Having been stung repeatedly by a series of managers, I eventually decided to give up being a worker and taking up management instead. I spent almost half a year reading up on how to inculcate managerial skills into my feeble worker anatomy. My well-wishers suggested that I attend some managerial seminars at a reputable business school like Harvard or apprentice under someone who had the reputation of being a good manager. The beholder of a good manager’s beauty is his boss and not his workers.
Having browsed through all kinds of teach-yourself stuff and the various books that were recommended, I still remained naive; the books lacked the live action. Eventually, I decided to pursue what was more handy, cheap and had all the compliments of the aforesaid live-action. I decided to follow the life pattern of an effective manager. The fact that he had not managed his home affairs to avoid being fired from the institutions he had worked for, and that two of his children (he had two only) hated him, did not dissuade me from my resolve. I vowed total allegiance to the guidance his modus-operandi offered and keenly began to observe how good managers did their thing.
The first and the foremost thing I learnt was that a good manager has less to do with the product of his work than with the control of the means of production - people, money and time. A good manager is not so much interested in why people do what they do as in how they do it; how much money they spend on it and how much time they take. The main idea is to restrict their elbow-room and standardise their style of work so that there is no chance for individuality to raise its ugly human head.
This guarantees that whatever they produce can be done exactly the same way over and over again. This is called replicability, one of the cardinal virtues of successful management. If and when there is a voice of dissension, offering an alternate and viable solution to a given problem, it must be silenced and subdued in the name of economy, a sacred virtue, loved by the people at the top.
Taking my observations further, I found that the best manager does not do much himself. He analyses the work of others, usually by dint of “knit-picking.” He coordinates by getting in between two people who are busy doing something and stopping them from doing it; he issues guidelines so that the auditors and other such species of nosy-parkers can catch people transgressing him; he replaces old procedures, regardless of the strictures of the previous ones. The main idea is to create chaos and generate confusion and then, come forward in the masquerade of a messiah and offer a solution, purely in the name of “devotional selflessness.”
I further learnt that good managers spend more time in learning the weaknesses of those who work under them rather than knowing their strong points; the former can be exploited whilst the latter may result in the un-doing of the manager. These weaknesses are carefully plotted in the order of their exploitatory strength and are up-dated on a regular basis. As a principle, a good manager NEVER employs friends, relatives or people recommended by friends; he sees them as the greatest of liabilities; such people can restrict the hands of the “knit-picking-co-ordinating” tyrant of shear obligation.
A good manager is a firm believer of the law of continuity. Simply defined, this law implies that your continuity in a given organisation is directly proportional to your projected usefulness.
When applied in common daily usage to the manager in question, this law morally prohibits him from taking any decisions which may prove an ultimate solution to a given set of problems; if there are no problems, why do we need a manager? He thus ensures his permanence, not by solving problems, but by creating them. The resultant sweat on his brow is therefore indicative to his bosses as his efficiency and not his devotedly disguised deviousness. If the problems prevail - so would the need for a manager.
A good manager also knows the wisdom of buying time. When confronted by his subordinates for which a solution has also been conceived by them, he goes into this “time-buying-mode.” He acknowledges the problem and promises to get an OK from the bosses for the solution. He then requests a few busy executives in the organisation to look into the problem and awaits an approval. Why? They will hardly ever find a commonly agree-upon time to meet, they do not fully understand the problem because it is not directly related to them and lastly, they still feel important that they were consulted.
Amidst this group that the manager chooses, the choice of a leader is strategically important too. The ideal candidate is an important bully of the company, heartily disliked by one and all. This ensures that the implementation plan is a masterpiece of chaos, confusion and bluster; quite useless to God, man or beast.
The last, but the most important lesson I gathered from my model manager was that every good manager has an angle. If the manager decides to transfer Joe from New York to Dallas, it is not because a shift is due or that the operation in Dallas requires Joe’s expertise. The real reason is Harry, who was originally at Dallas, has to be posted to Phoenix because his wife upset the chairman’s wife at the last company dinner, and at Phoenix, Harry’s brother is in charge of land allocation where the manager had applied for a lot of land.
