Management for Scientists and Engineers

Why managing is still hard & if it will get better

David W. Creelman

• Publisher: Creelman Research Inc.
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780986698576
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Why hasn't management improved the way way other fields have improved? Will it ever get better? That's the topic of this book. It's aimed at inquisitive thinkers, people like scientists and engineers, who wonder not just how to get through the day as a manager, but why that day is often so hard.In this book we range from the insights about management from business professor Henry Mintzberg to the skepticism about management from physicist Richard Feynman. A rich cast of characters have tackled the task of making management better. We'll see what we can learn from their attempts.This isn't a book of management tips; there are thousands of such books. This book aims to look clearly at why it's been such a struggle to create a science of management and, having taken that look, seeking to find a path forward. Join me in the investigation since better management could one day lead to a better world.

1

Learning from the Greats

Introduction

If our goal is to understand management, we should ground ourselves in a solid foundation of what is known. There is a wealth of literature that practicing managers have found helpful in guiding them through the challenges of management. We can’t begin to cover it all; this isn’t meant to be a survey of all the management greats. We have a different goal here. We want to look at just a sample of cases so that we can extract the major themes. To understand the nature of management, we’ll make sure we understand the nature of management literature. From there we should be able to move toward an improved science of management.

The classics

Let’s start with a classic theory that has endured for many years: John Eric Adair’s Action Centred Leadership. Adair was born in 1934, earning a doctorate at King’s College London before going on to become a management theorist and consultant. His starting point is that management is comprised of three distinct topics: tasks, people, and teams. You may have had a manager who focused on tasks but had no people skills. You may have had to participate in a training program about team building while you sat worrying about the urgent tasks you needed to get done. You may have led some great individuals who could never get along as a team. Adair points out that you need to balance all three aspects of management: tasks, people, and teams.

Adair’s model of these three elements is presented as a Venn diagram. Admittedly, the primary reason seems to be that every student has learned about Venn diagrams and rather enjoyed that lesson. You’ll find this something of a theme in management literature. There is a fondness for circles, arrows, and pyramids. You’ll find the occasional faux equation. It does us no harm.

Astonishingly, Adair has written more than 40 books on management. In these books, he explores the three components of management. For example, the topic of people involves motivation; to have a motivated group you need these eight factors:

1. Be motivated yourself
2. Select people who are highly motivated
3. Treat each person as an individual
4. Set realistic and challenging targets
5. Remember that progress motivates
6. Create a motivating environment
7. Provide fair rewards
8. Give recognition

These components of motivation are self-explanatory. Even with just this glimpse of Adair’s work, we recognize that there is a wealth of practical management theory we can apply. Disturbingly, in line with the laments of Mintzberg about the state of management, Adair says, “I am the world’s first professor of leadership studies. Why is it that I have failed to get across the core body of knowledge of what we know about leadership and the principles of leadership development?”¹

For all the commonsense clarity of Adair’s work on management theory, something seems to be missing that prevents its widespread application. We probably don’t need another 40 books from Adair; we need to get a sufficiently ‘meta’ understanding of the field so that we can transcend Adair’s failure.

Moving from A to B, we can look at the work of Warren Bennis. Born in 1925, Bennis is a bit older than Adair and had an illustrious career as a professor at the University of California; he eventually became president of the University of Cincinnati. Bennis is famous for a concept that remains extremely popular among management consultants today. His idea was that we need to distinguish between leaders and managers—and that, frankly, we have too many managers. Bennis explained that the manager administers whereas the leader innovates; the manager focuses on systems and structure while the leader focuses on people; the manager relies on control while the leader inspires trust.

As president of the University of Cincinnati, Bennis had a chance to apply his insights to the real world of leadership. It did not go well. Perhaps we can attribute that sad experience to the difference between a theorist and a practitioner. An expert on programming theory might not necessarily be a great programmer. Another possibility is that there was a fundamental flaw in his leadership theory. We can’t avoid noting that Mintzberg scoffs (and worse) at the distinction between leadership and management. The “scoff” points out that management without leadership is uninspiring. Who wants to work for someone with no vision? At the same time, leadership without management is disconnected from the actual work. Who wants to work for someone who is full of airy vision but has no idea of how things actually get done? The “worse” is that Mintzberg believes this distinction between leadership and management is one reason why the quality of management has declined over the past several decades. He suggests too many people, armed with fresh MBAs, are eager to be “leaders” without much knowledge of, or even interest in, doing the actual work.

