productivity and professional satisfaction. If a boss wants to control the performance of his subordinates and impose his criteria, that may be fine, or very well; but perhaps it is more like Management by Tasks or Instructions than Management by Objectives; Perhaps it is a kind of Management by Quantified Tasks, which in truth could be perceived as a kind of Taylorism of today.
