WHAT IF THE GURUS WERE RIGHT?: PART I

摘要

Engineering management as a discipline is more than 100 years old. Significant advances were made, but many broad questions continue to be addressed simply by habit, hope or speculation. This paper is the first installment intended to highlight questions that promised great potential for improvements but no clear answers are ever proven out. Popular management gurus provided their suggestions but decades later their ideas remain untested. Practitioners are frustrated by a lack of solutions to common problems and complain about a lack of utility from the academic research conducted. Perennial examples of known inefficiencies are budgeting processes, annual performance appraisals, structuring of organizations, and degrees of work specialization. The intent of this paper and its sequels is to continue bringing these situations forward, in the hope of growing the body of knowledge and providing explicit guidance for practicing managers. Improved utility of the output of ASEM will benefit everyone.