What Would Good Management Look Like?

Management in business and government is a complete mess. Companies are simply dictatorships with clueless people up top. How could we do better?

How does business work? How does government work? How do things get done?

Well, management issues orders and workers carry them out. Management is supposed to be capable of directing things and workers are supposed to be able to follow that direction. And together, this is what produces food, and services, and public projects, and business empires.

Supposedly.

If you’ve been in the workforce for awhile, you know from direct experience that this isn’t quite reality. Managers are largely clueless, and the higher up they are in the organization, the more clueless they are. This is structural. It’s largely independent of the intelligence of the people holding those positions.

Management doesn’t know what’s going on with the actual work because they don’t do any of it. They are in no position to know much of anything. They can ask employees for information, but employees quickly learn that telling the truth to the boss is either a waste of time, or creates problems for employees. Advice is either ignored, or the employee is told to fix the problems without being given the tools or authority to do so.

How Things Really Work

If the boss is a hands-off type, the employees simply get the work done — or try to within the limits of the authority, resources, and information at their disposal. They do this without any training in process analysis, but instinctively often know when doing something one way is stupid, and another way is better. And they opt for better.

If the boss is the interfering kind, he gives orders, expects them to be carried out and insists that EMPLOYEES must make his way work successfully. If things don’t work, it’s never that the boss’s idea was bad (or, as is often the case, ridiculous), but because employees failed to carry them out correctly. The conclusion is ALWAYS that the boss was right. Even though, given his complete ignorance about how things work, it’s very unlikely that he could give intelligent, well-informed instructions.

Management Mis-Education

Now, executives like anyone else vary in natural ability and inclinations. Some are stupid and some are smart. Some are cruel and some are kind. But management education — as embodied by the MBA — tends to make them pig-headed and clueless. They see themselves as a superior group, an elite born and trained to lead. They are in their vaunted positions because they are smarter and more capable than the people who do the actual work.

Furthermore, they are taught nonsense, some of it pernicious nonsense, a philosophy of management that ensures that they can’t do a credible job of managing people and systems.

What IS the job of an executive or manager? The answers that most would give are:

An executive must steer the course of the company, and maximize profits. And then they’d make some noises about the importance of respecting customers and employees, but that’s just talk and never part of any policymaking — in either corporations or government.

A manager ensures that the area under his control operates efficiently and gets better numbers every quarter. Managers may get some training on handling employees, mostly setting their objectives. This is done in an allegedly joint process during employee evaluations — which is actually more like a master-slave situation. In any case, the power is in the hands of the manager, and the responsibility is strapped to the back of the employee.

What the Actual Job Should Be

In some ways, it’s hard to define what the job of an executive should be. That’s because we live in a world that values money and not life or Nature. That’s why both corporations and governments abuse people and the planet. They only care about money and power.

And that’s literally insane. That’s what drives them to destroy the planet that we all live on. Think about how crazy that is!

But let’s just say that the systems under which we live cared about life and Nature and saw money and power as being much, much less important. Let’s imagine how this would look if our civilization was sane.

Managers would be, largely, servants of the employees that do the productive labor. Managers would provide the tools and training to employees to evaluate and improve the systems of production. Instead of whipping employees to work harder, managers would provide tools and support enabling them to work smarter. Managers would receive reports from employees on what THEY think would work better and why. Managers would listen. And generally the employees would be right — and that’s how things would proceed.

People would like and respect their bosses because those bosses would be helpful and not a threat to either productive work or the general well-being of employees.

Good management would be almost exactly the opposite of what we have now.

My MBA

I learned to be skeptical of management and the ability of management early in my career. I did a lot of temping in big companies, and temps are considered invisible. Executives and managers would be their undisguised selves in front of temps.

I saw astounding incompetence everywhere, at the highest level. I saw executives full of hubris one day, and shell-shocked the next — when the stock market crashed.

I saw managers and executives shut their eyes tightly when disaster loomed right in their faces. For example, a large bank sent me to a room full of file folders. They contained mountains of papers in each. They wanted me to put them in order. (They didn’t know what kind of order. They didn’t care.) The folders contained paperwork for extremely questionable loans to Central and South American governments. They were loans in the hundreds of millions of dollars — each.

Obviously, there would be a problem. And a few months later, what I saw and what any executive should have known was a sh!t show, became a crisis and a scandal.

Anyway, when I started my MBA, I was already pretty cynical about management and management education. I thought of the degree not as an education, but more like buying a very expensive suit for a job interview.

But, by accident, I discovered GOOD MANAGEMENT! I ended up taking courses with two teachers who had worked closely with W. Edwards Deming — America’s leading consultant in what was then called “total quality management.” They taught me how systems worked, and that employees were in the best position to understand systems and how they could be improved. To run things better, both management and employees would need to learn a bit about process research and evaluation.

Anyway, our societies and civilizations need to be fixed. But once we have sane and humane societies (I’m working on it…), we can operate them using sensible and somewhat effective management techniques.

In the meantime, we can laugh at the foolishness which passes for executive expertise.

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