Fads and Fashions in Management Practices: Taking Stock and Looking Forward

Established management practices – such as Six Sigma or business process re‐engineering, as well as more recent practices such as agile management processes, HR analytics and beyond budgeting – are viewed by practitioners as the basic tools of their trade. Yet they have been known to wax and wane in popularity, often quite unpredictably, with one technique following the other in wave‐like fashion. The scholarly observation of this phenomenon has...