A recent piece in The Times claimed that the recession was exposing management theory as “the jargon-filled sham it always was”. Apparently management theory (I never knew there was only one) is to blame for incompetence at Haringey Council, the BBC Trust, schools throughout the land (“schools last year received 6,000 pages of theory and guidelines from Whitehall”), the NHS and the police. “In the past two decades, management theory... has been deliberately imposed on almost every aspect of commercial and public life.”

The article takes no prisoners. “Those who have watched management theory evolve into a religion wonder whether its false gods should take responsibility for the current economic downturn.” No management theories are spared – Management by Walking About, Theory X and Theory Y, Senge’s Five Disciplines, Kolb’s Four Learning Styles, W Edward Deming’s Fourteen Points and much more.

The piece has left me reflecting on the extent to which management theories (I insist that this should be plural) can be imposed on utterly resistant and unwilling managers. If the theories are so daft, so patently absurd and damaging, how is it they attract a following in the first place? I suspect it takes two to create a management fad: the originator and the recipient. Are managers so gullible that they are seduced by whatever the like of Tom Peters says? If so, they only have themselves to blame.

There is a telling passage in the Times article. Key performance indicators are under scrutiny and David Craig, author of Plundering the Public Sector, is quoted as saying: “KPIs are absolutely fabulous if used by effective management. But if you have incompetent, ineffective management and policies that only want to give the illusion of progress, they are a disaster and demote everyone in the organisation.”

Exactly my point. Ineffective managers fall for silly fads. Effective managers extract whatever is useful from the theory being offered, adapt it to their circumstances, implement it cautiously and monitor its usefulness. If more managers were effective, fads simply couldn’t exist. But which, I wonder, comes first: management theories or effective managers?