Gary Hamel closed a recent LinkedIn post with a genuine question: What elements of the managerialist mindset are ripe for a rethink?
It’s the right question. But answering it as a list misses something. The beliefs Hamel names (that KPIs can guarantee right behavior, that competence tracks with rank, that employees are “resources”) are not independent errors sitting side by side. They follow from it. They are what you get once a more fundamental belief is already in place.
That belief is this: a person is a type of thing.
Not a subject. Not an agent with an inside that no system can reach. A thing. A unit with properties. Something that can be measured, allocated, optimized, and if necessary, replaced.
Once that belief is installed (quietly, structurally, before anyone arrives at work), everything else follows with a certain logic. Of course, you measure performance. Things have measurable properties. Of course, competence correlates with rank; someone had to assess the properties and sort accordingly. Of course, you call them human resources; resources is what things are when organizations need them.
Hamel is right to reach for Kuhn. But there is a floor below the assumptions.
Scientific revolutions happen because anomalies accumulate (things the reigning paradigm cannot explain) until what the paradigm cannot explain outnumbers what it can.
The managerial paradigm has been accumulating anomalies for decades. You already know what they are. The engagement survey whose results surprised no one. The transformation initiative that consumed two years and changed nothing that mattered. The knowledge worker (perhaps yourself, in an earlier role, or a current one) who gave exactly what was measured and protected everything else.
They are what happens when you govern persons as though they were things.
This is not a case against metrics. A well-designed KPI can protect a worker from a supervisor’s prejudice; in some contexts, quantified evaluation is more humane than subjective judgment, not less.
But a system that offers that protection still cannot see the internal assessment a person makes about what the relationship on offer is worth, and what to give to it. That calculation happens below any system’s threshold.
Hamel asks which managerialist beliefs are ripe for a rethink. There is one and it is the source of most of what isn’t working.
Large organizations genuinely require systems: budgets, accountability structures, operational metrics, and role clarity. Complexity without coordination is just chaos with good intentions. The problem is subtler.
Optimize a machine component and it does what the optimization requires. Optimize a person and they notice that they are being optimized, they notice what it means to be treated that way, and they respond to that.
Not necessarily by resisting. Sometimes they calibrate. Other times they give exactly what the system measures and protect everything else. And the system registers it as compliance. In reality, it is closer to the minimum viable performance of a person who has understood the terms of the relationship on offer.
No system can reach the inside of that transaction. The belief that it can is what’s wrong.
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