The inevitably flawed manager

All of this is part of our ‘romance of leadership’ (Meindl et al., 1985), that on one hand puts ordinary mortals on managerial pedestals (‘Rudolph is the perfect manager for this job – he will save us’), and on the other hand allows us to vilify them as they come crashing down (‘How could Rudolph have failed us so?’). Yet some managers do stay up, if not on that silly pedestal. How so?

The answer is simple: they are flawed – we are all flawed – but their particular flaws are not fatal, at least under the circumstances. (Superman, you might recall, was flawed too – remember Kryptonite?)

If you want to uncover someone’s flaws, marry them or else work for them. Their flaws will quickly become apparent. So too will something else, at least if you are a mature human being who made a reasonably good choice: that you can usually live with those flaws. Managers and marriages do succeed. The world, as a consequence, continues to unfold in its inimitably imperfect way.¹

This, of course, means that those superman lists of leadership qualities are also flawed: people often succeed even while failing on some of these qualities. But more to the point, these lists are often wrong. For example, leaders should be decisive, and they should be decent: who can argue with that? For starters, anyone who has worked for an indecent leader who got results. And how about Americans whose president learned the importance of being decisive in a case study classroom at Harvard and certainly was decisive in his decision to go to war with Iraq. The University of Toronto list calls this quality ‘fearlessly decisive’. He sure was.

As for some of the other items on the University of Toronto list, that president’s arch enemy in Afghanistan certainly ‘had the courage to challenge the status quo’, while Ingvar Kamprad, who built IKEA into one of the most successful retail chains ever, reportedly took fifteen years to ‘set [its] clear direction in a changing world’. Actually he succeeded because the furniture world was not changing: he changed it.

Reference

Meindl, J. R., Ehrlich, S. B. and Dukerich, J. M. (1985) ‘The romance of leadership’, Administrative Sciences Quarterly, 30, 78–102.

Footnotes

Source: Excerpted from Henry Mintzberg, Managing, FT/Prentice Hall, 2009.

Decision Making: It’s not what you think
with Frances Westley

How should decisions be made? Easy, we figured that out long ago. First define the problem, then diagnose its causes, next design possible solutions, and finally decide which is best. And, of course, implement the choice.

But do people always make decisions that way? We propose that this rational, or ‘thinking first’, model of decision making should be supplemented with two very different models – a ‘seeing first’ and a ‘doing first’ model.

Consider how a real decision was made, a personal one in this case. It begins with a call from an aunt.

‘Hi, kiddo. I want to buy you a housewarming present. What’s the color scheme in your new apartment?’

‘Color scheme? Betty, you’ve got to be kidding. I’ll have to ask Lisa. Lisa, Betty wants to know the color scheme of the apartment.’

‘Black,’ daughter Lisa says.

‘Black? Lisa, I’ve got to live there.’

‘Black,’ she repeats.

A few days later, father and daughter find themselves in a furniture store. They try every desk, every chair: Nothing works. Shopper’s lethargy sets in. Then Lisa spots a black stool: ‘Wouldn’t that look great against the white counter?’ And they’re off. Within an hour, they have picked out everything – in black, white and steel gray.

The extraordinary thing about this ordinary story is that our conventional theories of decision making can’t explain it. It is not even clear what the final decision was: to buy the stool; to get on with furnishing an apartment; to do so in black and white; to create a new lifestyle? Decision making can be mysterious.

Managing: How can you possibly think?

Have a look at the popular images of managing – the conductor on the podium, those executives sitting at desks in New Yorker cartoons – and you get one impression of the job: well ordered, carefully controlled. Watch some managers at work and you will likely find something far different: a hectic pace, lots of interruptions, more responding than initiating. So let’s have a good look at some of these facts, compared with that folklore.

Folklore: The manager is a reflective, systematic planner. We have this common image of the manager, especially in a senior job, sitting at a desk thinking great thoughts, making grand decisions, and above all systematically planning out the future. There is a good deal of evidence about this, but not a shred of it supports this image.

Facts: Study after study has shown that (a) managers work at an unrelenting pace, (b) their activities are typically characterized by brevity, variety, fragmentation and interruption, and (c) they are strongly oriented
to action.

(a) The Pace Reports on the hectic pace of managerial work have been consistent, from foreman to chief executives. As one CEO put it, the work of managing is ‘one damn thing after another’. Managing is an open-ended job with a perpetual preoccupation: the manager can never be free to forget the work, never having the pleasure of knowing, even temporarily, that there is nothing left to do.

(b) The Brevity, Variety, Fragmentation, and Interruption Most work in society involves specialization and concentration. Engineers and programmers can spend months designing a machine or developing some software. Managers can expect no such concentration of efforts. Their work is fragmented and loaded with interruptions. Why? Because they don’t wish to discourage the flow of current information, also because they develop a sensitive appreciation for the opportunity cost of their own time: no matter what they are doing, managers are plagued by what they might do and what they must do.

