Slaying Zombie Management Ideas

The Global Peter Drucker Forum is one of my favorite events of the year. It's hard to beat Vienna during the Holiday season - even harder to beat the company of fellow management renegades who gather there.

This year, I joined a panel moderated by the excellent Bill Fischer to examine management's “zombie ideas” - outdated, counterproductive beliefs (and resulting practices) that refuse to die.  I was really looking forward to this session: beliefs deeply shape organizational reality, and can pose the biggest barriers to innovation. Yet they're seldom explored.

Major leaps in human progress rarely come from new tools, techniques, or other purely material factors — instead they originate from new ways of thinking. One of my favorite economists, Deirdre McCloskey, has written several books describing how this played out during the industrial revolution. The extraordinary growth in human prosperity during the 18th and 19th centuries, she argues, wasn't mainly about the discovery of the steam engine or expanding trade. While these mattered, the modern world emerged from a revolutionary shift in beliefs: that ordinary people could "have a go" and create new businesses, that economic life could have dignity, that progress was possible. Crucially, it also required believing that people had inalienable rights, not divine-right rulers.

Social science theories, including management theories, do more than describe reality: they shape it by influencing how we think about ourselves and how we act. As John Maynard Keynes noted, they can become true simply by modifying the reality they claim to explain, "both when they are right and when they are wrong." And in management, we've accumulated quite a collection of ideas that are more wrong than right.

At the Forum, I shared three particularly tenacious zombie ideas that deserve a final resting place:

1. More conformance is better: the belief that control through rules and standardization leads to better performance. 
2. Change should be engineered: the assumption that transformation must be designed at the top and cascaded down. 
3. Leadership is positional: the conviction that influence and wisdom naturally correlate with organizational rank.

Here are a few thoughts on each—why they become problematic when unchallenged, and some practical examples of organizations that thrived by overturning them.

1. More Conformance is Better

This idea traces back to Frederick Taylor, who argued that through meticulous measurement, we could find "one best way" to do everything. While standardization revolutionized manufacturing, this belief has become toxic.

When standardization becomes sacred, organizations lose their capacity to adapt. Innovation withers because experimentation requires deviation.  Local teams, facing unique market conditions, find themselves handcuffed by one-size-fits-all policies. Excessive control creates passive employees who master compliance but lose their capacity for judgment. I'll never forget what SAP's former CEO Jim Snabe told me after discovering his company had accumulated over 5,000 KPIs: "We had all this amazing talent, but had asked them to put their brains on ice."

Standardization sets a floor on acceptable behavior, but it often sets a cap as well. If the goal is to deliver exceptional customer experience, solve new problems, or simply survive in a chaotic environment, control needs to be based less on rules than on principles, norms, and mutual accountability - it's less about telling people what to do and more about equipping them to make smart decisions.

Barnes & Noble learned this lesson the hard way. By 2019, the company was dying: plunging in-store sales, anemic online revenue, and over 150 stores closed since 2008. After cycling through four CEOs in four years, the board turned to James Daunt, a British bookseller who had quit banking at age 26 to open his own shop in London. Having just turned around Waterstones, a struggling UK chain, Daunt arrived with a diagnosis that surprised many Barnes and Noble insiders: rather than blame Amazon, he argued the company's bookstores "simply weren't good enough."

For Barnes & Noble, the problem was devotion to the big-box playbook: standardization, centralization, and efficiency above all else. "People come to bookstores for a richly textured, emotional engagement," Daunt explained. "Independent booksellers understand their customers and curate for them. The big chains had simply stopped doing that." Worse, they'd ceded control over book selection to publishers, who paid for prime placement. The stores were serving publishers and head office metrics, not readers.

Daunt's solution was to let each store rediscover its bookselling soul. He gave store teams freedom over selection, displays, and pricing - with full accountability for results. Instead of following 'best practices,' managers were told to "think it through yourselves and make decisions based on principles rather than rules."

At first, many store employees felt lost - years of enforced conformance had created a kind of learned helplessness. But once people embraced their new autonomy, the results were remarkable. The Upper West Side store in Manhattan moved registers to the back, relocated magazines upstairs, and replaced algorithm-driven recommendations with hand-curated displays. Teams started sourcing titles for their specific communities, even scrolling through #BookTok to spot local trends. One Florida store even rebranded itself. Today, Barnes & Noble is profitable and expanding for the first time in a decade.

[Note: you'll find the fuller account of this remarkable transformation in the second edition of Humanocracy, coming next year. Stay tuned for more updates]

2. Change Should Be Engineered

Despite decades of evidence that programmatic change fails, organizations keep treating change as something to be designed by the few and executed by the many. I've written and spoken about this dynamic in some detail, but the basic idea is that top-down, highly prescribed approaches fail in three important ways. Change arrives too late, as the C-suite slowly works through diagnosis, design, and rollout, while opportunities slip away. Meanwhile, the changes themselves emerge either too timid or too radical - either maintaining the status quo through incremental adjustments or creating unnecessary risk through sweeping overhauls. Lastly, change meets resistance - not because people inherently oppose change (another zombie idea), but because no one likes change imposed without their input.

