As I plowed through my shelfload of bad management books, I beheld a discipline that consists mainly of unverifiable propositions and cryptic anecdotes, is rarely if ever held accountable, and produces an inordinate number of catastrophically bad writers. It was all too familiar. There are, however, at least two crucial differences between philosophers and their wayward cousins.
- The first and most important is that philosophers are much better at knowing what they don’t know.
- The second is money.
In a sense, management theory is what happens to philosophers when you pay them too much.