> You place an enormous responsibility on managers - I don't think they have
> a very good record at honoring it.
So seldom do we see the word "honor" in reference to managers. One
definition (from both Peter Drucker, and Ayn Rand. There's a strange
combination.) is more or less:
Individuals who plan the allocation of resources toward he production of a
desired end.
The "honor" there is in seeing that the resources, largely time out of
people's one and only lives, are well spent. As managers we owe those who
contribute to our designs our absolute best. Much like military
commanders, who owe their troops the knowledge that their lives will not
be spent poorly.
> What you say represents the dilmma of hierarchy - it is very neat - and we
> want organisations to be neat - but in reality they are not. Much modenr
> management literature is recognising the limitaitons of managment, and the
> need to understand and exploit individual initiative and competence.
We have taken a structure that povides convenient roll-ups, and used it as
the entire structure for entities that are much more complex.
Hierarchy is convenient for accounting and analytical functions, where it
provides abastrction. It is convenient for functional specialization,
where it collects domain expertise. It is convenient for command and
control of well-understood tasks.
Other than that, it's pretty weak.
One John Zachman (formerly with IBM) wrote several papers on systems
design. He provided "A Framework for Information Systems Architectures",
which has been used ever since. His latest book applies this framework to
Data Warehouses, one of the current hot buzz-words around.
His point is that an information system has several essentially
independent views, each with its own validity and purpose. Data view,
process view, architectural (network) view, etc. Each of these views can
work at different levels of abstraction.
I think that a human organization, built for some purpose, is similarly
represented by several views. (Hierarchy and Process to name two.) We fail
when we get hung up on only one of them.
> I think that is a responsibility that cannot rest entirely with managment.
The dilemma of more flexibly oriented "managers" is precisely this. It is
safe, and comfortable to be externally managed (in addition to the bias of
our many legal structures toward "company", "manager", "worker" roles.)
To be empowered is to personally assume empowerment. You cannot make
someone autonomous. They must personally choose to choose.
So, to work in this way, the individual is faced with the awesome
responsibility that goes with being alive. They cannot hide from this in
their work life.
Interesting problem . . .
--
" All of the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally insoluble . . . They can never be solved, but only outgrown."
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