Being a manager rarely gets the credit it deserves. Flicking through Gary Hamel’s blog on Management 2.0 for Wall Street Journal, I came across this excellent quote
“Our capacity to improve the state of the world is ultimately bounded by our capacity to manage.”
If we want to change the world then our ability to do that is limited and constrained by our ability to manage. Therefore management is the fundamental skill we need to change things.
Gary goes further. He suggests that “management is one of humankind’s most important inventions”… “quite simply, the technology of human accomplishment.”
Now put like this it does promote “being a manager” to an important role. It does make a mockery of all those who complain how much managers get paid, when they are actually bringing about change and improvement. It is an elegant re-framing of the idea of management and its role in the world at large. Without managers what would get done? Darn we would be left with the politicians and the workers.
One of the legs of our fourth generation strategic management approach is helping managers create a culture of performance for people to perform in. Clearly managers also need the space and permission to perform, and this framing of the idea certainly helps that.
