Management- It's Not What You Think! Read online

  Fact: Managers tend to favor the informal media of communication, especially the oral ones of telephone calls and meetings, also the electronic one of email. Studies have found managing to be between 60 to 90% oral. The manager does not leave the telephone, the meeting, or the email to get back to work. These contacts are the work. As Jeanne Liedtka of the Darden School has put it: ‘Talk is the technology of leadership.’ Moreover gossip, hearsay, and speculation form a good part of the manager’s information diet. Why? Because today’s gossip can become tomorrow’s fact. But then it may be too late: manager’s have to know sooner, not later.

  Formal information is firm, definitive – at the limit, it comprises hard numbers and clear reports. But informal information can be much richer, even if less reliable. On the telephone, there is tone of voice and the chance to interact; in meetings, there is also facial expressions, gestures and other body language. As a consequence of all this, the strategic data banks of organizations remain at least as much in the heads of their managers as in the files of their computers.

  Folklore: Managing is mostly about hierarchical relationships between a ‘superior’ and ‘subordinates’. Our use of these awful labels should be telling us something.

  Fact: Managing is as much about lateral relationships among colleagues and associates. Study after study has shown that managers, at all levels, spend a great deal of their contact time – often close to half or more – with a wide variety of people external to their own units: customers, suppliers, partners, government and trade officials, other stakeholders, as well as all kinds of colleagues in their own organization. We might thus characterize the manager’s position as the neck of an hourglass, sitting between a network of outside contacts and the internal unit being managed.

  Folklore: Managers maintain tight control – of their time, their activities, their units. The orchestra conductor standing on the platform waving the baton has been a popular metaphor for managing. Much of it is pure myth.

  Fact: The manager is neither conductor nor puppet: control in this job tends to be covert more than overt. If managerial work is like orchestra conducting, then it is not the grand image of performance, where everything has been well rehearsed and everyone is on his or her best behavior, the audience included. It is rehearsal, where all sorts of things can go wrong and must be corrected quickly.

  Managers exercise control despite the constraints, by using two degrees of freedom in particular. They make a set of initial decisions that define many of their subsequent commitments (for example, to start a project that, once underway, demands their time). And they adapt to their own ends activities in which they must engage (for example, by using a ceremonial occasion to lobby on behalf of their organization). Thus the effective managers seem to be, not those with the greatest degrees of freedom, but the ones who use to advantage whatever degrees of freedom they can find.

  The impact of the internet

  How has the internet, especially email, influenced all this? Has it changed managing fundamentally? No and maybe yes.

  This powerful new medium has vastly increased the speed, range, and volume of communication. Yet like conventional mail, it is restricted by the poverty of words alone: there is no tone of voice to hear, no gestures to see, no presence to feel, usually no images to see. It can give the impression of being in touch while the only thing actually being touched is the keyboard.

  Perhaps most significantly, email increases the pace and pressure of managing, and often the interruptions as well. Beyond the enticement of ‘You’ve got mail!’ add a BlackBerry in the pocket – the tether to the global village – and you’ve got interruptions galore.

  Does the internet enhance or diminish the control managers have over their own work? Obviously it depends on the manager. As with most technologies, the internet can be used for better or for worse. You can be mesmerized by it, and so let it manage you. Or you can understand its power as well as its dangers, and so manage it.

  Think of the power of email to connect, the power of internet to access and transmit information. Think too of the pressures and pace of managerial work, the needs to respond, the nagging feeling of being out of control.

  Might the internet, by giving the illusion of control, in fact be robbing managers of control? One conclusion seems evident: the internet is not changing the practice of management fundamentally, but rather reinforcing characteristics that we have been seeing for decades. In other words, the changes are in the same direction, of degree, not kind.

  But the devil can be in the detail. Changes of degree can have profound effects, amounting to changes of kind. The internet may be driving much management practice over the edge, making it so frenetic that it becomes dysfunctional: too superficial, too disconnected, too conformist. Perhaps the ultimately connected manager has become disconnected from what matters, while the freneticness is destroying the practice of managing itself.

  Source: Excerpted from Chapter 2 of Henry Mintzberg, Managing, Berrett Koehler and FTPN, 2010.

  What management says and what managers do

  by Albert Shapero

  Of the existing literature on management, 95 percent is American, and most of the rest is paraphrased or lifted from the American literature. Leading the field in prestige and circulation (160,000) is Harvard Business Review. Like the school from which it issues, H. B. R. is a major fount of MANAGEMENT, as distinguished from management. Management is what managers do. MANAGEMENT is a view of what managers do at major corporations – a view shared by business schools, management consultants, and many business and management journals.

  Accordingly, the appearance of On Management (Harper & Row, $17.95), articles selected from twenty-five years of H. B. R., is an event of some importance. The book should be considered not only in terms of its contents (which are undated to emphasize their timelessness), but also in terms of the opportunity it affords us to examine MANAGEMENT, its relevance to real-life management, and its profound influence upon the way we work and live.

