"Free to Obey: How the Nazis Invented Modern Management" by Johann Chapoutot offers a profound and unsettling examination of the role of management practices in the Nazi regime. Chapoutot delves into the ways in which the Nazis employed organizational strategies, bureaucratic structures, and management techniques to exert control over both individuals and institutions. Through meticulous research and insightful analysis, Chapoutot demonstrates how the Nazis pioneered techniques of efficiency, rationalization, and standardization in pursuit of their ideological goals. He explores the intersection of management theory and authoritarianism, revealing the ways in which concepts such as division of labor, hierarchy, and discipline were utilized to consolidate power and implement policies of oppression and genocide.

I like the premise but found the book a bit difficult to get into and it seemed like a lot of the underlying assumptions were a bit of a reach. Perhaps this might be more regionally applicable (ie, European management styles) but there's plenty of evidence for modern business culture predating the Reich. Interesting concept to explore but not a super strong read -- I abandoned partway through.

5 stars.

It may not be a book that gives you many answers, but it certainly is one that makes you question…well everything. I’d recommend this book not to people who are interested in history though, but I think anyone who’s looking around not sure about their life, what are they supposed to do, what they want, what to change, basically, people that usually pick a self-help book, a dozen a year, I think would greatly benefit from reading this instead. The most probable causes for what doesn’t feel right about your life are described in this book. It may be about management and its roots, but it asks a broader question, “Is this the right way to live?” Is this really what we should be striving for, participating, trying to find our place in this mass production world? How free the individual is living within the system? Because that’s how it is, we’re not just working in it, we’re living it. It’s a very short read, and I don’t think you should have the slightest interest in history to be impacted by the book. I honestly think it’s a must read. It’s just marketed to the wrong audience.

Didn’t finish this one. Very heavy handed writing that doesn’t convincingly hit its thesis. Cherry picking anecdotal history for a very specific idea.

The Nazis believed in eugenics and practiced social Darwinism in their quest for the "perfect" man (the women were home with the babies) who could rise to the highest ideals of their society. But they were also clearly chaotic and unorganized in their hierarchy, with an emphasis placed on oversight, efficiency, and production. Johann Chapoutot uses the former SS officer, Reinhard Höhn, who ran a successful management school for decades after the war, to illustrate how elements of the Nazi management style have become embedded into our business institutions today.

Based on the cover, the subtitle, and my own interest, I thought I was the audience for this book. It became quickly obvious that I was not. Nevertheless, I persevered. As an ordinary reader, I found the writing to be far more academic, dense, and dry for my taste.

Because I was not within the niche audience, I rated the book a bit higher than I normally would have. If you are interested in the history of Nazism as well as management techniques and principles, this might be a title to add to your list.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher, Europa, for providing me access to an e-copy of the book for an honest review.

#netgalley #freetoobey #europacompass

I try not to read too many books about Nazis. There's a ratio, isn't there, an unknown but definite proportion of someone's reading beyond which they get a bit worrying; too many of those who do learn from history also seem a bit eager to repeat it. And for books filed under Business on Netgalley, the same but even more so; there the threshold is so close to zero as to be indistinguishable with the naked eye. But come on, a book blaming modern management practices on the Nazis? Resistance was futile.

The introduction made me worry that it had been a terrible mistake, disavowing the promise of the blurb: "Nor do I seek to present an indictment of managers, management, human resources departments, or auditors of consulting firms." Oh, really? Shame. Mercifully, this turns out to be something of a fig leaf; we're soon back to the ghastly Nazi jurist turned post-War management guru Reinhard Höhn, his enthusiasm for subordinates doing more with less, being told to use their initiative and not come crying to higher-ups, even though doing the wrong sort of trusting their instincts will obviously lead to just as much trouble as you'd get for doing the wrong thing in the hidebound bureaucracies of France or the USSR, against which he and his chums defined the entirely different – which is to say, more lawless, but in the event just as punctilious – bureaucracy of the Third Reich. The belief that underlings should be not just compliant but actively enthusiastic, the tendency of the management guru to talk in airy generalities, the love of hollow rhetoric in which 'everything was "historic," "unique"' – it's all horribly familiar. I've long found it amazing/appalling that people will still talk about work as somehow bringing freedom, which is obvious bollocks even before you consider how it translates into German, and been puzzled how a phrase as clearly inhuman as 'human resources' retains straight-faced ubiquity, but it's lovely to have chapter and verse on the through-line, not just in terms of terminology but of personnel; the book names names on the various students of this method – and, at least at the time, enthusiastic fascists – who would go on to play key roles in Germany's post-War reconstruction and, given the success of that economic miracle, attain influence in the corporate system across the world.

Yes, it can at times feel a little Adam Curtis in terms of not acknowledging the long prehistory of the instance it's addressing - surely subordinates being given a choice of means, but not ends, is not that far from the largely spurious distinction between 'liberty' and 'licence', which had already been stinking the place up for centuries? And if 700,000 people went through the Bad Harzburg management school, many even after Höhn's SS past was revealed, you'd think the book could reveal a better smoking gun in terms of the methods still being used than Aldi. There's also an obvious gap, even allowing for the book's translation having taken a couple of years, in not mentioning how 'will of the people' rhetoric - complete with leaders who, in its alleged service, must be allowed to overturn outmoded systems and norms - has reared its ugly head in plain old politics again. But it is fascinating to be reminded that, for all we now think of the Third Reich as a classic totalitarian state, to many of its own theorists it was anything but, the state having been superseded by the Volk, and ultimately destined to wither away, just like the other lot promised yet somehow never quite seemed to happen there either.

The perfect encapsulation of the whole thing, though: Reinhard Höhn, after the War, with the same make of car in the same colour and given the same pet name as before. Pumping out the exact same dreary prose as before, with the same buzzwords and banal recommendations, still enjoining great responsibility for subordinates without any real power. The only difference being that he's had the sense to shut up about supposed racial characteristics. And yet can you think of anything more Prussian than a system supposed to encourage initiative and spontaneity, with 315 rules on how to do that?

(Netgalley ARC)

I needed to sit with this one overnight before making my mind on how to rate it. My rating and review are specifically for the translated to English version of this book and I might revisit my review if I get my hands on an original French language copy. Reading this book was very uncomfortable, it felt like reading a largely favorable biography of a SS general that got away with it and went on to live a life of relative success. While it's facts that it is what happened, I was really taken aback by the sympathetic approach to the man. Considering that French reviewers did not seem to have been shocked by the approach I think this might be a question of nuance being lost in translation (hence I might revisit if I can find a French copy).
There are interesting aspect to this book and very timely ones too, if you are not convinced that there is an authoritarian/fascistic drift currently happening in many places this book might just make you see things differently without even trying. I say without trying because the focus through most of the book is on the managements principles put forward by Höhn and his management school and his life and not really on how they present in today's managerial world/political sphere but it's not hard to see if you pay even fleeting attention to what's going on around you (the use of freedom verbiage by authoritarians where in reality freedom is only freedom of mode not freedom of goals, decentralized leadership with diffuse instruction, power of the individual over only a small area of action that falls under their purview…).
In conclusion, Chapoutot is an historian and this is a history book so if you're interested in history you'll find interesting tidbits in a concise package, if you're looking for a deep cut about how current principles of management were shaped in part by Nazis this book might leave you "sur votre faim" as we would say in French.