We continue the episodic publication of The Management Contradictionary (Benjamin Marks, Rodney Marks, and Robert Spillane. Michelle Anderson Publishing: Melbourne).
It’s available in all good libraries, and quite a few bad ones, too. The book is in alphabetical order, so feel free to keep reading the blog posts – past, present and future – from eh? to zzz.
The Management Contradictionary defines the real meaning behind management terms.
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manipulation
Comes between managing director and manual worker.
manual worker
Someone who can see the effect of his labour, usually derided by insecure workers who can’t.
margin
The straight and narrow. See far left and far right, on this and other pages.
marginal cost
The cost of giving all workers a new ruler.
marginal utility
A ute in a ditch.
market economy
The market is the economy.
market research
An activity based on the false assumption that people will tell you what they will buy before they do, or that they even know what that would be.
market value
The fallacious belief that an agreed price can be determined before sale. It is the simultaneous denial and admission that the market value is what it is and cannot be known until then. Only through demonstrated preference can preference be demonstrated.
marketing
Matching impossible market wants and needs with unlikely organisational capability and capacity.
martyr
Someone who dies for an undying truth.
Marxism
The belief that all individuals, other than Karl Marx, are unimportant.
mass education
Training for taxi drivers.
materialism
When idealism doesn’t matter.
matrix
A way of making words look like numbers; particularly useful if you are trying to hide data.
maturity
When a market or product cycle is more grown up than any producer or consumer in it.
maximum
- The largest number possible using available resources, irrespective of profitability.
- A large maternal figure.
(see optimum)
MBA
- Mistaken Business Acumen, or Married But Available, or Mind-Blowing Asset.
- The misstep between BBA and DBA.
MBFA
Like Management By Wandering About – but more widespread.
me
Public I.
measurement
Transforming managerial behaviour into take-home pay.
medals
Unqualified qualifications awarded as receipts for membership dues.
meeting
A form of occupational group therapy, whose purpose is to console people who cannot solve a particular problem alone by proving that no one else can either.
melodrama
- The daily play of characters in the business pages, with managing director heroes being pursued by regulator villains, with industry associations cheering and trade unions booing from the sidelines.
- Vice versa.
memory
What managers lose when giving evidence before (but not after) government commissions.
mental disorder
Condition of someone found in the management section of bookshops.
mentor
Someone who meant well.
mentoring
To gossip nostalgically.
merger
- Euphemism for acquisition.
- When wedlock becomes deadlock.
- When deadlock becomes wedlock.
- The period prior to de-merger.
(also see synergy)
metaphor
- A figure of speech in a manner of speaking.
- Like a simile.
metaphysics
Sub-editors who go above and beyond.
method
A system without a cycle.
microeconomics
Economic fine print.
midlife crisis
Panic-stricken realisation that you have not become what you wanted to be, and that you don’t won’t to be that person anymore.
millionaire
- Manager with a large mortgage and three divorces.
- House-owner with neither a mortgage nor a divorce.
mind
Mythical entity with free will that replaces the soul as the spiritual centre of the individual. A bucket for thoughts, feelings, emotions, values, beliefs and memories. Source of peculiar, unconscionable, undiagnosable illnesses, diagnosed by corporate psychiatrists and industrial psychologists.
minutes
A work of fiction. The history of a meeting from the viewpoint of the minute-taker; the secretary of a meeting is therefore the most powerful person there.
misbehavioural science
The science of labelling employees who are misbehaving as having ‘inappropriate behaviour’, when they’re really just being naughty; a pseudoscience whose practitioners believe that the facts of misbehaviour are wrong.
miscellaneous
Assorted sundry heterogeneous items that would be misplaced elsewhere.
mission statement
The aims of an organisation and what sort of service it intends to provide: both pugnacious and spiritual.
mistakes
Made by managers due to information provided by subordinates; made by workers due to irrationality.
mob
- The collective noun for many kangaroos.
- The collective noun for many Australian lawyers.
- The collective noun for many kangaroo courts.
model
A theoretical construct which is meant to represent a slice of reality. There is no model of reality as a whole. All the pieces add up to contradictory realities. The whole is not greater than the sum of its parts, it is just that the elements are not contextualised and the whole created from them doesn’t look like any component part. The main beneficiaries of models are the model makers, who, unless they are in the theatrical special effects business, may be management consultants, economists, strategists, policy analysts, planners or pretenders.
modus operandi
Roman management style.
mole
Employee having a friendly chat about colleagues with the organisational psychologist.
monetary policy
Determining that a dollar is worth 100 cents.
(see fiscal policy, which disputes the math, and the maths, and the arithmetic that makes one the other)
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