(c) The Action Managers like action – activities that move, change, flow, are tangible, current, non-routine. Don’t expect to find much general planning or open-ended touring in this job; look instead for tangible delving into specific concerns. Does this mean that managers don’t plan? Sure they plan; we all plan. But the real planning of the organization, at least in a strategic sense, takes place significantly in the heads of its managers and implicitly in the context of their daily actions, not in some abstract process reserved for a mountain retreat or a bunch of forms to fill out.

Folklore: The manager depends on aggregated information, best supplied by a formal system. In keeping with the classical image of the manager perched on some sort of hierarchical pedestal, managers are supposed to receive their important information from some sort of comprehensive, formalized Management Information System. But this has never proved true, not before computers, not after they appeared, not even in these days of the internet.

Fact: Managers tend to favor the informal media of communication, especially the oral ones of telephone calls and meetings, also the electronic one of email. Studies have found managing to be between 60 to 90% oral. The manager does not leave the telephone, the meeting, or the email to get back to work. These contacts are the work. As Jeanne Liedtka of the Darden School has put it: ‘Talk is the technology of leadership.’ Moreover gossip, hearsay, and speculation form a good part of the manager’s information diet. Why? Because today’s gossip can become tomorrow’s fact. But then it may be too late: manager’s have to know sooner, not later.

Formal information is firm, definitive – at the limit, it comprises hard numbers and clear reports. But informal information can be much richer, even if less reliable. On the telephone, there is tone of voice and the chance to interact; in meetings, there is also facial expressions, gestures and other body language. As a consequence of all this, the strategic data banks of organizations remain at least as much in the heads of their managers as in the files of their computers.

Folklore: Managing is mostly about hierarchical relationships between a ‘superior’ and ‘subordinates’. Our use of these awful labels should be telling us something.

Fact: Managing is as much about lateral relationships among colleagues and associates. Study after study has shown that managers, at all levels, spend a great deal of their contact time – often close to half or more – with a wide variety of people external to their own units: customers, suppliers, partners, government and trade officials, other stakeholders, as well as all kinds of colleagues in their own organization. We might thus characterize the manager’s position as the neck of an hourglass, sitting between a network of outside contacts and the internal unit being managed.

Folklore: Managers maintain tight control – of their time, their activities, their units. The orchestra conductor standing on the platform waving the baton has been a popular metaphor for managing. Much of it is pure myth.

Fact: The manager is neither conductor nor puppet: control in this job tends to be covert more than overt. If managerial work is like orchestra conducting, then it is not the grand image of performance, where everything has been well rehearsed and everyone is on his or her best behavior, the audience included. It is rehearsal, where all sorts of things can go wrong and must be corrected quickly.

Managers exercise control despite the constraints, by using two degrees of freedom in particular. They make a set of initial decisions that define many of their subsequent commitments (for example, to start a project that, once underway, demands their time). And they adapt to their own ends activities in which they must engage (for example, by using a ceremonial occasion to lobby on behalf of their organization). Thus the effective managers seem to be, not those with the greatest degrees of freedom, but the ones who use to advantage whatever degrees of freedom they can find.

Images of control, pictures of chaos

For whom is MANAGEMENT; to whom is it addressed? It is certainly not for all of the 13 million or so business enterprises in the U. S. To cite one piece of evidence, only a single article in On Management is directed to ‘smaller’ companies and speaks in terms of what top executives should do in the absence of operations research, planning departments, and large-scale computer capacity.

MANAGEMENT, it appears, is for the FORTUNE 500 and perhaps 2,000 more of the world’s largest companies. But there remains a question whether even for these large enterprises MANAGEMENT relates to the actualities of corporate managerial life. The term MANAGEMENT conjures up images of control, rationality, systematics; but studies of what managers actually do depict behaviors and situations that are chaotic, unplanned, and charged
with improvisation.

Reports on what managers do, made over the past thirty years in various countries and industries, are all amazingly similar in the pictures they paint of corporate managerial life: the fifty-five-to-sixty-hour week; the lists of things to do that never get past the first item; 40 to 60 percent of their time spent in meetings, 90 percent of which were called by others; 15 percent of their time on the phone; an average of fifteen to thirty minutes between interruptions; stolen half-days to produce required reports.

The managerial life at every level is reflexive – responding to calls, memos, personnel problems, fire drills, budget meetings, and personnel reviews. The manager’s days are controlled by other people. I have asked hundreds of managers how much of their time is spent in such reflective activities as planning, thinking, or analyzing. They consistently say between 5 and 10 percent – and then admit to lying.

Occasionally, however, we find at managerial levels individuals who go twenty-four hours without being interrupted by meetings or phone calls. They are the long-range planners, the people in O. R., E. D. P., financial or market planning, or market research. MANAGEMENT is really for them. The bulk of the articles in On Management are concerned with ideas from the world of the staff functionary. These articles are either directed to the interests of the staff person in terms of analytical how-to’s, or they tell the chief executive to think like a staff person, support and take part in staff activities, or else.

