Managing

The great myth is the manager as orchestra conductor. It’s this idea of standing on a pedestal and you wave your baton and accounting comes in, and you wave it somewhere else and marketing chimes in with accounting, and they all sound very glorious.”

“But,” he continues, “management is more like orchestra conducting during rehearsals, when everything is going wrong.”  In many ways, being a manager is the art of figuring out all the stuff that nobody ever told you.

Your job is to solve problems that no one else can -

The two basic jobs a manager does are to plan and make decisions. While others can focus on the work at hand, you need to look ahead for potential problems and opportunities.  So every good manager needs to get the best information available and make thoughtful decisions based on that information.

However, as I noted above, despite your best efforts, your information is usually going to be wrong.  Besides our natural tendencies toward bias, there will also inevitably be problems with how the information is gathered and analyzed.  Most of our information is also backward looking, so unforeseen events can render it invalid as well.

So not only is your information usually wrong, your plans are too.

  Adjustments will need to be made and that’s best done by those who are closest to the problem.