A conceptual background authenticated by an ideal university, certified by an MBA, or an academic degree, designates the heads sought after by the oligarchies running companies and institutions. Of course, this label is not enough to make a leader, because the managerial adventure is always deeply human, and therefore irrational, with its magical expectations coming from childhood and the need for emotional communions where identity and belonging are founded. Uniting common activity around a project is achieved through subtle exchanges that surpass the purely functional logic of the economy and organizations. The human dimension, still made up of emotions and passions in a transformed world, remains linked to the singular strangeness of desire and the unspeakable of anguish. . . The subject, developed by the three authors, stems from the first Metz Congress on the philosophy of management. It aims to open up a reflection, without any desire for reductive demonstration and without complacency, sometimes with a touch of irony, on the new “managerial” influences, often driven by (too many?) fine conceptual and methodological pretensions. “Science without conscience is but the ruin of the soul,” as Rabelais said. It could be that management, without a shared symbolic human meaning beyond the needs of the operational, is, in the long run, only the social bankruptcy of the collective.