Management Tools or just common sense

My current role gives me an opportunity to learn a lot about management tools. Those sophisticated diagrams, matrices, maps, charts and tables that have supposedly been devised over a long period of time after intense and deep research. Many of you must have heard about things like 2 by 2 matrices. These are used by many management professionals, consultants, business leaders to segment markets, characterise products, define customers, assess economies etc. These are very simple to use, we can put any two parameters on the X-axis and any two on the Y-axis and then (as ardent fans of these matrices would want us to believe) we can aspire to fit the entire world in one of those four boxes. Some innovative professionals in their spare time have devised the next generation matrices which also allow for a conitnuous gradation within any particular box or even across the whole matrix.
Then there is Michael Porter's famous five competitive forces analysis. This is a neat tool for industry analysis and business strategy development. It is perhaps one of the most popular tool in the business environment and has been around since the 70's with little change but widespread application. It allows you to think of a particular industry in light of five prominent competitive forces namely: Customer's, New Entrants. Competitors, Suppliers and Substitute Products. I have used it sometimes mostly in training courses while working on syndicate exercises and have found it quite useful.
Then there are many more such as those glossy transformation maps which can be used (again in the opinion of the ardent fans) to even create a map to transform your life with clear actions and timelines for each. It is mostly used when a group of people collectively need to achieve certain goals in a given time frame. Can be quite effective as a guiding document but unless one is careful these might not take into account the influence of external factors and multiple scenarios arising out of those.
Another famous and quite often used, specially when analysing one's own business or that of a competitor's is SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Very neat and simple. Often quite high-level but quite effective in terms of understanding the over-all direction.
All these, and I am sure there are many more, are almost used like mouse and keyboards by professionals all around the world to structure their thinking and remain focussed on key issues.
I do not have any problems with these tools but I am not a great fan of any of these or even of the whole concept of having these tools in the first place. For me most of this is common sense and to intelligent managers and natural leaders this will come naturally. All these tools will be of no use to an individual who has clarity of thoughts who knows what he wants, understands the environment around him well and is aware of his own strengths and weaknesses. And so is true for organisations who have a clarity of thought and direction. Most of the times people are so obsessed with wanting to talk hi-fi jargon that tools precede the main objective. It becomes fashionable to throw around a few slides with glossy 2 by 2's and transformation maps whereas in reality the crux of the problem or whatever objective is being pursued is lost.
Off course there are benefits of using these tools and as mentioned before systemic and structured thinking is one of those. But the best value can be derived from these tools only when people begin to appreciate the core themes and concepts that these tools espouse and incorporate them into their thinking styles which should ultimately make the very same tool redundant.
I will continue to use a few of these particularly the Porter's five forces but will try and keep things in perspective by always being aware of the fact that tools by themselves are nothing but tools and only a skilled workman can create something of value by using them.