It’s really not in anyone’s interest to do so because they are meant to undermine that central virtue of modern business life: confidence. No one pays attention to these broadsides. Both of us ended up returning to a sort of quasi-academic environment whence we hurl occasional broadsides at the present representatives of our past lives.
This proved a way of making a living but ultimately brought us both close to moral bankruptcy. We both spied some hope that there might be a place for intellect in the practical world of business and became management consultants. We share the disappointed aspirations of young academics who find that knowing more and more about less and less is the path down an intellectual black hole. Matthew Stewart is proof of my own replicability and confirms my own identity. So, paradoxically, when we have a near-double, we have an identity. Someone out there shares our experience and concerns. Then, bingo, we realise our membership in a class, a culture, a generation of more or less replicable people. Unless, of course, he writes a book and generates a little fame. But actually meeting a physical or psychological twin is another matter in which the 8 billion works against ever encountering him. There just aren’t that many genetic and cultural variables to ensure the reality of a conceit like uniqueness. Among the almost 8 billion people in the world, the chances that there is someone else who looks like you, talks like you, and even thinks like you if fairly high. Combining hands-on experience with the theoretical underpinnings of contemporary fads in efficiency improvement, empowerment & strategy, Stewart knows his stuff, & thus he lays bare how little consultants have really done for the business of others-while making a killing for themselves.Ī sentimental aphorism has it that we’re all unique. Alongside his devastating critique of management “philosophy” from Frederick Taylor to Tom Peters, Stewart provides a bitingly funny account of his own days in a management consulting firm. Striking fear into the hearts of clients with his sharp analytical tools, Stewart lived in hotel rooms & got fat on expense account cuisine-until, finally, he decided to turn the consultant’s merciless, penetrating eye on the management industry itself.
But soon he was telling veteran managers how to run their companies. Study philosophy.įresh from Oxford with a degree in philosophy & no particular interest in business, Matthew Stewart might not have seemed a likely candidate to become a consultant.
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