Bennis attributes his difficulties as a university president to “an unconscious conspiracy.” By this, he means all the usual forces of bureaucracy and inertia that make leadership so frustrating. While Bennis’s ideas remain extremely popular, you have to wonder if he glossed over a deep problem: in a battle to the death, bureaucracies will always defeat our leadership theories. A theory that always loses in the face of reality is not much of a theory. Perhaps what we need is a theory on how to defeat the unconscious conspiracies of bureaucracies.

While I have no intention of going from A to Z in the foundations of management theory, I can’t resist going to C. Let’s look at just one more of the greats, the highly regarded Ram Charan. He trained as an engineer before heading into business via a Harvard MBA. Probably more important than his education as an engineer or MBA is his work in his family’s small shoe store in Hapur, Uttar Pradesh. That hands-on, close-up experience in business grounded abstract constructs like cash flow in everyday reality. We’ll touch on this later, but Mintzberg thinks this kind of grounded experience is essential before people can learn to become effective managers.

Charan comes across as being rather different than, say, a highly intellectual McKinsey consultant. He puts something of the “guru” into the phrase “management guru”. He has been a close advisor to many CEOs, including highly successful ones like GE’s Jack Welch and highly unsuccessful ones like Welch’s successor Jeffery Immelt. He had a close relationship with these leaders, to the extent we can judge from press reports: he guided their thinking and feeling rather than simply performing some sort of business analysis.

I have an odd story about Charan from two well-known University of Southern California professors. Charan gave a presentation to HR leaders hosted at the university. The attendees were wowed, giving him massive applause. One professor turned to the other and said, “I have to admit, I didn’t understand anything he said.” The other responded, “Frankly, neither did I.” The problem was that Charan had departed from the more common linear approach of “here are three things that leaders must do” to a more poetic, metaphoric, guru-like style. This was not at all what the professors were looking for but it resonated with the leaders in the audience.

That story suggests there is something of the mystic in Charan, and perhaps a hunger for something mystic among business leaders. This may be a clue that the rational, actionable advice we find in management literature is not as helpful as one would suppose. Managers have taken their MBAs and been to the consultants’ presentations and seen the lists of management competencies and still feel something is missing.

That said, Charan has written dozens of books that take a less guru-like, more linear approach. Let’s take a look at some of Charan’s foundational ideas. First, he explains there are three categories of things that a leader must do:

• Pick other leaders
• Set the strategic direction
• Conduct operations

Based on this, if you are a leader setting your weekly agenda, you ought to ensure that you are working on all three categories.

He also points out that, if you are a leader, you also need to cycle through a focus on three things:

• Financial targets
• The external environment
• Internal activities

In The Talent Masters, Charan shows that a leader’s main job is to develop talent, in particular the talent that will eventually replace them.

Far from finished in his work, Charan has also identified the eight skills leaders need:

• Position the business correctly in the market
• Connect the dots to pinpoint patterns of change ahead of others
• Shape how people work
• Judge people by getting to the truth of a person
• Mould high-powered, high-ego people into a working team of leaders
• Know the destination where you want to take your business
• Set laser-sharp priorities for meeting your goals
• Deal creatively and positively with societal pressures

This has just been a glimpse of Charan’s work, but you can imagine working from his many ideas to build your understanding of what it takes to be a successful manager. Gather it all up, and perhaps you will have the solid foundation you seek.

Let’s connect the ideas of a number of thinkers to reinforce the foundations of a theory of management; we’ll start with teamwork. Adair said teams were a core element of management, and Charan listed moulding high-powered people into teams as one of the eight skills a manager needs. Let’s see what some other management books tell us about teams.

Richard Beckhard says teams should focus on four things: goals, roles, procedures, and interpersonal relationships. Bruce Tuckman adds that we need to consider the process of how teams form, storm, norm, perform, and adjourn. The very popular Patrick Lencioni says teams must trust one another, engage in conflict around ideas, commit to decisions, hold one another accountable, and focus on achieving collective results. Harvard professor J. Richard Hackman’s research showed that teams need team stability, clear and engaging direction, enabling structure, supportive organizational context, and expert coaching.

And now we can conclude…hmmm, let’s wait a minute. We’ve barely begun to look at teams and we already have four different conceptual frameworks. When we were looking at leadership, Adair had us studying the three things a leader has to do, while Charan suggests a leader should pay attention to three different things. Bennis wants us to make a clear distinction between leading and managing but Mintzberg suggests making that distinction is one reason companies are badly run. Are we building the foundations of management theory or playing some kind of party game?

