"Dilbert" fans - and others - will wish to read the article
"Management Fad Mad" by Jonathon Walters in _Governing_ Sept.
1996, at p. 48. This is not necessarily the best, certainly not
the only, piece to debunk the "management" buzzword twaddle.
The art form is old and respected, going back at least as far
as the late Aaron Wildavsky's merciless flaying of Peter
Phyrr's panacea "Zero-base Budgeting" (and much other claptrap
too) which the hapless Jimmy Carter, then Governor of Georgia, took
to like Toad to motorcars. But it ought to be read, because the
old ones never die, being clung to by the Peter Principle bunch
who have a lot of their limited intellect invested in their
particular favorites, even as new ones are invented. Worse, the
old ones, in persisting (like old TV sitcoms which, they tell us,
will live on forever, travelling out through space; somewhere out
there is the complete corpus of "Gilligan's Island," right
alongside TQM) will be eternally and endlessly rediscovered by
"managers" and "administrators." Even as I write, someone you
work for, or someone _they_ work for, is finding "PODSCORB" for
the first time, and saying "YESS."
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