Against Management

A not-atypical example of bad management: An incompetent ‘manager’ issuing impossible instructions and then shifting the blame to someone/something else when they go wrong; image by AI, my own prompt

Despite more than 40 years in business, working with organizations of all sizes, I still cannot fathom why we seem to absolutely revere people in all sectors of the economy who are rich, famous, and/or powerful. All the deference, all the pomp, it just makes no sense to me. It’s not as if these ‘leaders’ have earned their wealth, fame, and power. For most of them, it’s nepotism, Epstein Class/Patriciate “favours”, inheritance, dumb luck (speculation in stock markets and other casinos), and/or abuse of power that has gotten them where they are.

When I retired from my last job, one of my staff members gave me the ultimate compliment when he said: “You’re the only ‘boss’ I ever had who understood that the job of a manager is to identify and remove obstacles preventing your staff from doing their best work.”

Instead, most of today’s obscenely overpaid ‘managers’ simply set ‘objectives and targets’ for their staff, and expect them to figure out how to accomplish them, even if they’re unattainable or if their achievement is subject to the whims of economic tides. If the targets aren’t met, the ‘managers’ blame and punish the staff; if they’re met, the ‘managers’ take credit and receive bonuses and extra perks and privileges. It’s an abusive and dysfunctional system.

And instead of new technologies making staff’s work easier, most of the new business technologies (like AI surveillance) actually impede workers’ capacity to do their work, by imposing obstacles to them doing what customers rightfully need.

In response to a recent post by Tim Requarth about the impact of AI on the role of “managers”, titled Everyone’s a Middle Manager Now, I replied:

I have a very cynical, but perhaps not inaccurate, hypothesis about what ‘automation’ in all its forms is actual doing. My hypothesis is that essentially all the important work in organizations is done by front-line staff trying to solve customers’ problems by working around the impediments put in place by management (especially in the form on new, employee-hostile and customer-hostile technologies, notably via AI).

If I’m correct, we could, as quickly as possible, simply eliminate middle and senior ‘management’ entirely, empower the people who actually know what customers want and need, to provide what they want and need, and, by eliminating the exorbitant senior management salaries, pay these actually useful employees a decent wage and still be able to sell the company’s products and services for less. It would of course require some time for those staff to learn to use their new authority and capabilities effectively, but I am confident it would pay off in multiple positive ways.

Why will this never happen? Because management doesn’t actually exist to make important decisions or solve real problems. Look at most management ‘activity’ these days and it’s pretty much entirely setting ‘objectives’, sending out accompanying spreadsheets, and leaving it to the front line staff to figure out how to achieve the ‘objectives’, which are likely nonsensical (since management is completely buffered from contact with customers), and, somehow, still meet customers’ needs.

Why haven’t managers all been fired then? Because ‘management’ is actually a siphon (and a tax shelter) to allow the company’s owners to redistribute profits and wealth to family and friends so they don’t have to pay tax on it. It’s merely another poor-to-rich income and wealth redistribution scheme. With today’s technology and information, most ‘management’ isn’t actually needed at all if staff were simply empowered to do their jobs.

This is perhaps an overstatement, but not by much.

So how have we gotten to this sorry state, where some of the least competent people in organizations are being absurdly rewarded for preventing front-line staff from doing their jobs?

I think there are several reasons:

1. Most of today’s economy is driven by organizations that are simply way too large to be functional. In every facet of our society, size breeds dysfunction. As the size of an organization increases linearly, its complexity, and the probability of error, corruption, and mismanagement increase exponentially. The more the layers of hierarchy, the more the ‘managers’ are distanced and isolated from the important work the organization is actually doing, and from understanding the needs and level of satisfaction of customers.
2. The fact that power in organizations derives mostly from nepotism, Epstein Class/Patriciate “favours”, inheritance, and dumb luck (speculation in stock markets and other casinos), and actually encourages abuse of power, means that incompetence and sociopathy generally rises to the top. And as I’ve explained elsewhere, the disease of entitlement and abuse that quickly infects those initiated into the Epstein Class/Patriciate means that this abuse is self-perpetuating, and highly infectious.
3. Our attempts to make processes more “efficient” (and hence more “profitable”) are actually making them more complex and more vulnerable. The more ‘moving parts’ in the system, the more that can, and will, go wrong. The solution of “shareholders” will then be to jettison the (non-Patriciate) “managers” who happened to be around when things went wrong, and bring in some other “managers” who haven’t been in the wrong place when things went wrong, yet.
4. In the west, most of our economies were hollowed out over the past five decades by outsourcing and offshoring essential (and expensive-to-train) skills and production facilities, to the point that most western countries no longer produce much of anything of value. So profits need to be produced by gouging and abusing customers, abusing employees, buying up and shutting down competitors to create oligopolies, and through absurdly-inflated financial ‘rents’ rather than the production and sale of actual useful goods and services. Who in their right mind would want to be a “manager” in such a fraudulent economy?
5. Most of today’s “managers”, have never done the work of the staff they are “managing”. They got promoted to “manager” often because they have some useless MBA that daddy bought for them (or because daddy and his friends influenced the promotion decision), not because they’ve showed that they can actually do the job. Our fragile economy can no longer afford to pay for apprenticeships and other OJT programs where staff learn actual skills.

This is what our economy has come to. It’s completely unsustainable and already teetering.

What do you call those left holding the bag, and who have to tell the staff the bad news when everything inevitably falls apart, after the rich and powerful have taken their money and fled to walled estates in New Zealand?

I think they’re called “managers”.