At Onilog, one of our core values is PASSION, which we define as the belief that we should all live our lives doing what truly gives meaning to us. That’s why we are developing an internal program called "Professional and Personal Development Plan" to ensure all our team members follow their own path toward happiness.
Theories connect analysis and action, and especially in times of change, when the future becomes unpredictable and anxiety runs high, managers need theories that provide clarity and security.
Scientific management. Human relations. Competitive advantage. Maximizing shareholder value. Disruptive innovation. These are just a few of the theories that have driven management over the past century, offering a purpose, a framework, and sometimes even a justification for action. They have also helped shape management itself, creating an image of what managers are supposed to be.
Let’s consider scientific management, better known as Taylorism, possibly the most enduring management theory. It suggests that a manager’s job is to increase efficiency within a production system. The manager, then—represented by the image of Dr. Taylor—should be a distant engineer who examines data to counter the most common source of error: people.
We are all caught in a midlife crisis of management. The signs of this crisis appear in many everyday experiences. Maybe you feel restless and anxious, sensing that we won’t be returning to “normal” at work—if we even still have a job. Or you feel stuck, swinging between frustration and despair, wondering who is in charge and what lies ahead. You feel anger toward the system, not to mention distrust; you feel lonely and devoid of meaning. These are not just signs of grief over how life has forced us to change in recent months and weeks—our restlessness and despair have been building for much longer than that.
Yet, the more we search for new theories, the more restless and stuck we feel. That’s because the problem that triggers a midlife crisis isn’t like most challenges management is trained to analyze and solve. It’s existential.
And yet, it must be faced. Our lives depend on it.
This is the matter of death—and the question of what to do with the freedom, time, and energy we have left.
You read that right. I’m arguing that the unease many have felt at work over the past months and years—and that is felt even more acutely now in the face of a global health and social crisis—is not due to a lack of competence among managers to prepare for the future. It is due to management’s reluctance to face a scarcity of its own future, one that is becoming more obvious and urgent by the day. A future scarcity that affects management not only as an idea and a practice, but also as the destiny of individual managers. That denial, still visible in many organizations today, is both dangerous and unfortunate.
Midlife crises are often unpleasant but productive matters. Death, when we are able to face it, forces us to consider not only how we live, but also why we exist. It moves our intellect and imagination toward better ways and deeper reasons for being. Though it begins with a lack of meaning and hope, a midlife crisis can be a source of both. A crisis can:
Such humanization is much needed, as many have been pointing out, but it must go much further than the usual rhetoric of purposeful leadership, an airbrushing of humanism to make management nicer. It must become its core.
There is much to gain—if we can work through the crisis. But first, let’s consider where it comes from.
A midlife crisis doesn’t need to be triggered by the realization of our actual physical death. It can arise from the awareness that the world as we knew it—or a worldview we once held in high regard—is breaking down. Midlife crises erupt at existential inflection points, between a state that is no longer viable and one that is not yet imaginable.
Seen this way, management has been experiencing a midlife crisis for some time. Capitalism, the worldview for which most management theories and tools were designed to sustain and grow, is at an existential crossroads. We are no longer just asking how to make it work. Many are now asking why it exists (and for whom). Some are even questioning whether it is still viable.
"Capitalism as we know it is dead," declared Marc Benioff, three weeks into the 2020s. Speaking from the main stage to a packed auditorium at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, the CEO of Salesforce became an unlikely eulogist. Benioff was inviting his peers to lay to rest ultra-capitalism—concerned only with itself, obsessed with growth and profits, and blind, if not openly hostile, to its environmental and social context. The strain of capitalism that appears daily in macro trends like the emergence of “winner-takes-all” societies, and micro movements like the obsession with stock markets during a pandemic, is what he critiqued.
We can debate whether ultra-capitalism is truly dead. But as the planet burns, inequality grows, people suffer, and geopolitics become increasingly tense, few would doubt that it is mortal.
Much of the harm caused by ultra-capitalism happens through its management—more precisely, through the unquestioned practice of a dehumanized vision of how management works and how it should work. It’s an instrumental view that frames it as a kind of technology, a means to an end, a tool to maximize efficiency, alignment, and performance—even when it seemingly acts with care and concern for people. It disregards anything that doesn’t affect performance, and its influence is so deep that we often use it to manage even ourselves. For example, each time we tell ourselves we should sleep better, exercise more, or read a novel just to be more productive at work, instead of because our lives are healthier, richer, and freer for doing so.
Consider, for example, most management research or popular writing on the topic. It’s based on a portrait of management when it’s done well—how it predicts and solves practical problems. And it focuses on offering prescriptions for how managers should address these problems, such as:
In many circumstances, the theories and tools that help answer instrumental questions are enough. But they fall short when existential questions arise, such as: How long will we be here? Do we matter? Are we in charge? These are midlife questions for individuals. And they are precisely the kinds of questions we’re increasingly asking about management in this existential crossroads.