  Images of control, pictures of chaos

  For whom is MANAGEMENT; to whom is it addressed? It is certainly not for all of the 13 million or so business enterprises in the U. S. To cite one piece of evidence, only a single article in On Management is directed to ‘smaller’ companies and speaks in terms of what top executives should do in the absence of operations research, planning departments, and large-scale computer capacity.

  MANAGEMENT, it appears, is for the FORTUNE 500 and perhaps 2,000 more of the world’s largest companies. But there remains a question whether even for these large enterprises MANAGEMENT relates to the actualities of corporate managerial life. The term MANAGEMENT conjures up images of control, rationality, systematics; but studies of what managers actually do depict behaviors and situations that are chaotic, unplanned, and charged

  with improvisation.

  Reports on what managers do, made over the past thirty years in various countries and industries, are all amazingly similar in the pictures they paint of corporate managerial life: the fifty-five-to-sixty-hour week; the lists of things to do that never get past the first item; 40 to 60 percent of their time spent in meetings, 90 percent of which were called by others; 15 percent of their time on the phone; an average of fifteen to thirty minutes between interruptions; stolen half-days to produce required reports.

  The managerial life at every level is reflexive – responding to calls, memos, personnel problems, fire drills, budget meetings, and personnel reviews. The manager’s days are controlled by other people. I have asked hundreds of managers how much of their time is spent in such reflective activities as planning, thinking, or analyzing. They consistently say between 5 and 10 percent – and then admit to lying.

  Occasionally, however, we find at managerial levels individuals who go twenty-four hours without being interrupted by meetings or phone calls. They are the long-range planners, the people in O. R., E. D. P., financial or market planning, or market research. MANAGEMENT is really for t
hem. The bulk of the articles in On Management are concerned with ideas from the world of the staff functionary. These articles are either directed to the interests of the staff person in terms of analytical how-to’s, or they tell the chief executive to think like a staff person, support and take part in staff activities, or else.

  The size of staffs and the influence of staffs on the conduct of business and government have grown very considerably over the past several decades. In 1920 nonproduction workers made up 19 percent of the manufacturing work force. Today about 27 percent of the manufacturing work force is not directly involved in production. The large and growing number of people not occupied with the apparent central business of their companies should give us pause.

  Even more worrisome, however, is the increasing general preoccupation with the analytics that are the domain of staff people. Staff people are committed to the products of the analytics, such as models, graphs, ratios, printouts, and not to the people and things they represent. With very exceptional exceptions the staff person has seldom spent more than token time on-line in producing, selling, or servicing the products of a company.

  Analysis in Wonderland

  The staff view of life is the very essence of MANAGEMENT, and that is the view nurtured by our better business schools. Selling and manufacturing have been virtually expunged from the curriculum, and in their place we have analytical surrogates such as consumer behavior, market research, operations research, financial analysis, organization theory, and accounting theory. These are intellectually satisfying pursuits, but they are not directly involved with the realities, joys, and difficulties of real operations.

  Twenty-five years of MANAGEMENT have resulted in an Analysis in Wonderland outlook where abstractions are reality and where people and things are ciphers of difficulties to be dealt with. In the MANAGEMENT world view, a typical managerial task is using E. D. P. with an M. I. S. to measure R. O. I. so the C. E. O. can please the board of directors with projected results of corporate competitive strategy as depicted in the L. R. P. graphics.

  Traditionally, the staff person lived a life of frustration and petulance, trying to influence men of power who came out of production or sales. The constant effort was to get ‘them’ to listen. The successful staff person was a vizier, a gray eminence, turned to by the boss, wielding power through legitimate managers. With the growth of MANAGEMENT, however, the man of power is increasingly taking on a staff outlook.

  The effects of twenty-five years of MANAGEMENT are manifest and troublesome. A 1975 issue of Harvard Business Review shows that corporations with assets exceeding $10 million have been outperformed by smaller companies over the past several years in terms of return on stockholders’ equity. U. S. corporate productivity is being outdone by Europeans to whom, under various technical-assistance programs, we promulgated our pre-MANAGEMENT methods of production and selling.

  The staff-driven, bureaucratic, competitive, impersonal climate generated by MANAGEMENT has had and continues to have disastrous effects on many aspects of our lives. The recent bribery revelations, for example, are no passing accident. They are inexorable results of abstraction from direct concern for workers and customers with names, and direct contact with processes and products that have substance.

  Why not bribe officials if it will get you the sales and make the annual report look good? Why not lower product quality to just above the lawsuit level? Why provide more than the minimum of service required to maintain profits? You will swiftly be promoted to another department if you can keep the numbers right. Show me a thirty-five-year-old executive with an M. B. A. from a very good school who wants to stay in direct sales because he likes making customers happy, who likes his colleagues and wishes them every success, and who would never do anything unethical, and I will show you a man known as a religious type, as a ‘loser’.

  Making it work anyway

  Eventually, the strange culture of MANAGEMENT will retreat. It has been able to prevail to the extent it has only because, no matter how you design a system, real human beings will make it work anyway. The immense goodwill and natural capabilities of hundreds of thousands of managers are committed each day to making sense of the wide gap between MANAGEMENT and the chaotic realities of daily existence. With feelings of guilt and inadequacy in the face of the latest methods they are urged to use, they give MANAGEMENT lip service, and still produce and sell as required.

