| What do managers actually do? |
 |
 |
 |
|
Engineers in a corporate setting are generally baffled by middle management. Even the term "middle management" conjures up an image of some pointless individual just getting in everybody's way. But the good ones are needed. First, some definitions.
Yes, but what do they DO?Managers sit around all day typing emails and having meetings. They don't produce code, or put stuff together. Instead, a manager's job is communication. You'll probably find more managers in larger companies, and there's a good reason - they become more useful. It's like when you are adding more CPUs to a desktop machine. If you just have one CPU it knows what it's doing. Two CPUs aren't quite twice as fast. By the time you are up to four, one of the cores is spending all its time coordinating the other three. Management is the same - with scale comes overhead. Both are neededCompanies that are completely run by managers might work, but there's a danger that they'll turn into a real life Dilbert strip. Companies that are completely run by engineers also have problems. They might make fanTAStic products, but nobody makes any money and the company folds or cost cuts all the goodness away. I'm sure you can think of companies like this that died, but the world would have been better had they lived. In John Nathan's examination of Sony, he describes the early development of the CD, and how Sony's Ohga (who later became President) managed the project. "In the spring of 1976, the team proudly presented Ohga with an audio laser disc thirty centimetres across, the size of an LP record, a musical "platter" with a capacity of thirteen hours and twenty minutes of digital sound. For their pains, they received a withering lecture on the folly of engineering for its own sake and the importance of developing business sense. A principal reason for Ohga's excitement about creating a new standard in the recording business was the opportunity it would create to combine new hardware with the rich "software" holdings of CBS/Sony records. But at current rates for acquiring and recording music, in the neighbourhood of $75,000 an hour, each and every audio disc with this capacity would cost the record company over $1 million to produce. Ohga still uses the story to ratify his assertion that engineers left to their own devices would run any business into the ground because business is never what excites them." Here is the list of things that managers are responsible to.
Which one is first? Well, that depends on the company. Different companies make different choices. A non-profit would put society first. Some businesses put employees first, as they believe that when people are motivated, they perform well, and everything else falls into line. Some businesses believe that they exist to make a profit. An organisation can exist with just that objective, but it might not be sustainable in the long term. If one is first, the other two are still important. Aren't managers in charge?Management is just another function like anything else. It just happens that one of those functions is making decisions - managers get the final call, simply because in their role, they are supposed to understand every aspect. EthicsEthics are necessary, for two reasons.
|
