Management’s job has never been harder and its tools never softer

Mar 02, 2023

It’s your first day on your new job. You are very excited because the CEO of this mid-sized firm made a point of dropping by to welcome you and she told you she hired you specifically for your initiative and creativity. The company’s mission statement is “Excellence in innovation” and among its long list of corporate values is respect for individuality. After she leaves, you start sketching a mind map of your first week’s goals. Then a long-time employee drops by and says, “If you want to stay out of trouble kid, follow this”. “What is it?” you ask. “The old procedures manual. I’ll be following you to see that you follow it.”

For most employees in mid-sized to large organizations CEOs occasionally flash like comets across their day. Peers are, like gravity, on all the time. This much is as old as organizations. But, for senior managers, things have only gotten worse.

The previous post, On the Shoulders of Ye People, ended with this ominous promise,

In addition to the three characteristics of the Ideas Era that make us more dependent on teams there are four more that make it harder to hold them together.
Personalized information filters - news nozzles - are available and unavoidable.
Individual autonomy is cheaper.
Context is individually tailored.
More of value is intangible and intangibles are more valuable – and intangibles are infinite.
We’ll look at them next in Management’s Job Has Never Been Harder and Its Tools Never Softer.

Well, here we are and this post is already too long so we’ll start with cheaper autonomy. We’ll return to individual context and personal information filters later but here’s a bit from Introducing Leading Managers,

We have been “drinking from a fire hose” for years. The difference between the information era and the ideas era is that each of us has our own adjustable news nozzle. Information has never been a match for ideas - believing is seeing after all - but, now that we can broadcast and narrow receive, it is easier to spread fantasy and harder to explain reality. You’ve noticed.

Intangible value is a whole other topic and will just have to wait.

Organizing principles

I defined leadership and management earlier. Organizations are people acting in a (more or less) coordinated fashion to achieve something. Managers coordinate through the use of tools and rules.

As a senior manager I found that the more control I had of a coordinating tool or rule the less control it had of staff. Here is a simplified chart that portrays what I mean.

Don’t be misled by the names and number of power tools Management holds. The Ideas Era’s greater scope for thinking and acting independently renders items 1 to 8 - the blunt management rules/tools of the Industrial Era - less effective while items 9 and 10, the powers of the murmuration, are more effective every day. What’s more it is not just the Murmuration in Your Organization managers need to worry about. The external murmurations grow in influence every day.

It all starts with individual autonomy being at a historically low price. Autonomy is up so authority is down.

You have the right to remain sullen

There are thousands of hours in our lives when we would rather be at the dentist. I speak not of toothaches but of business meetings. We sit, avoiding eye contact, numb, powerless, fearing to be asked to summarize, waiting to be told what to do so we can leave, wondering when we’d lost control of our lives. The truth is we never lost control; we surrendered it. We can leave the meeting at any time. Instead, we stay and have only ourselves to blame. Every tormented second is a personal decision to stay put.

Every person has always been an autonomous actor in theory and autonomous thinker in reality – at least those who keep their thoughts to themselves - but, through most of history, acting autonomously was prohibitively expensive for all but a fortunate or brave few.

Societies constrain autonomy through laws and norms. Organizations actively discourage autonomy; armies and drug cartels are particularly firm on the point. But even the lowliest private in the world’s cruellest army can desert or try.

There is the fine print to be considered. To act autonomously we must be:

1. aware of options.

2. able to execute our choice1

3. prepared to pay the price.

Autonomy is never without a cost/benefit analysis. However, in the Ideas Era, the price is down, the ability to execute is up, and awareness of options is way up. This has consequences for organizations including public authorities, and institutions and for society. To understand what they are let’s go back to the Industrial Era.

The company town meets the global village.

Every factory is a mold that people are poured into to fill the gaps between the machines – the tasks the machines can’t perform or can’t perform as cheaply as, say, a child. The first factory in the world powered by steam, Blockmills in Portsmouth England, turned out thirty thousand pulley-blocks a year for the Royal Navy. Pulley-blocks are pulleys in a wooden block that give mechanical advantage to sailors hauling on the ropes. Thirty thousand blocks a year may seem extravagant but, in 1807, when Blockmills opened, the Royal Navy required 100,000 blocks a year.

Blockmills replaced one hundred-ten skilled craftsmen working autonomously making pulley blocks with 10 people working for its 37 pulley-block making machines.

In the Industrial Age the cost of individual autonomy was high enough that most managers could cheerfully ignore it. In the murky recesses of his reptilian mind, the satanic mill owner knew that everyone who lived in the town worked for him one way or another, and they all knew it too.

You’ve probably seen the clip from Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film, Modern Times, where the little tramp falls into a vast machine and is contorted through various cogs and gears. It is an apt metaphor for the Industrial Era. Those happy days of human resource management have largely faded at least in the developed world. As chips replace cogs, machines are made to fit people (and even inside people) and individuals can do things alone or in small groups without being enmeshed in large organizations for three reasons

more is available for less in the market,
more information flows horizontally,
more collective knowledge is embedded in smart tools.

We can thank the Industrial Era for more being available in the market. It lowered the price and increased the availability of everything. That alone makes us more autonomous. Horizontal information, we’ve discussed already.

The factory in your phone

The great thing about tools, be they smart or intellectually challenged, is that it is not necessary to understand how they are made or bother the nerds who invented them with questions about how they work. We just use them. The more knowledge that’s embedded in the tool, the less the tool user needs to know.

Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for developing the semiconductor circuit which gave us digital photography. Boyle lived about two kilometers as the crow flies from me when he won. I could have introduced myself and asked him to explain imaging semiconductors, but that wasn’t necessary to take digital pictures, so I didn’t.

The more knowledge that’s embedded in the tool, the less the tool user needs to know. Today we order goods and services from all over the world online without any special skills or understanding.

When we first ordered things online, we applied to a priest class of highly skilled specialists.

Online shopping

Suppose you wanted to replace your musket with one of those new rifles or order a Singer sewing machine, you might go to the nearest telegraph office where a reasonably good telegrapher would transmit your order at a rate of 25 to 40 words per minute.

Samuel Morse is popularly credited with the conversion of words into electrons and back again, but he did not actually invent the telegraph. There were already several different electrical telegraphy technologies. Morse gets the credit for two reasons: he developed the relays that allowed transmission over long distances; and he invented the system of dots and dashes we know as Morse Code. Morse’s telegraph is binary, like computer code. Powering the line with a key at one end magnetizes the receiver at the other end, pulling down a lever and causing a click – a dot or a dash depending on the duration.2

The telephone automated the word/electron/word conversion process, making instant distance communication available to lay people.

We seldom hear the term automation anymore. It is so ubiquitous. Now, if we call it anything, it’s the new face of work. The fact that it is two faced – we may be home earning a good living but still missing our work friends – doesn’t alter the fact that countless expert skills and processes have been reduced to a smart tool, like an app.

Smart tools performing work that used to require organizations and managers, make individual autonomy, and organizing people and things, easier and cheaper.

That brings us to Management’s second and even bigger problem. One most managers don’t know they have.

That’s for the next post.