Meanwhile, strategy scholars were also amongst the heap of academics ridiculed in the book. Here’s Taleb on his MBA experience:

When I was in business school I rarely attended lectures in something called strategic planning, a required course, and when I showed my face in class, I did not listen for a nanosecond to what was said there; did not even buy the books. There is something about the common sense of student culture; we knew that it was all babble. I passed the required classes in management by confusing the professors, playing with complicated logic…

He does thankfully recognize that strategy scholars themselves have noted the planning problem in existing work e.g., he cites Bill Starbuck’s work – but that argument goes back to Alchian, 1950 etc.

Taleb then goes on to say:

Almost everything theoretical in management, from Taylorism to all productivity stories, upon empirical testing, has been exposed as pseudoscience.

Cute. I love any argument that in wholesale fashion dismisses a field like that. Is there pseudoscience in management? No question. There is in any field. And the field of management might even have a disproportionate share of pseudoscience in it. But the whole book is characterized by those types of glib dismissals very few are spared, which then makes it hard to evaluate anything novel that Taleb himself might have to say.

via Nassim Taleb, the Angry Version of Malcolm Gladwell « StrategyProfs.net.