eManagr News

If you’ve been following along here, you already know this article is the long-promised what makes a good manager story.  It has been derailed several times, most prominently when Vineet Nayar spoke out on perceived deficiencies in American programmers a couple of weeks ago.

The article grew and I want to move towards smaller, more readable articles.  So, the big article is now a series.

Before I get started, though, I definitely need to tip my imaginary hat to the fortieth anniversary of the Moon Landing.  With few tools and less hard data than most of us take to the supermarket, plus more than a few wonderfully demented mishaps, a bunch of civilians and military men managed to organize themselves well enough to get human beings to the Moon and back, and invent a few great technologies along the way.  Just…wow.

Anyway, my view has long been that management roles are difficult because managers frequently come in one of two varieties.

• On the one hand, you have a manager promoted from within.  She was probably good at her “real job” and enjoyed it, and now misses getting her hands dirty.  Management certainly wasn’t her career goal.
• On the other hand, you have the young MBA who knows nothing about the industry and cares even less.  Projects are projects, people are people, so he can apply theoretical models to get everybody in line.

Both of these approaches are dismal failures every single time and annoy the people trying to get their work done.  The technical manager does whatever she can to avoid managing in favor of getting down in the trenches with “her people,” while the MBA is using models that assume that all the world is Henry Ford’s assembly line and that knowledge of the product is irrlevant to the task.

Sure, this is an exaggeration, but a mild one.  And it’s from these archetypes that we’ll learn what traits we find in bad managers and so, eventually, be able to build an image of a good manager.

See?  Short and digestible.  I hope, anyway.  If anybody has feedback on the  new approach, the Reply button is down yonder.

Stay tuned.  Next time, we’ll talk about where the technical manager goes wrong.

(Psst.  Of course–and here’s the obligatory cheap plug–these mismanagement styles are exactly what drove us to get eManagr on the road.  Take the complexity out of management and the technical guy can go back to helping out while the MBA makes himself and his team look good for the next round.)

I guess it’ll be too late for the celebration, but once this series is done, I may investigate some part of the Moon Landing from a management perspective.  That they were so phenomenally successful suggests that they had the very “good managers” we’re looking for, here.

Tags: Management, Series, Vineet Nayar

This entry was posted on Monday, July 20th, 2009 at 12:00 and is filed under Concepts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.