More Management Less Leadership

[Erasmus]

Looks to me like this article applies every bit as much to politics as to commerce and to other countries apart from the USA.

Tech Republic

The United States is facing a crisis of management. Not leadership. Management.

Nearly three years after the start of “The Great Recession,” there’s still no end in sight. The Feds report that unemployment is +9.5%, but those figures are drastically understated. The real figures include people who have given up looking or are no longer on unemployment insurance — they aren’t counted. If you include those individuals, the real national level is more like 12% - 13%.

Across this country and outside it, people talk about the reasons for the slow recovery of the still-dominant U.S. economy. A lot of reasons are cited. Among the more popular are mortgage issues, fear of inflation/deflation, the growing strength of China, gridlock in the government,…and a lack of leadership.

Each of these is important. But none of them is the most critical factor. The single most important reason is that we have a management issue.

The United States (along with many other Western countries as well) has too many leaders. In fact, I believe that we’re probably “over-led.” And we no longer have enough managers; we’re undermanaged.

[mouse]

more to do with the quality of management and leadership..the west has none
we get rid of people who can lead or think and put in their place those who tick the right boxes..
we are in dire need of leaders...who can lead...mean while we worship at the shrine of the mediocre and go faster and faster down the pan

[iamjumbo]

pretty much. the simple fact is that ALL business can operate without management, NO business can operate without labor. democracy is about labor governerning, not management, since by definition, management is incompetent

[mouse]

very true jumbo...the management need workers far more than workers need management

[fretslider]

Nov 27, 2010 6:11:29 GMT -5 iamjumbo said:

pretty much. the simple fact is that ALL business can operate without management, NO business can operate without labor. democracy is about labor governerning, not management, since by definition, management is incompetent

Its largely the fault of Fordism-Taylorism.....



What do you do?

I build cars... I do up bolts 156 and 159

Genius.

[iamjumbo]

Nov 27, 2010 6:34:32 GMT -5 mouse said:

very true jumbo...the management need workers far more than workers need management

the simple fact is that no business can exist without workers. they are the ones who make the product or provide the service

[iamjumbo]

Nov 27, 2010 7:55:18 GMT -5 fretslider said:

Nov 27, 2010 6:11:29 GMT -5 iamjumbo said:

pretty much. the simple fact is that ALL business can operate without management, NO business can operate without labor. democracy is about labor governerning, not management, since by definition, management is incompetent

Its largely the fault of Fordism-Taylorism.....



What do you do?

I build cars... I do up bolts 156 and 159

Genius.

hardly. how many ceos do you know that are smart enough to do EITHER bolt?
the simple reality is that, in the current perversion of capitalism that is practiced today, managment is nothing but a financial albatross on any business. they don't bring in a penny of income, yet are paid many times as much as those who provide the ONLY income to the company.

[fretslider]

Nov 29, 2010 12:37:00 GMT -5 iamjumbo said:

Nov 27, 2010 7:55:18 GMT -5 fretslider said:

Its largely the fault of Fordism-Taylorism.....



What do you do?

I build cars... I do up bolts 156 and 159

Genius.

hardly. how many ceos do you know that are smart enough to do EITHER bolt?
the simple reality is that, in the current perversion of capitalism that is practiced today, managment is nothing but a financial albatross on any business. they don't bring in a penny of income, yet are paid many times as much as those who provide the ONLY income to the company.

Believe it or not, I have witnessed on several occasions people being promoted 'out of the way'. That is to say where they can do least damage. Capitalism can be counter intuitive at times.

[Erasmus]

The famous Peter Principle: promotion to the point of incompetence. It's maybe an unexpected negative outcome of replacing class with meritocracy. Managerial and executive grades become seen as a continuous career path starting from the shop floor, made worse now because mostly what can be done my machines is, so even the 'floor' becomes more supervisory.

I used to know somebody who hated the promoted worker above all because that would be somebody with their own knowledge and ways of doing the job who too often thought of it as the only way to do the job. where your trained manager knew that his remit did not run to details and left the workforce to micro-manage themselves. It's the old Army joke about how the lieutenant gets a trench dug. The trainee goes into all kinds of detail until the instructor stops and says "You say 'Sergeant, I want a trench over there that long, deep and wide' ". Likewise, the sergeant does not concern himself with the tools and methods the squaddies use to dig the trench.

Once you get this idea of continuous promotion as meritocracy, then becoming foreman is only the start. Back at one time when it was all us and them, being a master craftsman would be something in its own right and only a few would want to get away from their work and into management.

It hit me as a matter of fact. We were always given the impression that because systems analysts were higher up the the chain of design (and pay) than programmers (and they than encoders), then we should have that ambition. I had absolutely no interest in losing contact with actually writing and testing software and like most of us, I expected promotion sideways, that is you move to a more complicated form of the same kind of job somewhere else at higher pay, not keep changing jobs working for the same people until you find one one so boring that you can't do it well enough to get more promotion. Besides, it's a pyramid: you can always swap places at similar level but you can't all leave for a higher one. Since then, they've renamed programmers software engineers and encoders programmers. From encoder to programmer was a valid promotion because the encoder would do detailed often trivial stuff that today is more often built in and took a lot of time.

We have the people who know how to make the bits and put them together and we have the people with the Grand Ideas about the ultimate result. What is often missing is the people who know which bits to put together and what has to be developed new to build the Grand Design.

[beth]

The Peter Principle almost always seems to play out. I used to work for a largish company and one day, a friend and I sat down and traced the people in middle and upper level management ... each and every one had moved up until they were out of their depth ... some were great employees a level beneath their final job title.

You had very wise expectations, Erasmus, and that's the way it should work but seldom does.

[fretslider]

Well put, Erasmus.