This piece by Andrew Hill perhaps inadvertently highlights the ideological nature of management. He proclaims, reasonably enough, the merits of day-to-day progress and 'small wins' within firms against 'big hairy audacious goals'.
But this raises the question. Why should firms focus on progress at all?
Put it this way. If Lionel Messi plays as well this season as last, only a half-wit will complain that he hasn't made progress. Instead, we'll celebrate his consistent brilliance. Only the mediocre need 'progress.' For the truly excellent, its enough to maintain a plateau.
But even if we need progress, why should this be an explicit, management-directed goal? In the introduction to one of his superb guitar books, Allan Alexander says that if you keep playing, you'll get better whether you want to or not. This speaks to the possibility that incremental improvement is something to be achieved obliquely rather than as a conscious goal.
Now, you might object here that what really spurs improvement is what Matthew Syed calls purposeful practice, which requires organized feedback. True. But inserting this into companies has been difficult; there's some evidence that employee performance reviews actually backfire and have a negative effect upon productivity. This is consistent with the theory that firms are institutionally stupid, in the sense that they are incapable of learning.
Which raises a question. Could it be that the rhetoric of progress, 'moving forward', 'managing change', 'driving towards objectives' and other dynamic-sounding terms serves an ideological function?
I mean this in two senses, but there might be more.
1. The notion of progress gives management a valuable role. In principle, we could judge management by how well organized a firm was. But by this standard, very many managers would seem inadequate (pdf). As John van Reenan and Nick Bloom show (pdf), there is a 'long tail' of poorly managed firms.
The concept of progress, though, deflects attention from that management often fails whilst maintaining that there is a caste of experts who can both identify short-comings and remove them.
There's a variant of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle here. Managers want us to focus on movement, so that we don't measure their actual position and achievement.
2. 'Progress' operates to smooth over conflict. It says to workers: 'you might be poorly paid and badly treated now, but things will be better in future.' It's the White Queen's 'jam tomorrow' trick.
My point here is simple. What look like neutral, technical, jargon-laded issues of management are in fact means by which power is exercised and legitimated.