There are two types of people

As a party game you can ask each person to complete the sentence, “There are two types of people: _______ and _______.” Why don’t you give your favourite answer now? You can also do this with “three types of people” and so on, even “There are 10 types of people: those who know binary notation and those who don’t.”

Most theories of management seem to be examples of this kind of party game. We can say there are three elements of leadership, or six skills for running a team, or two types of managers. It’s not like this when we study the foundations of chemistry. When we say there are two main types of chemical bonds (covalent and ionic), we don’t find that the next chemist has their own two or three or six types of bonds. We don’t run into a new periodic table each time we open a chemistry textbook. In management theory, everyone can come up with their own list. Each management model seems helpful on its own. The trouble is that it’s not adding up to anything close to a coherent theory.

Perhaps part of the problem is that these models are one-dimensional; they take the world of management and break it into a simple string of categories. What happens if we move our models into two dimensions?

Moving into two dimensions

There are many compelling and useful two-dimensional models from great thinkers in management. For example, managers have found it is useful to put their tasks into a two-by-two matrix of importance versus urgency. This creates four categories:

• Do now – The tasks that are urgent and important
• Do later – The tasks that are important but not urgent
• Delegate – The tasks that are urgent but not important
• Don’t do – The tasks that are neither important nor urgent

This is called the Eisenhower Box and is self-evidently a useful tool.

The consultancy Lucid Meeting has a two-by-two matrix for understanding types of teams. Their two dimensions are Information, which runs from making assumptions to knowing, and Connection, which runs from paranoia to trust. This creates four categories:

• Great teams – Where there is high information and high trust
• Anxious workers – Where there is high information but low trust
• Trusting fools – Where there is high trust but low information
• Paranoid asses – Where there is low trust and low information

You have probably worked on teams that neatly fit into one of these categories. It feels right. What’s not so obvious is how you would link this matrix to the various one-dimensional lists of team characteristics. Perhaps if you did sketch it all out on paper you could find a coherent multi-dimensional model—or perhaps it would just be a mess. Nevertheless, the 2 x 2 matrix on its own is helpful.

Matrices are intriguing thinking tools; if you like them, you can learn about 55 such matrices in the book The Power of the 2 x 2 Matrix by Alex Lowy and Phil Hood. Add this to the hundreds of categorizations in management theory and you have a rich toolkit of ideas.

However, for the scientist, one disconcerting thing about 2 x 2 matrices is that they often don’t have any units on the axes. We, for example, don’t have a measure of paranoia; we can simply say that one team is more paranoid than another. It’s a ranking scale rather than a ratio scale, and science prefers ratio scales where you can say, for example, that this rock is twice as heavy as this other rock, not just that one is heavier than the other.

For the engineer wanting to understand management, the problem is that there is a bewildering variety of matrices. It’s not hard to imagine engineers creating a variation on the “two types of people” party game by saying, “People vary along two dimensions. This leads to four quadrants; please label your axes and name each quadrant.” I’m not sure it would be much fun, but it’s certainly doable.

Working with two-dimensional management models is fun and provides useful insight. However, it feels too much like a party game and not enough like the solid foundation that will solve our frustrations with ineffective management.

With string theory in physics, neither one dimension nor two is sufficient. String theory needs 10 or 11 dimensions to describe reality. Perhaps instead of a 2 x 2 matrix, we need a 10 x 10 one. It’s an intriguing idea, but we are nowhere close to being able to do that in a coherent way. Let’s see what other approaches the management greats have taken to help us understand management.

Insights, frameworks & fables

The canon of what we think we know about management is not restricted to categorization and matrices. There is a useful set of ideas that are best described as insights. We’ll look at three examples.

One insight is the notion of scope creep. There is a natural dynamic whereby people keep coming up with new features to add to a project. Each new feature seems like a small thing to add, as well as being an improvement. The dangerous dynamic is that as more and more small things are added, the scope of the project balloons out of control. Soon we are missing deadlines and trying to explain large budget overruns.

A second potent insight about projects is the mythical man-month, described in a book of the same name by Fred Brooks. It’s worth noting h...

Table of contents

• Half-Title
• Full-Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• 20 Words
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 - Learning From The Greats
• 2 - The Nature Of Reality
• 3 - Who Are These Humans And What Do They Want?
• 4 - Evidence-Based Management
• 5 - Organizations
• 6 - Grand Unified Theories
• 7 - Things That Kind Of Work
• 8 - Complexity
• 9 - A Brand New Science Of Management
• End Notes
• Index
• About The Author