25 June

If you've ever worked in 'middle management', you'll know it's often the pits. Impossible demands from above, impossible demands (often arising out of the top-down demands) to deal with from below. The meat in the sandwich. In my view the only genuine management going on in an organisation is the work middle managers do. Splitting organisations into these 3 tiers is a fantasy. You get senior people waffling about strategy unconnected to anything meaningfully operational, because their MBAs told them to firmly separate strategy and operations. That idea has destroyed more businesses than anything else I can think of.