By Thomas Oliver

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A jpeg of a poster resides on my computer’s desktop. The poster is of a firm handshake. The caption reads, “Consulting: If you aren’t part of the solution, there’s good money to be made in prolonging the problem.”

I didn’t find that joke in the just published “The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting It Wrong,” by Matthew Stewart. But I came across several others.

The author, a former consultant, has a wicked pen and witty sense of humor, and so the book is full of sarcastic putdowns of all things consulting and most things management.

Stewart’s serious point is that management as we know it practices a pseudo science, and we’d all be better off if senior executives were more versed in the humanities, particularly Stewart’s favorite, philosophy.

In fact, his previous book, “The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza and the Fate of God in the Modern World” was just that, and well received, with the New York Times writing, “Stewart has achieved a near impossibility, creating a page-turner about jousting metaphysical ideas....”

In “The Management Myth,” Stewart undermines the very basis of the science of management by revealing that the founding father of management and consulting, Frederick Winslow Taylor, basically fabricated his classic 1899 study of pig iron production at Bethlehem Steel. The calculations were pulled out of thin air, and when they seemed too good to be true, they were reduced, magically, just enough to make the results seem more plausible.

Many in middle management can relate to this. It’s reminiscent of when they first heard of a consultants’ discovery of the vast untapped potential sitting right outside their office door.

It just seems too good to be true and too obvious to have gone unnoticed for so long. But because consultants are paid to appear smart, we forget what granddaddy told us: if it’s too good to be true, it probably is.

Special emphasis, not to be confused with special attention, is given to consulting gurus who were born of the consulting firms. Especially Tom Peters, whose 1982 “In Search of Excellence” became one of the early top selling management-as-pop-culture books.

Forget that of the 43 excellent companies profiled in the book, one-third were in trouble within the next five years. Forget that the bigger failures, mostly in high-tech, prompted another book by a different author: “In Search of Stupidity.”

Peters, along with co-author, Robert H. Waterman Jr., had written the best-selling equivalent of “Catcher in the Rye” for middle managers: It comforted them in confirming their suspicion that their boss was clueless.

But perhaps a more damning statement of those who would hire consultants comes from the founder of one of most successful firms, the Boston Consulting Group, who said:

“Can you think of anything less improbable than taking the world’s most successful firms, leaders in their businesses, and hiring people just fresh out of school and telling them how to run their businesses, and they are willing to pay millions of dollars for this advice?”

Thomas Oliver writes a business column. He can be reached at toliver.writeright@gmail.com