Item — HN Reader

A manager is the subordinate. Their entire role is to provide for the employees the things and support needed to get their jobs done. Corporations arent the military, there are no "superior's" except in the minds of the mentally and emotionally fragile who think they were put there to rule over others.

Steve Jobs famously said, "I don't hire smart people to tell them what to do. I hire them to tell me what to do". He didn't always live up to that but his point was valid.

2 comments

There are two things here - Steve might well hire smart people to tell him what to do - but in the end Steve made the choices and drove them through.

Management is all about choices with limited information - there is rarely one clear and obvious route forward, but a strategy of following all routes simultaneously will lead to failure as there needs to be focus.

So somebody has to make that choice and then drive that focus through the organisation.

This can be very difficult when the choice isn't clear and obvious - as lots of smart people will have different views.

That's the art of management - you need to make the right choices most of the time. and when you've made the wrong one correct quickly, but you also need to be able to get the organisation to rally behind that choice, even if not everyone agrees.

The way I look at it is that a manager can make decisions with wider scope, but the people under them exert greater control in day-to-day tasks over some narrower scope. In software development, for example, a manager might set goals for some project, but it's individual developers who are actually writing the code that usually have the most leeway to decide for themselves how best to solve some particular problem. (So long as it's within the bounds of what peer reviewers will accept.)

I think org charts would better fit how I think of the organizations they represent if they were drawn upside-down, like a tree.

Sure - though this thinking can lead to the common misconception that CEO's just need to be generically good managers and not experts in the area the company operates in.

I think this is often wrong for two reasons

    - the layers are not entirely disconnected - the devil is often in the details
    - hard to detect BS from subordinates

yet the salaries impose hierarchies..

Salary is supposed to imply risk. The higher the responsibility the higher the risk the higher the reward. That’s another topic on its own.