Read the Book or Attend a Seminar? Charting Ironies in How Managers Prefer to Learn

Abstract

Access to the right information at the right time enables managers and the organizations for which they work to stay one step ahead of their competitors. Like any other hot commodity, information is packaged in a variety of ways. According to Crainer (1996), managers have a clear preference for one form of packaging over another: No executive office is complete without a neatly arranged row of management bestsellers. They are as much a fixture as the family portrait and cynics might say, as much practical use. Research by the Management Training Partnership found that three-quarters of personnel directors buy at least four management books a year. But, only one in five are actually read. Tom Peters calculates that while over five million copies of his In Search of Excellence have been sold, only 100,000 or so readers have read it from cover to cover. As the books gather dust, executives absorb the latest big ideas at seminars and conferences. There can hardly be a manager in the western world who has not been to an event promoting a particular individual's view of how they should be managing their business. (p. 49) Though interesting, Crainer's observation and others like it are limited in that they offer no explanation as to why it is that managers favor attending seminars and conferences in preference to reading. In order to investigate this question, we conducted in-depth interviews with 22 managers regarding how they acquire a particular kind of business information: knowledge about popular management ideas (e.g., excellence, reengineering, Total Quality Management). We then analyzed transcripts of these interviews from a socio-semiotic framework. based upon that analysis, we argue that the way managers approach seminars and reading is more complex than the existing literature suggests. We contend that a rich, highly nuanced, and at times contradictory, semiotic code shapes how managers prefer to acquire information. In this paper, we identify the main features of this code, chart its regularities and inconsistencies, and tie it to exo-semiotic (i.e., cultural, economic, social) factors that influence managers' work and leisure. In doing so, we identify several ironies in how this code is used and understood, and point out how these ironies reflect and give rise to contradictory responses on the part of managers that provide them with the means to negotiate the conflicting demands placed upon them by the various competing value systems which govern and complicate their working and private lives. Two key factors contributed to our decision to look at managerial preferences in consuming popular management ideas (as opposed to other forms of information). First, and most importantly with respect to our study, managers can access information about most (if not all) popular management ideas in book form or through seminar attendance. Other forms of information do not necessarily provide managers with these two options for access. (Though managers might be able to access the Internet, or other sources, for information that is also available in The Wail Street Journal, this kind of information often has a short shelf-life and thus does not lend itself to being disseminated in seminar format. In contrast, popular management ideas have a duration that more ephemeral kinds of information lack.) Second, popular management ideas permeate today's business climate. Given this pervasive presence, we expected (correctly) that all our interviewees would have come into contact with several popular management ideas during the course of their careers. This enabled us to ask our interviewees about their preferences in the packaging of a form of information known to all. In this way, we hoped to diminish idiosyncracies in reported preferences that were rooted in the kind of information consumed and not its packaging. We begin our analysis by sketching the importance of popular management theories in the contemporary business world. …