The modern tendency is to codify and systematize all management decisions.
In the old British Empire, the upper class learnt the classics (as in, ancient myths) and were packed off to go rule the world. It didn’t go so badly (for Britain).
Perhaps we can combine the two - managers to study human nature, and then study the problem, and then use regular brainpower to come up with good solutions.
i think managers should be good at observing and linking cause to consequence. and use that experience to make good decisions. in the future we might be able to replace managers with AI.
Thanks for the reference. There are quite a few writers railing against the current Professional Managerial Class (PMC). It's very interesting to see that their rise has quite a long history. Where things appear to have gone off the rails is that the PMC are now more interested in the management of perception than actually managing. The proposed solution is to get more competent managers but Burnham points out that the issue is likely more fundamental than that and a new social organisation may be required to deal with their shortcomings.
This is a good statement. Management is actually hard, and questions of leadership and management have been seriously thought about for centuries, because it is a hard problem that manifests itself in places where good results are expected.
I agree that “managers” are these days mostly a legacy from
Industrial Revolution. Supervisors at every few dozen people was a solution for armies and factories where the human does all the work.
As those workers “do what they are told” and do not “leave the farm” you can call it feudalism if you want.
But now the CPU does all the work so the coders are the new managers
Yes we need fewer supervisor-managers, because we have / need fewer workers.
Bauer thinks they just need a few brilliant chemists who can use AI to find that new protein. They might be right.
But there is a flaw - they still
Want the cash to flow upwards. They still see owning the capital as the right to get the returns to capital. They still want feudalism, but with fewer grabbing barons.
Bauer seems to have missed the point that self-organising is democracy.
That equal say means equal share
That letting smart mission driven people organise will likely lead to better results around the mission, but also lead to them asking “why aren’t we getting better paid, and who is taking all the money?”
FDR was called a traitor to his class. Or a hero for democracy.
Trouble is that management seems to be a P != NP type problem. Really easy to tell when done wrong but really difficult to get right - for variety of reasons.
You perspective is interesting. Do you have an opinion about to help management know how to manage? I'm personally in a constant struggle to improve my management skills but struggle to weed through the sudo-science of management training resources.
Management has been around since ancient times in various forms. There are things that kinda work, but the game keeps changing as the interests and balances of power shift in the workplace. Why would it ever be "solved"?
IMO it’s not this simple. Culture has more to do with it than anything. See my note about Netflix having this mantra of “context not control”. Managers are less inclined to be domineering in that setting and allow people to do the work in a reasonable way because they are given the context of why their work is being done in the first place.
Not perfect but a more than above average way to approach the problem yet this kind of thinking or its permutations have not caught on at all. It’s still top down process oriented models
Reminds me of something I had noticed: There are a lot of occupations that previously (sometimes long ago) required a good bit of expertise and a good bit of thinking that nowadays have been placed under managers who took the thinking (and very often fake the experience doing the work they plan or have outdated experience)
For some barely logical reason the more complicated work and the higher salary came with a kind of military authority position that use to be reserved for the level above or (longer ago) didn't exist.
This gets interesting where management tasks, like all other tasks, need to be optimized. If it is the same person doing both the tasks and the planning optimization happens naturally. A is compared to B, one goes over the advantages and disadvantages of either and makes a choice.
But now the manager has to chose between his own comfort and/or the effort he has to make and that of his underlings and the actual productivity. I don't think we need numbers to know what most would chose when the options are themselves or others. Its a damn hard choice to make objectively.
But the thing is, didn't we get these big brain high salary guys to make everyone under them work more efficiently? I think comfort in a job makes the largest contribution to productivity out of all factors. At one end of the scale people just start walking off at the other you get the [rare] unimaginable performance only seen in people who love what they are doing.
WFH is going to make management that much harder but also more valuable. If one is not excited about that the job seems to have evolved beyond capabilities.
What more do we need than the employee himself stating: "I cant do the work like this" in a context where we know others are doing it with great success.
Video chat is like the way PDF tries to replicate the paper office. I'm sure people are already building parsers for video chat and failing to match organized exchanges.
I imagine some kind of analogy with using whatsapp as a bug tracker. Surely it would kinda work to some extend? You would be able to find things you know are in the log but if you don't know it is there it is going to be a huge waste of time. If the person filling the ticket has the tools to make that extra inch of effort it saves the person on the other end of it a mile of scrolling.
A water cooler is designed to provide cups of water. It is only suppose to do one thing and it does it well.
Management theory was mostly invented in the 19th century on the basis that you have a bunch of smart, ambitious people (management) overseeing a bunch of dumb, physically more able people (labour). The weirdness is that suddenly what Marx would call "the factors of production" have to be smart. Not only that but how smart they are, rather than how strong they are, is the basis of their productivity.
Invariably, they end up being smarter than the people overseeing them, and that's the source of the weirdness.
In the old British Empire, the upper class learnt the classics (as in, ancient myths) and were packed off to go rule the world. It didn’t go so badly (for Britain).
Perhaps we can combine the two - managers to study human nature, and then study the problem, and then use regular brainpower to come up with good solutions.
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