I was fascinated by some points made in an interview with Dr. Henry Mintzberg, Cleghorn professor of management studies at McGill University. These insights were in an August 17, 2009 article in the Wall Street Journal -- I've paraphrased from this article located at:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204908604574334450179298822.html
Dr. Mintzberg:
The great myth is the manager as orchestra conductor. Management is more like orchestra conducting during rehearsals, when everything is going wrong. Management is largely about interruption-- and today email, blackberries, etc. makes it much worse.
When asked what he would tell a group of new managers:
Be prepared -- it's going to be a lot of interruption, a lot of pressures. And I'd go through the three kinds of planes - you have a choice of managing through information, or through people, or through action. You're going to manage through all of them, but understand the difference and understand the choices.
Managing is basically about influencing action. Helping organizations and units to get things done, which means action. Sometimes managers manage actions directly. They fight fires. They manage projects. They negotiate contracts.
One step removed, they manage people. Managers deal with people who take the action, so they motivate them and they build teams and they enhance the culture and train them and do things to get people to take more effective actions.
And two steps removed from that, managers manage information to drive people to take action- through budgets and objectives and delegating tasks and designing organization structure and all those sorts of things.
Today I think we have too much managing through information, what I call "deeming." People sit in their offices and think they're very clever because they deem that you will increase sales by 10% or out the door you go. That's the worst of managing through information. The alternative is to give more attention to the people plane and the action plane. Even when you are managing information, you can manage in a much more nuanced way than just shooting a bunch of figures around.
* I really like his observations. The "deeming" concept is often seen in some of the corporations for which I have worked as a consultant.