Moral: A good manager bases his corporate existence on the doctrine that everything is about something else.
Having browsed through all kinds of teach-yourself stuff and the various books that were recommended, I still remained naive; the books lacked the live action. Eventually, I decided to pursue what was more handy, cheap and had all the compliments of the aforesaid live-action. I decided to follow the life pattern of an effective manager. The fact that he had not managed his home affairs to avoid being fired from the institutions he had worked for, and that two of his children (he had two only) hated him, did not dissuade me from my resolve. I vowed total allegiance to the guidance his modus-operandi offered and keenly began to observe how good managers did their thing.
The first and the foremost thing I learnt was that a good manager has less to do with the product of his work than with the control of the means of production - people, money and time. A good manager is not so much interested in why people do what they do as in how they do it; how much money they spend on it and how much time they take. The main idea is to restrict their elbow-room and standardise their style of work so that there is no chance for individuality to raise its ugly human head.
This guarantees that whatever they produce can be done exactly the same way over and over again. This is called replicability, one of the cardinal virtues of successful management. If and when there is a voice of dissension, offering an alternate and viable solution to a given problem, it must be silenced and subdued in the name of economy, a sacred virtue, loved by the people at the top.
Good managers spend more time in learning the weaknesses of those who work under them rather than knowing their strong points
Taking my observations further, I found that the best manager does not do much himself. He analyses the work of others, usually by dint of “knit-picking.” He coordinates by getting in between two people who are busy doing something and stopping them from doing it; he issues guidelines so that the auditors and other such species of nosy-parkers can catch people transgressing him; he replaces old procedures, regardless of the strictures of the previous ones. The main idea is to create chaos and generate confusion and then, come forward in the masquerade of a messiah and offer a solution, purely in the name of “devotional selflessness.”
I further learnt that good managers spend more time in learning the weaknesses of those who work under them rather than knowing their strong points; the former can be exploited whilst the latter may result in the un-doing of the manager. These weaknesses are carefully plotted in the order of their exploitatory strength and are up-dated on a regular basis. As a principle, a good manager NEVER employs friends, relatives or people recommended by friends; he sees them as the greatest of liabilities; such people can restrict the hands of the “knit-picking-co-ordinating” tyrant of shear obligation.
A good manager is a firm believer of the law of continuity. Simply defined, this law implies that your continuity in a given organisation is directly proportional to your projected usefulness.
When applied in common daily usage to the manager in question, this law morally prohibits him from taking any decisions which may prove an ultimate solution to a given set of problems; if there are no problems, why do we need a manager? He thus ensures his permanence, not by solving problems, but by creating them. The resultant sweat on his brow is therefore indicative to his bosses as his efficiency and not his devotedly disguised deviousness. If the problems prevail - so would the need for a manager.
A good manager also knows the wisdom of buying time. When confronted by his subordinates for which a solution has also been conceived by them, he goes into this “time-buying-mode.” He acknowledges the problem and promises to get an OK from the bosses for the solution. He then requests a few busy executives in the organisation to look into the problem and awaits an approval. Why? They will hardly ever find a commonly agree-upon time to meet, they do not fully understand the problem because it is not directly related to them and lastly, they still feel important that they were consulted.
Amidst this group that the manager chooses, the choice of a leader is strategically important too. The ideal candidate is an important bully of the company, heartily disliked by one and all. This ensures that the implementation plan is a masterpiece of chaos, confusion and bluster; quite useless to God, man or beast.
The last, but the most important lesson I gathered from my model manager was that every good manager has an angle. If the manager decides to transfer Joe from New York to Dallas, it is not because a shift is due or that the operation in Dallas requires Joe’s expertise. The real reason is Harry, who was originally at Dallas, has to be posted to Phoenix because his wife upset the chairman’s wife at the last company dinner, and at Phoenix, Harry’s brother is in charge of land allocation where the manager had applied for a lot of land.
Moral: A good manager bases his corporate existence on the doctrine that everything is about something else.