Breaking free of these limitations means distributing the responsibility for change broadly throughout the organization. When new challenges emerge, everyone must be empowered to act, while senior leaders focus on creating the conditions for change rather than dictating its precise path.

The U.S. Army's "Transforming in Contact" initiative shows what this looks like in practice. Today's Army faces two fundamental challenges: adapting to multiple threats simultaneously (unlike during the Cold War when the Soviet Union provided one clear focus) and keeping pace with rapidly evolving technology. Commercial tech now changes every few months - drone software and sensors need updating every six to twelve weeks just to stay effective.

Rather than imposing another top-down change effort, Army Chief of Staff General Randy George designated three brigade combat teams as innovation laboratories: the 2nd Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division in Kentucky, the Pacific-focused 2nd Brigade of the 25th Infantry Division in Alaska, and the 3rd Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division in Germany. Each operates in distinct environments, testing what works in their specific contexts. This marks a revolutionary shift from the Army's traditional approach. In the past, as Chief Technology Officer Alex Miller explains, the Army would set "gold-plated" requirements - insisting that equipment work perfectly in all conditions - and then push this over-engineered kit down to every unit over three to seven years. Now, these experimental brigades can quickly acquire and test equipment suited to their specific needs. A robot that works well in Louisiana might fail in the Pacific - and that's valuable knowledge.

The initiative has already produced promising results. Equipment specifications have shrunk from encyclopedic documents to five-page briefs. When units needed new coolant-pump covers for Bradley vehicles, instead of waiting six to eight months through normal channels, they 3D-printed them in under an hour for 16 cents each. The Army is also embracing modularity, exemplified by their new infantry squad vehicle - based on the Chevrolet Colorado, with 90% commercially available components.

"It's a big difference to actually do this on the ground, inside formations," says General George. "We have users, developers and testers that are all there together." This approach puts innovation in the hands of frontline soldiers while creating the conditions for rapid experimentation and iteration.

3. Leadership is Positional

During the Drucker session, I asked the few hundred audience members the following question: “When people in your company mention 'the leadership team,' do they mean...

A. Everyone in the organization who can mobilize others?

B. The dozen or so EVPs who sit atop the pyramid?” 

You won’t be surprised by the fact that not a single hand went up for Option A.

Conflating leadership with rank creates two fundamental problems. First, it distorts organizational decision-making. Experience substitutes for expertise. Dissent disappears. Candor evaporates. Second, it misdirects organizational energy. The competition shifts from creating value to securing promotion.

W.L. Gore shows us another way. Known for Gore-Tex fabrics, they've built a 13,000-person organization that operates as a lattice, not a hierarchy. Gore associates connect directly with colleagues to get work done. They resist titles because, as former CEO Terri Kelly explained, "Titles put you in a box, and worse, they put you in a position where you assume you have authority to command others." Associates - all owners in the company - choose where they can contribute most rather than waiting for assignments. But with this freedom comes accountability: once you commit, you deliver.

Having minimal hierarchy doesn't mean no leadership - au contraire. Leaders exist, but they emerge and earn their authority through followership, not top-down appointments. Seniority and executive friendships don't get you promoted. What matters is whether people actually want to be led by you. As one associate put it: "If you call a meeting and no one shows up, you're probably not a leader."

Gore isn't alone in rejecting positional leadership. Companies like Haier, Vinci, and Bayer multiply leadership opportunities by breaking into smaller, autonomous units. They develop business acumen at every level and tie rewards to value creation rather than position.

Breaking Free

These zombie ideas represent just a few of the outdated management beliefs we must challenge. I have a longer list, which I might explore more deeply in a later post. I'm sure you have your own set. But how do we go about identifying and eliminating them once and for all? Here are some tips based on my research and experience advising organizations through the years:

First, start by becoming aware of how these beliefs influence everyday organizational life. Watch for their fingerprints in team meetings, corporate communications, and HR policies. Notice how they influence big decisions - when you look back at missed opportunities or missteps, you'll often find zombie thinking at the root. Make this reflection visible to others, and invite them to share their observations about what holds the organization back.

Next, challenge these beliefs by examining their origins. Often, we prefer certain management practices simply because they match our inherited assumptions about people and organizations. Ask yourself: Are there organizations achieving similar outcomes through different means - perhaps emphasizing values and peer accountability over rules and supervision, like Gore? Are we allowing comfortable beliefs to cloud our willingness to consider alternatives? Make space for evidence that might challenge conventional wisdom.

Finally, explore alternatives by asking: If we held a different belief about how organizations work, what would we do differently? Consider changes both at the individual level - how you lead and make decisions - and at the organizational level through new practices and policies. Take a page from the Army's playbook: create spaces where new thinking can be tested safely and quickly. Pick a few units to serve as laboratories for change, equip them with resources and autonomy, and let them show what's possible. While the goal might be radical, the path there should be utterly practical.

Like every revolution worth its salt, transforming management starts with transforming minds. Time to bury these zombie ideas and nurture new life in their place.