Too Small To Fail: Learning How To Manage Again

Thirty years ago, my father-in-law, who had been CEO of two companies before that term became an mild expletive, took on a project: helping me find a job. He was a brave one.

If he had been fazed by the fact that I didn't know squat about business, he didn't show it. He had been in the navy, and besides, he had been sent on his mission by a higher authority. Eventually, and with some help from the feeble, I found out that most people in business don't know much about it either, but that was much later. 

The most enduring lesson he taught me was about something called Management. He had borrowed his definition from the American Management Association (AMA), where he sent each of his company's execs to learn this fine art. I had my Darling Girl wife, fiance' at the time, copy it down for both of us. Here it is (above, left); it reads:

"Management is the art of getting people to do what they're supposed to do when they're supposed to do it how they're supposed to do it the way their supposed to do it because they want to do it."

Most of us would amend this definition today, since it assumed the kind of top-down management that fell out of favor over the last 30 years, with the stunning exception of China. Having one big guy in a huge corner-office telling everyone what, when, how ceased to work well in our individual-crazed Twitter culture.

But, after allowing for some "decentralization,"  the fundamental idea still works pretty well, especially the last part, wanting. Getting people to want to do something together is what makes Management an art: the art of teamwork

          "The vision, dedication, and integrity of managers determines whether there is management or mismanagement." - Peter Drucker

Gen X and Y may find this very hard to believe, but basic management of people, operations (now called process), quality, customer service, and R&D were actually taken seriously by Busy-ness Schools as recently as thirty years ago. Perhaps even harder to believe is that respected corporations  had their own management training programs. Gasp!

So, what happened? The Numbers.

"....A million zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one...." - Jung

Too many of the "best and brightest," the T-Rexes of the business world,  began to treat wise teachers like Peter Drucker and W. Edwards Deming, the quality expert,  as if they were writing science fiction. The MBA fast-trackers thought that learning the art of management was  a waste of their precious time, which they believed could be better applied to learning shortcuts to personal wealth.

Instead of the nuts and bolts of business management, they fell in love with, and I'm not kidding, Accounting. Then,  they cleverly married Accounting to Higher Math, re-branded it as, da-da, Financial Management! The rest, as they say, is hysteria.


 Cue "Synergy," the Internet Bubble and our current calamity, MortgageGate. These are what happen when you mistake managing The Numbers for managing the whole Enterprise.

            "It's amazing how difficult it is for a man to understand something if 
            he's paid a small fortune not to understand it." - Upton Sinclair       

That little slip of paper with the definition of Management on it came to mind recently, when I read  several headlines in the newspaper of record (No, not that Foxy WSJ, yet):

                                       UNEMPLOYMENT AT 9.6%

          TOP BANK HALTS ITS FORECLOSURES IN ALL 50 STATES

                      STATE IGNORED RED FLAGS ON TEST SCORES

And one from today:

                                      PARALYSIS OF THE STATE!

Banks can't even foreclose on their own messy deals. We treat schools as if they were purely political institutions. We spend more money on prisons than on schools (this is actually true in CA). And, we're leaving out the the Hardy Boys' Search For The Missing WMD's caper (a novel way to burn a $Trillion or so).

It is very fitting that Election Day closely follows Halloween. It gets scarier every year. Why? Mostly because we know that, whoever wins, we will continue to mismanage. We will not know whathowwhen and we most certainly will not want.

Here's a proposition: mandatory Management courses in every grade level of every school in the country. Home of the Free and the Brave, yes! But, wouldn't it be nice to be the Home of the Smart for a change? Wouldn't it be nice to drive into your town and see a sign up there with the State High School BeeKeeping Championship that said: Home of Citizens Who Learned How To Manage Again?

Yes. It would.

Ed Note: Okay, we admit that our explanation for calamity is a little simplistic in that it appears to blame everything on people in accounting/finance. Also, we employed some hyperbole (look it up). We wish to note that any appearance of bias against the financial world, where I have many friends, is completely, totally with merit.