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•114 The 100 Greatest Business Ideas of All Time

Idea 65 – Robert Townsend, author of Up the
Organisation

Some may find it odd to have the author of such a witty and irreverent book in a
section dominated by the gurus of the century, but Townsend gets a lot of votes,
and a reading of this book written 30 years ago shows that many of the points he was
making were good enough to stand the test of time. It’s just that he used hyperbole
and wit to hammer his views home.

His starting point is that we all take ourselves and our businesses too seriously.
The result of this is to constrain creativity and run the risk of trying to implement
impossible strategies. He observes that ‘top management (the board of directors) is
supposed to be a tree full of owls – hooting when management heads into the wrong
part of the forest. I’m still unpersuaded that they even know where the forest is.’

On the other hand

I wonder if this analogy was behind the later theory of bowling alley manage-
ment. In this the middle managers are the ones bowling and senior managers
the scorers. The twist is that senior managers erect a curtain through which the
ball has to travel to strike the pins. Managers never, therefore, see the results of
their actions.

The only feedback they get from the senior management scorers is to be
told how many pins they missed.

But if you read the book twice – you miss too much the first time because of
giggling – there is solid sense behind a lot of what is said. He hates the trappings of
power, for example. His hit list in this area includes: reserved parking spaces, special