I certainly don’t mean to break our golden silence to continue adding actual content but let’s see if we can get through it, shall we?

As a person who intends to spend a good portion of the rest of his life teaching and researching management theory, the application of that theory in the real world is obviously of big interest to me. More specifically, it’s a confusion to me.

The examples I’ve seen of management have been a scaled-up fashion. As in, “Mark made a wonderful data entrist. He will know how to manage other data entrists.” It is impossible for me to describe the errors in this. Perhaps all Mark knows is data entry.

I’m not sure when this perception became so routine. You hear of, in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, there being professional managers. Not employees with supervisional requirements.

Management is a difficult job. Being a good manager is hard. Being a good manager means recognizing the strengths of each of your employees and letting them work on those projects that can benefit from their expertise. It also means identifying their weaknesses and placing them on projects where you can determine whether they can improve those skills or not. After identifying the boundaries of their abilities, you then have a pseudo-matrix of how you can schedule those people. This, in itself, is extremely difficult and time-consuming.

But on top of that, a good manager must also keep on top of their field. The easiest way for a manager to become simple paper-pushing desk-fodder is to lose relevance by not being aware. A good manager always needs to have some clue about what is going on around them. Whether or not they are able to ‘fix’ the problem themselves, they should always have the availability of the necessary resources at hand.

That said, I’ve met very few good managers.

I’m very tired.