Management - failure to learn, and a call for business unit diaries

I'm in the process of coming out of about my sixth 'utilisation rate" farce - er, cycle. 

What happens is that some IPOC does some very simplistic thinking, notices that utilisation rate appears to indicate productivity, if productivity is defined in terms of billable hours, conflates their excitement at having found something they that matches their level of understanding with what motivates real human beings, and then starts pushing for measurement and targets on utilisation. 

That's the start. Once reality sets in, including business cycles, competition, the waxing and waning of markets, competitors, business practices, changes, and internal restructuring, the fact that utilisation rate does NOT detect time that is crucial to business functioning, then ways of pushing back on this simplistic and often (but not always) useless tool start to be used, and eventually we get to a stage where people start looking at overall resourcing, capability and project cycles again, and utilisation rate gets pushed back to the backburner - until the next shallow thinker comes along. 

There is a problem learning from experience in management - to quite an extent, I suspect, because the analysis is too simple, too focused on easily measured numbers rather than quality, and because too many people are ideologically addicted to that which they like and/or understand, rather than whatever the evidence is really showing. 

This something that, in a different setting, is being brought out by Daniel  Ellsberg's "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers". I've now got to the section where the study that was later referred to as the Pentagon Papers is being started, and I've come across this:

"Tran Ngoc Chau said to me in 1968, “You Americans feel you have been fighting this war for seven years. You have not. You have been fighting it for one year, seven times.” There was a general failure to study history or to analyse or even to record operational experience, especially mistakes."

Mr Ellsberg then gives an example of one location where US forces were engaged twice, eight months apart, but the second time they weren't aware that there had been an earlier exercise in the same area. 

Every time we get into the start of a utilisation rate cycle, I wonder why it is that no-one seems to realise the flaws of this from the previous time. Are courses still teaching the same intellectually attractive but real world flawed ideology that they were thirty or more years ago? Are there some places where this makes a difference - for the better, I mean, rather than just demotivate? 

It seems to be exactly the same sort of unintelligent incompetence as Mr Ellsberg is talking about.

That somewhat surprises me, as I know many military units keep a unit diary - documents which are often used to reconstruct details for subsequent analyses. 

I would, in fact, like to see businesses have such official diaries for their key business units, but those diaries: 

• get introduced at the start of the next management appointment, and will the full awareness and agreement of the candidates (discussed during the assessment process, with refusal to accept this being reason to reject that applicant);
  
• should be compiled independently, with a commitment to objectivity and avoiding promotion of the favourable (so they get written by an independent analyst, and possibly under an embargo until the key managers leave/get promoted); 
• they record what is happening in the market and in competitors as well, to enable a properly informed - contextually - analysis to be undertaken; and
  
• they focus on management approaches (not individual project lessons), the impact on the company overall (from a stewardship of company resources perspective * ), and not on the numbers that are already reported by others (although copying those in to the analysis as an Appendix would be good).
  

Hmm. 

I wonder if that will ever happen? If the military can learn from past mistakes, and they do, what is wrong with businesses that they can't?

 * I knew one manager a long time ago who thought it was acceptable to lose most of the staff in his group provided the profit as a percentage went up - the total value was lower, and a staggering loss of skills had occurred, but he didn't care. That is NOT good for the company.