Do we really need management?

Ever wonder why people spend so much of their time getting an education and then decide to do something completely different? Most of the time the thing that these people decide to do has nothing to do with their education and for some reason they think they will be good at it. If you read Dilbert, the pointy haired boss would be one of the people I am talking about. Pointy haired bosses wonder around telling people how they need to be managed and how life would be hell if they weren’t around. Sometimes they go out of their way to make life hell just to prove a point.

On Dilbert the CEO is a cone headed person that does even less that the pointy haired boss but has an ego twice the size. Scott Adams started writing the Dilbert comic strip while he was working at Pacific Bell. I have spent most of my career working in the same telecom industry so perhaps that is why his strips hit so close to home. In the 80’s while I was at Newbridge, we used to think that he had a hidden camera somewhere in the building. Scott would write a strip about something that had happened that same week at work.

I know that Scott draws a lot of his material from others who email in real situations so I guess that I shouldn’t be that surprised.

So to all you VP’s and CEO’s out there, Get off your but and do some real work. If you have an engineering degree, do some engineering! If your degree is in something else, write a paper, send me something to post in my BLOG or write a book. The people in the trenches doing the real work are tired of carrying your weight. If you can leave the office at the end of the day and point to something that will increase the companies valuation then you have done your bit. If all you did all week was create power point slides then you have failed your company.

For the rest of us that have to deal with pointy haired bosses and cone headed CEO’s, do your 8 hours and get out of there. There are lots of other projects waiting to be completed and with a bit of luck you might be able to start your own venture where you can treat people with the respect they deserve.Drop me a line and we can work on something together.

If you are fortunate enough to find yourself leading a team, I challenge you to break the mold and continue to contribute. Hire people to work for you that make slides but don’t hire a CEO to run your company for you.

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