The size of staffs and the influence of staffs on the conduct of business and government have grown very considerably over the past several decades. In 1920 nonproduction workers made up 19 percent of the manufacturing work force. Today about 27 percent of the manufacturing work force is not directly involved in production. The large and growing number of people not occupied with the apparent central business of their companies should give us pause.

Even more worrisome, however, is the increasing general preoccupation with the analytics that are the domain of staff people. Staff people are committed to the products of the analytics, such as models, graphs, ratios, printouts, and not to the people and things they represent. With very exceptional exceptions the staff person has seldom spent more than token time on-line in producing, selling, or servicing the products of a company.

Analysis in Wonderland

The staff view of life is the very essence of MANAGEMENT, and that is the view nurtured by our better business schools. Selling and manufacturing have been virtually expunged from the curriculum, and in their place we have analytical surrogates such as consumer behavior, market research, operations research, financial analysis, organization theory, and accounting theory. These are intellectually satisfying pursuits, but they are not directly involved with the realities, joys, and difficulties of real operations.

Twenty-five years of MANAGEMENT have resulted in an Analysis in Wonderland outlook where abstractions are reality and where people and things are ciphers of difficulties to be dealt with. In the MANAGEMENT world view, a typical managerial task is using E. D. P. with an M. I. S. to measure R. O. I. so the C. E. O. can please the board of directors with projected results of corporate competitive strategy as depicted in the L. R. P. graphics.

Traditionally, the staff person lived a life of frustration and petulance, trying to influence men of power who came out of production or sales. The constant effort was to get ‘them’ to listen. The successful staff person was a vizier, a gray eminence, turned to by the boss, wielding power through legitimate managers. With the growth of MANAGEMENT, however, the man of power is increasingly taking on a staff outlook.

The effects of twenty-five years of MANAGEMENT are manifest and troublesome. A 1975 issue of Harvard Business Review shows that corporations with assets exceeding $10 million have been outperformed by smaller companies over the past several years in terms of return on stockholders’ equity. U. S. corporate productivity is being outdone by Europeans to whom, under various technical-assistance programs, we promulgated our pre-MANAGEMENT methods of production and selling.

The staff-driven, bureaucratic, competitive, impersonal climate generated by MANAGEMENT has had and continues to have disastrous effects on many aspects of our lives. The recent bribery revelations, for example, are no passing accident. They are inexorable results of abstraction from direct concern for workers and customers with names, and direct contact with processes and products that have substance.

Why not bribe officials if it will get you the sales and make the annual report look good? Why not lower product quality to just above the lawsuit level? Why provide more than the minimum of service required to maintain profits? You will swiftly be promoted to another department if you can keep the numbers right. Show me a thirty-five-year-old executive with an M. B. A. from a very good school who wants to stay in direct sales because he likes making customers happy, who likes his colleagues and wishes them every success, and who would never do anything unethical, and I will show you a man known as a religious type, as a ‘loser’.

Making it work anyway

Eventually, the strange culture of MANAGEMENT will retreat. It has been able to prevail to the extent it has only because, no matter how you design a system, real human beings will make it work anyway. The immense goodwill and natural capabilities of hundreds of thousands of managers are committed each day to making sense of the wide gap between MANAGEMENT and the chaotic realities of daily existence. With feelings of guilt and inadequacy in the face of the latest methods they are urged to use, they give MANAGEMENT lip service, and still produce and sell as required.

When we forswear MANAGEMENT, do we forgo rationality? Is this the lesson of the past twenty-five years? No! Never have we had more need of rationality, but the kind of rationality rooted in observed phenomena. We need to return to a rationality tuned to the natural messiness of life, and not one dedicated to neat abstractions. There are no straight lines in nature, and despite the linearities depicted by MANAGEMENT, there are no straight lines in management either.

Source: This article appeared in the May1976 issue of Fortune magazine.

References

Devons, E. Essays in Economics, London: Allen and Unwin, 1961.

Galbraith, J.K. ‘You can’t argue with a monetarist’, a feature article in The Christchurch Press, 23 September 1982; from the London Observer Service.

Jahoda, G. The Psychology of Superstition, New York: Pelican, 1970 p. 127.

Langer, E.J. ‘The illusion of control’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32, 1975, pp. 311–328.

Malinowski, B. Magic, Science, Religion and Other Essays, quoted in Romans, G.C., The Human Group, London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1951 pp. 321–323.

Moore, O.K. ‘Divination – a new perspective’, American Anthropologist, 59, 1957, pp. 69–74.

Perlmuter, L.C. and Monty, R.A. ‘The importance of perceived control: fact or fantasy?’, American Scientist, 65, 1977, pp. 959–964.

Source: © 1984, by The Regents of the University of California. Reprinted from the California Management Review, ‘Management and magic’ by M.L. Gimpl and S.R. Dakin, Vol. 27, No. 3. By permission of the Regents.

If you’re not confused, you don’t know what’s going on.

Jack Welch (as CEO of General Electric)