The Poverty of Management

I just finished reading Paco Underhill's Call of the Mall. He reminded me of why I was so skeptical of the passage in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy in which Schumpeter seems to say that there is no longer any need for the entrepreneur, that we need only manage the existing industries. Basically, Underhil says that the original retail giants, the people who founded Saks, Macys, Neiman-Marcus, and so on, were people who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with titans like Vanderbilt and Carnegie. They had a vision and built an empire on that vision. Today, retail is boring and dull, punctuated only occasionally by someone with enough vision to come up with something truly unique. As an example of this, Paco gives us window displays, which are no longer the realm of creative designers but are now developed by a bunch of MBAs in an office in New York and then packaged in three-ring binders and sent out as orders through a bureaucratic army. Yuck.

To me, this only emphasizes that despite her overthetop fictional portrayal, Rand's thesis in The Fountainhead was essentially correct.