Man, I have been around tech long enough to watch these management fads come and go like bad haircuts. Back in the 90s we thought we were so damn sophisticated, chasing the next big fix for how to make smart people build software without wanting to throw their monitors out the window. Spoiler: none of them worked like the books promised, but we sure had fun pretending.
Early to Mid 1990s: Total Quality Management (TQM) The Original Sin
Before anyone moved any cheese, we had Total Quality Management. It sounded so reasonable: “Quality is everybodys job!” We drew fishbone diagrams, held quality circles, and chased zero defects like it was the holy grail. Wall charts everywhere. Meetings about meetings about quality.
For me, TQM ended when I, a young Lieutenant in the Air Force, presented a Lieutenant General with a metric on… wait for it… all the metrics. He asked me if that was my idea. I said, “No.” He looked at my (soon to retire) boss, sighed deeply, and ended my TQM torture forever. I still laugh about that one. Classic warm up act for everything that followed.
Late 1990s: Cheese, Reengineering, and Six Sigma Mania
Then came Who Moved My Cheese? that stupid little book about mice and tiny humans. Companies lost their minds. We had Cheese Days, plastic cheese wedges on desks, and managers earnestly telling burned out engineers to “sniff for new cheese.” I swear some people still quote it unironically.
Right around then Business Process Reengineering told us to blow the whole company up and start over (fun times). And do not get me started on Six Sigma. Motorolas manufacturing religion somehow infected tech. Suddenly frontend devs were getting Green Belts and calculating defects per million lines of JavaScript. Peak comedy.
Late 1990s to Early 2000s: The Balanced Scorecard Era
While we were still chewing on cheese, someone sold us The Balanced Scorecard. Now we did not just track money we had pretty colored dashboards for customers, processes, and learning and growth. Looked fantastic in board presentations. Got ignored by anyone actually doing the work. I still get nostalgic for that era of delusional metrics and four quadrant PowerPoint slides that somehow passed for strategy.
Early 2000s: The Agile Reformation
Thank God the rebellion finally hit. Bunch of tired developers snuck off to Snowbird in 2001 and wrote the Agile Manifesto. It was actually pretty damn inspiring at first working software over documentation, people over processes.
Then, of course, we ruined it. Agile showed up with certified Scrum Masters, 45 minute standups that felt like group therapy, and story points that somehow became the new performance whip. Still, those early days felt like freedom compared to the TQM nonsense. For a brief moment it really felt like we were finally putting the humans back in the process.
Mid 2000s to 2010s: The Alphabet Soup Years
After that it was just one long blur of buzzwords. Lean everything, OKRs (thanks Google), Servant Leadership, Holacracy (poor Zappos tried so hard), Design Thinking Post it parties that lasted entire afternoons, Lean Startup, and Growth Hacking. We tried so hard to be soulful and data driven at the same time. I remember sitting through workshop after workshop thinking, “Are we building software or starting a cult?” We even convinced ourselves that stacking enough of these fads on top of each other would finally make management scientific. It mostly just made everything noisier.
2010s to 2020s: The Human Hack Phase
Then we swung hard into the touchy feely era. Psychological Safety became the new holy grail after Googles Project Aristotle. Radical Candor taught us to care personally while challenging directly. We got blameless postmortems, quiet quitting freakouts, endless hybrid work whiplash, and the sacred belief that AI would finally fix all our very human problems. It was like the industry woke up one day and realized people had feelings, then immediately turned that realization into another set of frameworks and certifications.
The Current Meta: Token Maxing
And now? We have reached enlightenment: Token Maxing.
Can I spend a ridiculous amount of money to look extremely productive? Hell yes. Drop 200 a seat on the latest AI coding suite. Hire fractional Chief AI Officers. Build an Innovation Lab that ships one nice slide deck per quarter. Stack every tool until your token usage graph looks like a SpaceX launch.
The best part? Nobody can prove you are not crushing it. You have got the receipts, the dashboards, and the very expensive consultants nodding approvingly. Actual shipped product is so last decade.
The Eternal Truth
Looking back, every single one of these fads had a decent idea buried in there somewhere. The problem was always the same: we turned them into mandatory corporate religions and forced them on people who just wanted to build cool shit.
TQM for a 10 person startup was ridiculous. Six Sigma on consumer apps was performance art. Token maxing in 2026 is just expensive cosplay with better branding.
The managers I actually respected? They did the same boring crap for thirty years: hire good people, tell them what needs to happen, get out of their way, and buy them decent coffee. Everything else was just the consulting machine selling new cheese now extra expensive and served with AI tokens on top.
What about you? Which one of these fads still makes you groan the loudest when you hear it? I am still not over that damn Six Sigma belt from 2007.
About the author: Jeff Gray has been in tech long enough to remember when “cloud” was just called “someone else’s computer.” He currently runs Cyborama LLC, focusing on practical security solutions that avoid management fad whiplash.