Additional Insights for Myth 3
There is one best way to organize

The Programming Imperative

(Adapted from “An Underlying Theory for Strategy, Organization, and Management: Bridging the Divide Between Analysis and Synthesis,” Strategic Management Review, 2022).

Early in the 20th Century, Frederick Taylor initiated the age of the analyst—the technocratic specialist who programmed but did not perform the operating work of the organization. A multitude of disciples followed, swarming into factories under titles such as Scientific Management, Time and Motion Study, and, later, Reengineering.

When there was little left to program in the operations, it was only a few short steps to the office. If workers of the factory were fair game, why not clerks in the offices? Indeed, there was no reason to stop there. Certain decisions made by managers seemed to be rather routine in nature, hence they, too, became the subject of programming.

The rise of electronic computing accelerated this. In the 1950s and 1960s, computer programs were written to balance the work on assembly lines, schedule production, reorder parts, and so on. In each case, a somewhat complex decision process, previously the work of managers or analysts, was programmed for execution by a computer.
As the role of the analysts entered this new stage of development, it was inevitable that they would turn their attention to the senior management, especially concerning the making of strategic decisions and the formulation of strategies. This began in the 1960s, with strategic planning heralded as the new way to formulate business strategies, and PPBS (Planning, Programming, Budgeting System) to do much the same thing in government. Work also began on massive management information systems (MIS).

But when the dust settled—most dramatically following the debacle in Vietnam, thanks in no small part to the failures of PPBS—the actual work of senior management, and the strategy process in particular, were found to be hardly affected, indeed sometimes left worse. In part, the problem was that the planners had failed to learn the essential lesson of Frederick Taylor: he never tried to change work processes that he did not thoroughly understand. In contrast, many proponents of MIS seemed to have had little idea about the information that senior managers actually used, while strategic planners appeared to have had only the most rudimentary understanding of how organizations actually made their strategies, and many of the systems analysts likewise knew little about how managers made their strategic decisions.

And so what can be called the “great divide” remains in the managing of organizations, between analysis on one side and synthesis on the other. Will the new advances in AI finally lead to the ultimate realization of Taylor’s one best way? The verdict is out at the time of this writing.