Continuing our series on management styles, we took on technical management last time, leaving us with the other extreme: The business manager, who rarely comes from within the company or even industry, and relies on an MBA to provide understanding and even authority.
What could possibly go wrong?
If you’re coming in late, last week, I suggested that management is harder than it should be because we consistently fill management positions with people who probably shouldn’t manage.
There are people who understand what their team does well enough to keep tabs and smart enough to manage rather than interrupt. If you have such a manager, ignore this post and do everything it takes to keep that job. The rest of us see our primary facilitator make our jobs more difficult. (more…)
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.
Before I get moving, I hope that everybody’s Father’s Day went well. Mother’s Day happens to have the more interesting history (for which you’ll need to wait until next May), so there isn’t much to say past that.
Now, my original plan for this Monday was to talk about what managers actually do, and start some discussion over time about what distinguishes a good manager from a bad manager.
That piece wasn’t coming together and I was on the verge of scrapping it completely when somebody coincidentally reminded me of a favorite gem, Bill Swanson’s “Unwritten” Rules of Management at AllBusiness.