  When we forswear MANAGEMENT, do we forgo rationality? Is this the lesson of the past twenty-five years? No! Never have we had more need of rationality, but the kind of rationality rooted in observed phenomena. We need to return to a rationality tuned to the natural messiness of life, and not one dedicated to neat abstractions. There are no straight lines in nature, and despite the linearities depicted by MANAGEMENT, there are no straight lines in management either.

  Source: This article appeared in the May1976 issue of Fortune magazine.

  Management and Magic

  by Martin I. Gimpl and Stephen R. Dakin

  There is a fundamental paradox in human behavior – the more unpredictable the world becomes, the more we seek out and rely upon forecasts and predictions to determine what we should do. It is not unreasonable to draw an analogy between weather forecasting under conditions of extreme uncertainty, and management’s continuing interest in forecasting and planning activities in a highly uncertain trading climate. Why do we continue to seek forecasts when the weather is unpredictable? It is our contention that management’s enchantment with the magical rites of long-range planning, forecasting, and several other future-oriented techniques is a manifestation of anxiety-relieving superstitious behavior, and that forecasting and planning have the same function that magical rites have. Anthropologists and psychologists have long argued that magical rites and superstitious behavior serve very important functions: they make the world seem more deterministic and give us confidence in our ability to cope, they unite the managerial tribe, and they induce us to take action, at least when the omens are favorable (Perlmuter and Monty, 1977). In addition, these rites may act to preserve the status quo.

  Superstitious behavior is behavior which in the eyes of a ‘reasonable’ man is unlikely to have the causal effect it is believed to have (Jahoda, 1970). E.J. Langer (1975) refers to this as ‘illusion of control’ – the belief that events are causally related when objectively they are not.

  Superstitions increase in number and intensity as our environment becomes more uncomfortable and more unpredictable. Superstitions abound during periods of plague, famine, and warfare. B. Malinowski (1951), a social anthropologist, argued that ‘man resorts to magic only where chance and circumstances are not fully controlled by knowledge’. To illustrate the point, he described the fishing practices of the Trobriand Archipelago. Those who are in villages in the inner lagoon, where fishing is easy and safe, do not have any magical procedures associated with it. By contrast, those in villages on the open sea, where obtaining fish is more hazardous and uncertain, have many superstitions concerning fishing.

  Similarly, in today’s uncertain trading climate we might expect a similar emergence of ‘superstitious’ behavior as managers try to predict and control events which, in terms of current conditions and technology, are manifestly unpredictable and out of control. Such conditions foster the use of predictive devices ranging from capital budgeting to assessment centers. Do these devices work? If not, then we may legitimately brand their continued use as superstition …

  [S]uperstition often involves the emergence of cult-leaders, or ‘witch-detectives’, who may direct proceedings and interpret omens. Similarly, times of uncertainty in our modern world breed magicians, witch-detectives, and consultants. Why? As John Kenneth Galbraith (1982) says:

  In an uncertain subject matter such as economics or psychiatry, there is something wonderfully compelling about those who are sure. Also, much discussion of money has a necromantic aspect; mystery, even witchcraft, is presumed to be involved. A special reputati
on accrues to those who, affirming the mystery, presume to penetrate it. They are in touch with the occult; others should trust them.

  … Superstitions are the vehicle whereby charismatic leaders provide feelings of certainty in otherwise uncertain times. The existence of these leaders may boost confidence, guide action, and, if things continue to go wrong, provide a scapegoat for the sufferer. The difference between modern economic forecasters and the shaman predicting and inducing rain may be more in their appearance than in the substance of their predictions …

  Implicit in the discussion so far has been the notion that superstitions are undesirable; that illusions of control should be discouraged. On the contrary, it is apparent that under certain circumstances superstitious behavior can be highly functional for both individuals and groups.

  One function that may be overlooked is that, under conditions of extreme ambiguity, people may readily opt for helplessness (Perlmuter and Monty, 1977). When people feel out of control there is a tendency toward inactivity – to do nothing. Under such circumstances, of course, it is more appropriate to do something – anything – since activity may uncover elements of control which were previously unnoticed. Thus, to the extent that superstitions give the feeling of control they may encourage necessary activity.

  A second major function is that in a random world the best course of action is random action. Well-designed magical rites do precisely this – they encourage random action …

  O.K. Moore (1957) tells of the use of caribou bones among the Labrador Indians. When food is short because of poor hunting, the Indians consult an oracle to determine the direction the hunt should take. The shoulder blade of the caribou is put over the hot coals of a fire; cracks in the bones induced by the heat are then interpreted as a map. The directions indicated by this oracle are basically random. Moore points out that this is a highly efficacious method because if the Indians did not use a random number generator they would fall prey to their previous biases and tend to over-hunt certain areas. Furthermore, any regular pattern of the hunt would give the animals a chance to develop avoidance techniques. By randomizing their hunting patterns the Indians’ chances of reaching game are enhanced …