| Management theory, at least the aspects of it which become popular, seems fad-driven. Matrix managment, holacracy, consensus, etc etc. Is this a field where people discover things that last? For instance, fundamental limits to human communication, fundamental quantities that are conserved no matter what the configuration of management is. Computer science has Brooks' observations on team size and communication, but that was only ever a guess, it's not really a law. Generally people seem to adopt decision and management mechanisms that purport to address the pain they were having in their previous organization, while being proven enough to be plausible ("$FAMOUS_COMPANY does it") and not quantifiable enough to be a definite failure yet. Probably someone is writing a new airport book on "Founder Mode" right now! So... what is known about human management? I'm not a fool, people are ever-changing and complex and what they want from their organizations changes all the time, but are there any eternal truths? |
That is, a control system (management structure) needs to match the system it controls in complexity. [2]
This book lists many of the major variables you need to control to run a project [3] such as "hiring/managing employees", "communications with stakeholders", ... A project has a beginning and end, unlike the activities of an ongoing business, but the list in PMBOK is pretty exhaustive. A small project/organization doesn't required a dedicated part for each one of them but as you get larger you need HR, PR, the dedicated project manager and such.
[1] A reductivist statement, yes, but Ashby's law takes the reductivism out of reductionism.
[2] The index case is the Wright Brothers' flier. People thought aviation was a matter of lift and thrust but it's actually a matter of controlling roll, yaw and pitch so you don't tumble and had Galileo understood that he could have built a glider.
[3] https://www.pmi.org/standards/pmbok