22 July

One thing I never did as a manager over almost 20 years, is delegate my work to other people. In nearly every larger organisation now, this is the pattern you’ll see. One of the first things a new senior manager does is invent a ‘deputy’ position that they can dump the parts of their job they don’t like into. In fact every organisational ‘re-structure’ I’ve ever seen was this, on steroids. The entire rationale for re-structures is to make life easier for the people at the top of the org chart. Some of them are even witless enough to say it out loud (been there too, with an ex-supervisor). They invent new positions entirely to park some part of the job they don’t like inside, and that cascades down the whole chart, every manager dumping stuff they don’t like into new positions below them. MBAs are a large part of why this happened. They encouraged and gave excuses to senior managers to basically do nothing. Told them that their focus should be ‘strategic’ i.e. sitting around in meetings with colleagues all day gossiping. That they shouldn’t ‘get into the weeds’ (they have an infinite store of ridiculous analogies). I see it everywhere. Fast food restaurants, and let’s use weeds as an example, where the garden is growing out of control, weeds everywhere, nobody has cut the grass, rubbish hasn’t been picked up. If I was the manager there, I’d be out there first thing to pull the weeds out myself, and pick up the rubbish. Focus on the actual work being done, every day that place looked a disgrace would be an insult to me, as a manager. Can’t wait to retire. Nobody manages anything any more, because organisations are too stupid to even understand what it means. They’ve been captured by all the stupid people who are masters at self-promotion. Entire nations of nothing but teenagers, posturing for social position and status. More likely to be scrolling through Instagram on their phone than managing a single thing. Politics is the same.