There is a peculiar disease afflicting modern organizational culture, one that transforms common sense into expensive consulting packages and repackages grandmother's wisdom as revolutionary management theory. We have become a civilization obsessed with renaming, rebranding, and remarketing concepts that have existed since humans first organized themselves into productive groups. From the factory floor to the battlefield, from ancient craftsmen to modern software developers, the fundamental principles of good work have not changed, but apparently, neither has our need to pretend they have.
Consider Lean Six Sigma, which originated from Motorola in 1986 when Bill Smith developed what was marketed as a revolutionary quality management methodology. The corporate world erupted with enthusiasm. Companies rushed to certify their employees as Black Belts and Green Belts, creating an entire cottage industry of consultants, certification programs, and training seminars. By 2005, Motorola claimed over seventeen billion dollars in savings from their Six Sigma efforts, and the methodology spread like wildfire through corporate America.
But here is the uncomfortable truth that gets glossed over in those expensive training sessions: the core concepts were not new at all. The pursuit of quality and efficiency in manufacturing traces back far earlier than the 1980s. The history of Lean started way back in the 1450s in Venice, where craftsmen developed systematic approaches to reduce waste and improve production flow. Henry Ford's assembly line innovations in 1913 embodied many of the same principles. The Toyota Production System, which heavily influenced Lean manufacturing, was developed after World War II. Statistical quality control emerged from the work of Walter Shewhart and W. Edwards Deming in the early to mid twentieth century.
What Motorola did was set a goal of tenfold improvement in five years, focusing on measurement and defect reduction. They slapped a catchy name on it, Six Sigma, added some statistical rigor, created a certification hierarchy borrowed from martial arts, and suddenly ancient principles of quality craftsmanship became a revolutionary methodology worth billions in consulting fees.
The real genius was not in the concepts themselves but in the marketing. Management fads are typically marked by the introduction of novel jargon or buzzwords that rebrand longstanding management concepts, presenting them as innovative solutions to familiar problems. Efficiency techniques rooted in scientific management from the early twentieth century get repackaged with trendy terminology to appeal to executives seeking cutting edge approaches.
The tech world's obsession with sprints offers another perfect example of rebranding the obvious. In the early 1990s, Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland developed what became known as Scrum, introducing time boxed iterations they called sprints. The Agile movement embraced this concept, and suddenly every software company on the planet was organizing work into two week sprints, holding daily stand ups, and conducting retrospectives.
Walk into any Silicon Valley office, and you will hear developers speak reverently about sprint planning and velocity as if these concepts descended from Mount Sinai. But strip away the jargon, and what do you have? Breaking large projects into smaller, manageable chunks. Reviewing progress regularly. Adapting plans based on what you learn. Collaborating closely with your team. These are not revolutionary ideas. They are how competent people have always worked.
Military strategists have understood these principles for millennia. The OODA loop was developed by John Boyd in the early 1970s, but the concept of observing your environment, orienting yourself, making decisions, and taking action is not exactly novel. It is how every successful general from Sun Tzu to Napoleon operated. It is how every skilled craftsman has approached their work. It is how farmers have managed their crops and how merchants have run their businesses since the dawn of commerce.
The beauty of military planning throughout history has always been its iterative nature, its emphasis on rapid feedback loops, and its focus on adaptation. Boyd's OODA Loop strategy developed in the mid 1950s during the Korean war, but he was simply codifying and systematizing what successful warriors had always known intuitively. During the Korean War, Boyd observed F-86 pilots achieving a ten to one victory ratio against superior MiG-15s, not because of revolutionary new tactics, but because they could complete the observation, orientation, decision, and action cycle faster than their opponents.
The pattern repeats itself endlessly. Management fads are often characterized by new jargon for existing business processes, external consultants who specialize in implementation, and certification or appraisal processes performed by external agencies for a fee. Pick any decade from the past seventy years, and you will find a parade of supposedly revolutionary management theories that are really just old wine in new bottles.
Management fads of the late twentieth century include Management by Objectives in the 1950s, sensitivity training in the 1960s, quality circles in the 1970s, total quality management in the 1980s, and self managed teams in the 1990s. Each was heralded as the solution to organizational dysfunction. Each generated massive consulting revenues. And each eventually faded, only to be reincarnated years later under a different name.
Consider the absurdity: President Lyndon Johnson mandated that agencies adopt the Planning Programming Budgeting System in 1965, followed by Management by Objectives under Nixon in 1973, then Zero Based Budgeting under Carter. Each acronym promised to revolutionize government efficiency. Each required extensive training, new systems, and substantial investment. And each eventually gave way to the next fad, leaving behind a trail of binders gathering dust in forgotten storerooms.
The federal government's experience with these management fashions reveals an uncomfortable truth: the modern era of management by fad started with the Hoover Commission in 1949, which advocated for performance budgeting. That is over seven decades of cycling through revolutionary management approaches that fundamentally boil down to the same basic principle: align your activities with your goals, measure your progress, and adjust accordingly. Revolutionary? Hardly. Common sense? Absolutely.
