Poor Deming never stood a chance

I found this article really helpful; it clearly identified what I dislike about management by OKRs.

In the real world, there are MANY different objectives that all need to be met, not just 6-8 of them. In the real world objectives are slippery beasts not captured by a single measurement or date. In the real world leaders don't have enough bandwidth to consider every niggling detail, but all the people across all of the organization DO.

OKRs make it easy on leaders at the expense of the overall organization.

I consider it to be bad management but most management consists of creating an abstraction layer and not caring about what happens below that abstraction layer.

Choice quote: "I want you to bring me solutions not more problems."

It's also due to self-preservation because from their vantage point (both vertical position, knowledge system and mental capacity) it would be trivially easy to drown in all the details.

Good managers respect the details. The best managers are able and willing to jump down into the glorious mud that makes up the work.

I believe Drucker also advocated the apprentice model and promoting management from within the organisation. If you skip this part (which most western organisations do today), everything else is kind of skewed.

It's easy to dunk on someone who invented OKRs, but I'm not sure Deming was playing the same game. Management advice to "do research and fix the system" is like a generalised framework to produce Drucker's "pick key objectives and track a few related metrics".

I think the reason for Drucker's "success" in the western hemisphere was Pareto principle related. OKRs get you lots of the management consulting benefit for very little investment. Deming sounds like 10x more work!

I'll take "Managers who haven't read Seeing Like a State" for 500, Alex.

My rendering of an organization. Not to scale.

lmao. So true.