Hello everyone!! Yepp..i am alive..and Noo....my keyboard has been workin' absolutely fine....(Cud have been a respite for many if it didn't)....so lemme roll my fingers again....
It's been almost one n' a half year since I started working in a corporate, and I sometimes wonder whether this is all i wanted for myself ten years ago, if I could ask myself, from all the experience that has happened.
I was somehow pushed into engineering....the 1st degree...a B.E.
Well not that i repent, i exceptionally managed well to frame myself as a scholar and spent some beautiful years moulding or rather unwinding myself.
Then soon, somewhere down the line I found myself standing here amidst the mad rush for another degree thrown in the market....the 2nd degree...the lucrative MBA!!
Not that i don't want to have that too rolled up my sleeve as every other average indian would like to....(Talk to me for a sec and I wud flash an impression as of a Wharton Graduate....but lets not talk about delusion here)
One of the things that I'd love to tell anybody who's willing to hear is that 'management' is unnecessarily overhyped. Considering how much of the work is done by managers and how much is done by the team, I'm still amazed by how much of a halo 'management' has. Sometimes, it feels like this huge illusion that has been created by management schools and managers themselves to make it feel so ultra important. It might be important, but the huge amount of bad managers belies this.
I was trying to Google for 'Egoless programming', and surprisingly there's a huge amount of material out there on this. In fact, it is a term to be used and watched out for! Wow! But when I try for egoless management, there's hardly anything! The second link talks about Michael Dell, which comes as no surprise. From the article -
"But most amazing of all to his peers is Dell's near egoless management. From the start, he has sought out gray-haired mentors to help show him the way."
Like programming, there are two tenets of management -
1. You own your own words
2. Assume good intent
Assume Good Intent also means a lot of trust. What happens in reality is so counterintuitive that it could only result from severe brainwashing! The same person who when (s)he was part of the team doing good, suddenly starts suspecting the team when they start managing! Wierd, eh? This particular point sometimes gets obliterated under huge manifestos and the many, many rules of doing management well, like the Six Thinking Hats by De Bono.
In my experience, the best managers have always used inclusive terms, like us and we, when referring to the whole team. The worst managers have always used exclusive terms, like you when talking to the team. If that's not alienation, I don't know what is!
All these thoughts about creativity, time management, and all the other jargon associated with good management, should come after these first two tenets.
Of course, there will be slackers, but the goal of management should not be to treat everyone as slackers. Rather it should be to think of everyone as trying to do their own bests.
I get the feeling that mostly managers feel that 'management' is synonymous with 'control'. Well, then they would be called 'Controllers', wouldn't they?
Recently I read an absolutely fantastic blog-post by Paul Graham called What Business Can Learn from Open Source -
Companies ensure quality through rules to prevent employees from screwing up. But you don't need that when the audience can communicate with one another. People just produce whatever they want; the good stuff spreads, and the bad gets ignored. And in both cases, feedback from the audience improves the best work.
I think the same could be said about a lot, of management!
Management should be there to guide, not control. Management should be there to listen, not talk. Management should be about seeing the bigger picture, not the nitty gritties. I think the first thing that managers should realise that if it weren't for the team, they wouldn't be there!
So much for the conventional education.....let some fresh degrees be invented that really pull us above all the bookish and rulebook shit....Till then i rather be looking for that ubiquitious 3rd degree....and i guess i found one!!
Amen!!:)