Lean Six Sigma techniques can be historically linked to scientific management ideas from Frederick Taylor circa 1910, Total Quality Management from the 1980s, and process reengineering from the 1990s. The throughline is unmistakable. Every generation repackages the same core insights about quality, efficiency, and continuous improvement, slaps a new brand on it, and sells it to organizations desperate to believe that this time, finally, someone has discovered the secret to effortless excellence.
The problem is not that these methodologies lack value. It is that their presentation as novel innovations creates a destructive cycle. Organizations waste enormous resources chasing the latest fad, implementing elaborate systems and training programs, only to abandon them when the next shiny methodology comes along. Management fads can cause people to become cynical and resistant to new ideas, the judgment of leaders to be questioned, and funds and energy to be diverted from important institutional activities.
More insidiously, the focus on singular methodologies obscures a fundamental truth: these approaches work best when they are woven naturally into an individual's or organization's existing processes, not when they are imposed as monolithic systems requiring wholesale transformation. Shapiro defined Fad Surfing as the practice of riding the crest of the latest management panacea and then paddling out again just in time to ride the next one, always absorbing for managers and lucrative for consultants, frequently disastrous for organisations.
When you mandate that everyone must follow a specific methodology religiously, you are essentially telling experienced professionals to ignore their judgment and intuition, the very qualities that made them successful in the first place. A skilled developer does not need to be told to break projects into manageable pieces. They do it naturally. A competent manager does not need a certification to understand that quality matters. An experienced leader does not need a four step acronym to know they should observe their environment before making decisions.
Here is the cruel irony: the very act of formalizing and systematizing these intuitive processes often undermines their effectiveness. When you turn natural human problem solving into a rigid methodology with specific steps, ceremonies, and artifacts, you risk creating cargo cult behavior, people going through the motions without understanding the underlying principles.
Consider the software development team that holds daily stand ups because that is what Scrum says to do, even though everyone hates them and finds them useless. Or the manufacturing plant that implements Six Sigma because leadership demands it, creating mountains of documentation that nobody reads. These are not failures of the underlying concepts. They are failures of implementation, driven by the belief that the methodology itself is magic rather than the principles it represents.
The military understands this better than most. While Boyd's OODA loop has significantly influenced United States military doctrine for the last thirty years, successful military organizations do not treat it as a rigid framework. They use it as a mental model, a way of thinking about decision making that can be adapted to different contexts. They recognize that Boyd emphasized that the loop is actually a set of interacting loops kept in continuous operation, not a simplistic four step process.
Follow the money, and the motivation behind this constant rebranding becomes clear. A defining trait is the heavy reliance on external consultants, gurus, and certification programs to propagate the fad and monetize its adoption. Fashion setters, including major consulting firms, develop simplified frameworks and training programs that generate substantial revenue through fees, workshops, and licensing.
There is an entire industry built on taking timeless principles of good work, giving them new names, creating certification hierarchies, and selling them back to organizations as revolutionary innovations. The consultants are not malicious. Many genuinely believe in what they are selling. But the economic incentives are impossible to ignore. A consultant who says just use common sense and adapt your approach to your specific context will not earn the fees of one who promises that their two hundred page methodology manual will transform your organization.
The certification racket is particularly egregious. Certification processes are performed by external agencies for a fee, creating multiple revenue streams. You pay to get trained, pay to get certified, pay to maintain your certification, and pay consultants to help implement the methodology. It is a perpetual motion machine of revenue generation, all built on repackaging concepts that workers have understood intuitively for centuries.
Perhaps the most telling evidence of how old these new ideas really are comes from military history. Every successful military campaign has relied on the principles now packaged as Agile, Lean, or OODA loops. Alexander the Great did not have sprint retrospectives, but he constantly adapted his tactics based on feedback from the battlefield. The Roman legions did not use Six Sigma, but they were obsessed with process optimization and continuous improvement. Napoleon did not know about Lean manufacturing, but he revolutionized logistics by eliminating waste and streamlining supply chains.
Boyd developed the OODA Loop concept during the Korean War to explain why F-86 pilots successfully engaged superior MiG-15s, achieving a victory ratio of ten to one. But the principle, make decisions faster than your opponent, disrupt their decision making process, is not new. It has been the foundation of military strategy since humans first organized warfare. Sun Tzu wrote about it twenty five hundred years ago. So did Clausewitz. So did every competent military strategist throughout history.
Wars have been won not through revolutionary new concepts but through the disciplined application of timeless principles: clear objectives, rapid feedback, continuous adaptation, elimination of waste, focus on quality, empowerment of frontline decision makers. These are not the inventions of twentieth century management gurus. They are eternal truths of organized human endeavor.
