Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? | Hacker News Reader

Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science?

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19 pointsdwynings20 comments

The mere title (but the article as well) begs the question, to what extent is management a science at all? While there's a lot of pseudo-science in pop business nonfiction, there's very little rigor - see a summary of this critique here: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/04/12/...

In particular, "In a paper currently under review, the three argue that not only are business gurus bad at identifying the causes of success, they have no way of telling true greatness from mere luck - if enough people are flipping coins, someone is likely to string together an impressive run of heads. According to their analysis of 13 of the most influential business success books, three quarters of the purportedly great companies had track records that could just as easily have been explained by the vicissitudes of random chance - performances that looked impressive on first glance were simply akin to being the lucky person in a stadium full of coin-flippers."

Maybe HBR is more rigorous than the pop business press as a whole, but this article doesn't seem to be.

If it has 'science' in its title, it probably isn't.

As much as I think poorly of much of the "soft science", there's no reason that there can't be such a thing as management science.

I think that we in the news.yc culture all agree that the following is a good approach to take to assertions and thesis floated about how to run a company, no?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method

Elements of scientific method

    * 3.1 Characterizations
    * 3.2 Hypothesis development
    * 3.3 Predictions from the hypothesis
    * 3.4 Experiments
    * 3.5 Evaluation and improvement
    * 3.6 Confirmation

The problem is running any kind of controlled experiment. There are oodles of variables involved.

Granted, there are probably a few situations where something useful might be gleaned, but I just don't buy the idea of management as a science.

There are similar problems in astronomy, cosmology, geology - and yet, we can still do science in those fields. Management science is hard, but management mythology is worse.

Maybe it's really 'management engineering'. The application of science and math to the practice of building businesses.

Domains of scientific inquiry can be roughly considered along two axes: ability to partition the world into context-free discrete objects, and ability to test predictions by direct intervention.

The former includes the type of abstract simplifications that people laugh at physicists for ("consider a spherical cow in a vacuum..."); the latter refers to the naive concept of the scientific method as an iterative "hypothesize, experiment, repeat" approach.

Physics sits far in the "easy" corner, which is why it's the shining city-on-a-hill ideal of scientific success. Cosmology and the like are way down the "non-intervention" axis, where testing is awkward. Down the context-heavy axis are things like biology, studying systems that can't be neatly decomposed.

In the far "difficult" corner, both analysis and testing are sufficiently difficult that constant vigilance is necessary to prevent the entire field from being overrun by convincing-sounding bullshit. Evolutionary biology is the only obvious success story I can think of in this quadrant, and even that has been intermittently plagued by dubious ideas (e.g., the "group selection" fallacy).

To take something like "management science", and do actual science is not just hard, it's fantastically difficult and requires a level of clear-thinking rational discipline far beyond the demands of most fields.

There's also applying the scientific method to what you do--A/B testing against different web designs for instance.

"Computer science"? "Rocket science"?

The first is essentially a branch of mathematics, and do they really have degrees in something called "rocket science"? I don't think that's its formal name, which would be aerospace engineering.

> The mere title (but the article as well) begs the question

I don't think that that phrase means what you think it means

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

I don't know, that was a more valid use than most. The question "Is X in category Y?" implicitly assumes, among other things, that X exists and that Y is a valid category.

If the validity of category Y is not established, then to argue whether something is or is not in Y is not too far from begging the question of Y's validity.

Entrepreneurship is not a synonym for management science. Asking if it is equivalent or a member of the set of "management sciences" does not "beg the question."

If by "the validity of category Y is not established" you mean that the validity of management science is not established I think you are ignoring a body of work dating to the 1940's in applying mathematics to decision making.

Disciplines like industrial engineering or operations research are normally considered members of the set of management science. They substitute decision making based on models and simulation for naive methods based on intuition and rules of thumb. Examples would include inventory control theory, queueing theory, game theory, decision analysis,...

See for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_science and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_research

It wouldn't be the Internet if someone didn't bring this up. As far as absuses of the phrase go, I say that this is a fine instance of "assuming of the premise", as opposed to the common misuse, which is as a synonym for "raises the question". One article regarding the phrase states, "One of the most common fallacies of assumption is called begging the question. Here the arguer assumes what he should be proving." The arguer here assumes that there is a science to management in his argument that entrepreneurship is potentially an application of management science. However, I contend that the arguer's assumption is misplaced and first the arguer should be proving that the scientific method is applicable to management in the first place.

You can argue that I am misapplying the phrase, but I certainly understand what it means and used it based on the above understanding. Furthermore, I don't think my attempt at communication failed: I am fairly certain you and every other reader of my comment understood the point I was making, which is ultimately the goal of the written word, no?

I will take the other side. Running an entrepreneurship club, I have found that the biggest challenge was deciding who we were. Were we startups? Mom-n-Pop small businesses? Work-from-homers? The key to your question starts with asking, "what do you define entrepreneurship?" Once you answer that, the original question will likely answer itself.

"I often saw the best practices of general management fail startups."

Even a quick reading Peter Drucker offers a lot of wisdom for managing a startup.

"The Effective Executive" and "Innovation and Entrepreneurship" have a lot to say about managing time, priorities, and posteriorities (what you are NOT going to do or organized abandonment) that are highly relevant to getting a startup off the ground and growing.

For a shorter piece that talks about value creation and the need to focus outside of the corporation to create value, his "The Next Information Revolution" (published in ASAP but available here http://www.versaggi.net/ecommerce/articles/drucker-inforevol... ) is worth a quick read.

That's a fair point. I did not mean to imply that Drucker's work has no relevance for startups. For one, I've been profoundly influenced by his writing.

Rather, I'm trying to work towards a new theory of entrepreneurship that can help us figure out _which_ practices from general management are transferable and which fail. Most MBA's and general managers that I've seen enter startups seem to assume either "all of them" or "none of them." Both answers are incorrect.

I think the use of "management science" in the title is problematic as management science is normally defined operations research or industrial engineering. Many of the techniques that you espouse, such as A/B testing, are examples of "management science."

I think what you are taking aim at that's "non-transferrable general management" is the bureaucracy of large organizations. Part of it goes back to the "startup dollhouse fantasy" which is a term you coined that I really like. But I think what you are ridiculing with it is the imposition of formal control structures on teams that are small enough that social process and peer pressure is an adequate substitute.

In "Corporation Man" Anthony Jay talks about 'hunting groups' or 'ten groups' having different rules from 'the camp' or the full tribe. Startups are like hunting groups, but every corporation has many "hunting groups." If you take a manager of a hunting group and put them in charge of a startup they will be right at home. General managers run the camp or the tribe and are less suitable for the special needs of the hunt.

My most recent startup created a marketplace for customers to buy and sell virtual goods for their 3D avatar

The author in a way has answered his own question, when he wrote the above. Entrepreneurship - the way understood by the rest of the world is developing the skills to make a profit out of a business. Entrepreneurship the way understood by most us here at HN is developing the skills to create and sustain 'start-up' that will make f*ck money!

You can use Science as part of your product development and management of the Company but Entrepreneurship itself is not Science.

Yes, sure, just we don't have enough information to see the "continuum" instead of the discrete parts.

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