Authenticity: will we fake it? by Philip Whiteley in Management Issues features an interesting discussion of why hard (money, structure, systems) conquers soft (people, personality, feelings) when it comes to business decisions:

It is so much a part of the air that we breathe that it is unnoticeable; this assumption that there must be some universal, mechanistic rules determining the outcomes of complex human societies. So organisations will copy the matrix management system of another company; outsource according to the same template; install the same total quality processes and, hey presto – the outcomes are completely different.

It is very, very difficult to shake this assumption from the mindset of most managers. The problem stems in part from the fact that companies deal in money; money has to be accounted for, and hence we produce lots of numbers. It is therefore tempting to borrow from the world of engineering and apply numerical formulae as though we were dealing with objects.

And then there’s this:

Being generally nice people, human relations/human resources practitioners don’t like telling MBA lecturers, senior executives and investment bankers that their ideology is no more advanced or scientific than alchemy or witchcraft.

One wonders if, collectively, they will ever be bold enough to say, as the little child in the Hans Christian Andersen fable did, that ‘The emperor has got no clothes’.

Of course, executives like Jack Welch and Larry Bossidy, and concepts like the Balanced Scorecard, emphasize combining the hard and soft in running a business.