These questions are growing stronger. And those we expected to bury ultra-capitalism may, in fact, be rushing to its deathbed to revive it—arguing that its previous success now makes us more capable of solving social ills, or selling our health and privacy for efficiency.
Trying to change the world without wanting to change our world is a classic sign of midlife and a common defense when our worldviews collapse. Only offering to lend one’s hand and means can be a way to assure that one will remain valuable and central even in a new world.
Ultimately, however, this approach is not enough. If we want to change the world, we need to change our world first. That means that those who aspire to give birth to a new brand of capitalism must kill the old brand of management first.
When I say that we must kill management, I do not mean terminating managers, the people.
Replacing them with algorithms, for example, risks making management more instrumental than it already is. The AI-run workplace achieves degrees of control that surpass Frederick Taylor’s wildest dreams. Replacing old managers with new managers will not do either. It would be useless, if new ones embody the same principles with a different style.
Instead, when I say we need to kill management, I mean putting aside the way we conceive, portray and practice management. We — you and me, people who attend gatherings and read magazine features on the future of work, and everyone else who brings management to life in words, in writing, or in their daily work — need to change our conception of management, of its function in any enterprise.
We need a truly human management, one that makes room for our bodies and spirits alongside our intellect and skills. That cares for what work does and feels and means to us, not just for what we can do at work and how.
A management that abjures the relentless pursuit of efficiency and alignment — and celebrates, or even just acknowledges, the inconsistencies that make us human. A management that pursues existential growth as passionately as it pursues instrumental growth — that is, one that pursues the expansion of our consciousness alongside that of our powers. One where we can be fully human, with all our contradictions, in pluralistic institutions.
A human management will demand that we:
That kind of management might advance a capitalism based on curiosity and compassion, therefore one that is much better at innovation and inclusion than its current form.
One can see glimpses of such a human view of management already. You can see them in the CEO's who talk about caring for purpose as much as for profit. You can see them in people’s longing for meaning and community at work. But for those claims not to ring hollow and those longings not to go unmet, management as we know it, really, has to die. There is no other way. Because, in truth, it does not have a problem. It is the issue.
The challenge facing management is not the lack of new theories; it is the strength of the old ones. It is impossible to build the future using the blueprints of the past. It is like going to a plastic surgeon to restore our looks, when we should see a psychoanalyst to free our mind instead.
Seen through this lens, the essence of a midlife crisis is confinement. Theories that we learned early on, and kept us going, have come to keep us captive.
For individuals, those are usually personal theories about how to get on. You must always work hard. (What for?) You can rest after the next promotion. (Really?) Prove that you can make it alone. (But why?) Always work to fit in. (At what cost?)
For management, these are theories we picked up at school, from books, and from role models at work. Popular theories like the ones I mentioned earlier, or more local ones in our organizations. Managers, say, must put shareholders first, or keep people in line. Those theories might have kept us safe and made us successful, at one point. They worked for us, and so we worked for them. Until their magic stopped, frequently because we could not change, were confronted with death, or both.
Those theories fail us then because they show us how to keep going without telling us why. When change is needed or death is in the horizon, that will neither soothe us nor suffice us. The question we need to answer is no longer, “what works best?”; it is, “what is worth living for?”
A midlife crisis is a euphemism for the realization that the instrumental answers that theories generate from data do not fit existential questions. Theories are of limited use without a purpose. They are, eventually, unbearable. So is the idea of management we have clung to for a century.
This is why existential threats, when we confront them, can end up freeing us up. They broaden our horizon, by reminding us that we require more than theories and that we are more than tools.
With insight and support, we often emerge from a midlife crisis with a more spacious view of who we are, more forgiving, more generous, more resolute and tolerant at once. More likely to balance our concern for the mechanics and morals of our actions. If it can face its own midlife crisis, then, management might be on the brink of a real transformation.It might even use the current health and social crises as opportunities to demonstrate, not just tout, its commitment to humanity.
For that, however, we do not need new theories of management. We require a broader purpose for it. And we require that purpose to emerge not in bold pronouncements but in ongoing conversations, with ourselves and others, that challenge instrumental theories.
Those conversations are far more useful at existential junctures like this. They are a far better means to free us up and join us in bringing about a human turn in management— and ultimately in our relationships with each other, with technology, and with the planet in the workplace.
Those who are still skeptical of pronunciations such as “capitalism as we know it is dead,” and mistrust the commitment to transformation of those who have benefited from ultra-capitalism, base their critique on a sound principle. We usually like to change the world if we can, but not to the extent that it puts our identities are at stake. Unless we are in a midlife crisis, that is. Then, an existential view suggests, people are often capable of becoming a threat to their old worldviews, of killing an old self that gets in the way of the future.
If efficiency is the aim of instrumentalism, freedom is the aim of existentialism. Deepening our humanity, in business, politics, and every other field, requires an equal devotion to both. The day that freedom is as central as efficiency to its practice, we might declare management dead and welcome it to a new life.
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