The following is perhaps important with regard to Peter Drucker. Why is economics so irrelevant for companies? It’s actually an absurdity. The following article looks for explanations.

How should companies organize their supply chains? How can we organize start-up ecosystems? Or, more generally: How should we do business in the future? How do we deal with multiple crises? How do we promote innovation?

These are questions that need to be addressed in economics. „But current management research is hardly looking for answers to these questions. This must change,“ Christoph Seckler and René Mauer demand in a FAZ guest article. For some years now, research has mainly been limited to explanatory research. Instead of coming up with ideas for shaping the future, the past is looked at in order to explain the present.

„The consequences of this one-sided research are serious. Management research is becoming less and less relevant for companies and their leaders. This problem is also recognized and discussed by management researchers. However, the responses to this are mostly only concerned with continuing to conduct explanatory research, just with a different focus,“ say the two academics from ESCP Business School in Berlin.

„The authors are right. But it won’t change. You can’t get into the top journals with practice-oriented articles. And articles in these journals are crucial for the reputation of researchers,“ comments Hidden Champion researcher Hermann Simon.

Professor Winfried W. Weber’s attempt at an explanation:

„Why is the influence of scientists on management declining? The answer is surprisingly simple. If we see management as a function of the organization that increases or decreases differences – much or little profit, innovative or incremental products and the like – the most effective observer of the manager keeps track and can influence it. And today, this observer is the consultant rather than the scientist,“ explains Weber.

This does not mean traditional consultants, but rather „management philosophers“. And these management thinkers have brought and continue to bring diversity, paradoxes and course deviations into play. They develop theories and approaches that advance management knowledge.

„Through the connection to organizational theory and practitioners, management philosophers develop a sense of which topics are connectable and which are not. In this sense, their fashions bring about a pendulum movement in management professionalization. In social systems that are never fully understood, there can never be a ‚one-best-way‘,“ emphasizes Weber.

Innovations can arise for companies precisely when they are made aware of the blind spots in their cluster, industry or company by external parties.

This is only possible with the necessary amount of surprise and chaos, which is not to be expected from pseudo-rational economists. Managers tend to look for new alternative courses of action in interpretative approaches. In this context, the chaotic thinking style of some management thinkers is closer to the practitioner than the logician. And then there is another aspect:

Without a flair for the cool and new, no management philosopher has access to top management, says Weber: „Management philosophers earn their money as coolhunters, much like Cayce Pollard, the protagonist in William Gibson’s novel ‚Pattern Recognition‘. They try to recognize patterns where there are none. They try to draw their customers‘ attention to something that does not yet exist. And: they try to create patterns. Cayce, the heroine of the novel, and the management philosophers move in intermediate spaces in which something has yet to emerge,“ writes Weber.

Weber’s conclusion: the influence of scientists is dwindling. Companies tend to look to management philosophers for answers, and well-known names such as Peter F. Drucker, Hermann Simon and Fredmund Malik come to mind.

Many other consultants are dominated by empty concepts in individual case empiricism: opinion-belief-esotericism, that is the triad of today’s babble rituals. Some kind of „spin“ is breathed into the empty words, which not only deprives them of their original meaning, but also charges them with certain interests. They are simplified, woven into the flow of existing lines of argument, altered in their form, softened or even turned into the opposite.

The whole thing is peppered with tautological sentences that cannot be refuted empirically. A rhetorical sleight of hand: if I cannot prove the non-existence of God, that is proof of existence. A bell jar of immunity is placed over the claims of the advisors to protect them from doubt and criticism. As this constructed façade can collapse at any time, some management consultants quickly jump to the next tautological „theory“.

„The result is a constantly rising and falling cycle of management fads,“ says Professor Lutz Becker.