When organizations become obsessed with a single methodology, demanding strict adherence to its prescriptions, they paradoxically undermine the very principles that methodology is meant to embody. Agile emphasizes adaptation and flexibility, yet many organizations implement it so rigidly that it becomes the opposite of agile. Lean focuses on eliminating waste, yet the bureaucracy created to implement Lean often becomes wasteful itself.
This is what happens when you treat a methodology as an end rather than a means. The point is not to do Scrum or implement Lean Six Sigma. It is to deliver value, improve quality, eliminate waste, make better decisions. The methodology is just a framework, a set of tools and practices that might help you achieve those goals. But the goals existed long before the methodology, and they will persist long after the current fad fades.
The most effective professionals understand this intuitively. They cherry pick from different methodologies, taking what is useful and ignoring what is not. They adapt practices to their specific context rather than following them dogmatically. They focus on principles rather than prescriptions. And they recognize that much of what is being sold as innovation is really just systematized common sense.
The way forward is not to reject these methodologies entirely. Many contain genuinely useful practices and tools. The solution is to integrate valuable concepts into your existing processes rather than imposing them as wholesale replacements. It is to recognize that these frameworks are meant to accent and enhance an individual's or organization's natural way of working, not to supplant it entirely.
A skilled developer does not need to abandon their judgment in favor of strict Scrum adherence. They can use sprint planning as a tool for better organizing their work while still applying their professional expertise to make intelligent decisions. A manufacturing manager does not need to become a Six Sigma zealot. They can use statistical process control where it makes sense while still relying on their deep knowledge of their specific operation.
The key is maintaining perspective. These methodologies are tools in your toolkit, not religious doctrines requiring absolute faith. Use them when they are helpful. Adapt them to your context. Ignore them when they are not serving you. And never forget that the fundamental principles they are based on, quality, efficiency, adaptation, collaboration, continuous improvement, are timeless concepts that long predate their current packaging.
We live in an age that worships novelty and innovation. We want to believe that the challenges we face are unprecedented and require revolutionary new solutions. But the truth is that human organizations have faced similar challenges throughout history, and the fundamental principles of good work have not changed.
What has changed is our willingness to pay consultants enormous sums to rename these principles and sell them back to us in fancy binders with certification programs attached. We have created an entire industry devoted to taking grandmother's wisdom, giving it an acronym, and charging companies millions to implement it.
The renaming and repackaging of old ideas is well known, with the Jingle Jangle fallacy describing the specious idea that two different things are the same because they bear the same name or that two identical concepts are different because they have different labels. We fall for it repeatedly because we desperately want to believe that this time, this methodology, this framework will finally be the one that solves all our problems.
But the reality is simpler and more humbling: good work requires judgment, skill, collaboration, continuous learning, and adaptation. It requires focusing on value, eliminating waste, improving quality, and making intelligent decisions. These principles do not need rebranding. They do not need certification programs. They do not need consultants to implement them.
What they need is for organizations to trust their people enough to apply these principles intelligently, adapting them to their specific contexts rather than forcing everyone into a one size fits all methodology. They need leaders who understand that the latest management fad is not magic and that there is no substitute for good judgment, experience, and common sense.
The story of the Emperor's New Clothes endures because it captures a fundamental human tendency: our willingness to pretend we see value in something simply because everyone else claims to see it, particularly when that something is being sold to us by people with impressive credentials and expensive fees.
The management fad industry relies on this tendency. It takes concepts that have existed since civilized society began organizing work, gives them new names, creates elaborate frameworks around them, and sells them as revolutionary innovations. And organizations buy them, not because they are genuinely new or revolutionary, but because they are afraid of being left behind, of appearing unsophisticated, of missing out on the next big thing.
But just as in the fairy tale, someone needs to point out the obvious: the emperor has no clothes. These methodologies are not revolutionary. They are repackaged common sense. The principles they embody have been winning wars, building businesses, and improving organizations for centuries.
That does not mean they are valueless. Common sense is valuable precisely because it is grounded in timeless truths about how to organize human effort effectively. But it does mean we should stop treating them as if they are magical incantations that will transform our organizations if only we implement them with sufficient fervor.
The next time someone tries to sell you the latest management methodology, ask yourself a simple question: What is actually new here? Strip away the jargon, the acronyms, the certification programs, and the consulting fees. What are the core principles? Chances are, you will find that your grandparents understood them, that successful organizations have been applying them for generations, and that you already know most of what you need to know.
The real revolution is not in discovering new principles of good work. It is in having the wisdom and confidence to apply the timeless principles we already know, adapting them intelligently to our specific contexts rather than slavishly following whatever methodology happens to be fashionable this year. That is not something you can certify, package, or sell. But it is the key to building organizations that actually work, rather than organizations that merely look like they are implementing the latest fad.
Because at the end of the day, wars are not won by acronyms. They are won by people who understand the fundamental principles of strategy, logistics, and leadership, principles that have remained remarkably constant throughout human history, regardless of what we choose to call them.