What is "Management"?

The New York Times once wrote an article about me in which it called me “the corporate exorcist”1 : I go from company to company trying to exorcise management from believing they can do that which they cannot.

What is it they cannot do? They cannot find, or even train, the ideal manager, executive or leader. Why not? Well, before we can say why not, let’s define our terms. What do we mean by the words: “To manage,” “manager,” “management,” “mismanagement,” and “leader”?

I remember the day a door-to-door salesman tried to sell me the latest edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. “What do you do, sir?” he asked. “I teach management,” I replied. “Well,” he said, “let’s see what the encyclopedia has to say about the subject.”

With increasing uneasiness on his part and bewilderment on mine, we soon discovered that there was no entry for “management” in the encyclopedia. There was management science, which involves mathematical models for decision-making. There was organizational behavior, which is the sociology of organizations. But plain simple management – what millions of people around the world do day in and day out – wasn’t there.

So, what is “management” as it is taught and practiced today?

1. It denotes hierarchy. When people use the word “management,” what they usually mean is a group of people whose role is to manage. Each individual in this group is called a “manager.” “Management” refers to a certain rank in an organization; in the United States it generally refers to the middle and lower upper ranks – one level above supervisors and one level below executives.

2. It is unidirectional. A search through the Funk & Wagnalls, Oxford Illustrated, Random House, and Webster’s Third New International dictionaries found synonyms for “manage” including: “Accomplish,” “achieve,” “administer,” “alter by manipulation,” “be in charge,” “break in,” “bring about,” “coerce,” “communicate,” “conduct,” “connive,” “contrive,” “control,” “coordinate,” “cooperate,” “cope with,” “decide,” “develop,” “direct,” “do,” “dominate,” “educate,” “effect,” “evaluate,” “execute,” “gain one’s end with flattery,” “govern,” “guide,” “handle,” “husband,” “implement,” “influence,” “inspect,” “inspire,” “integrate,” “judge,” “keep in a desired state or mood by persuasion,” “lead,” “listen,” “make and keep submissive,” “make happen,” “make tractable,” “manipulate,” “mold,” “monitor,” “motivate,” “operate,” “order,” “organize,” “plan,” “react,” “regulate,” “render subservient,” “render submissive by delicate treatment,” “restrain,” “review,” “rule,” “run,” “steer carefully,” “succeed in one’s aim,” “supervise,” “take care of,” “take charge,” “teach, “train,” “treat with care,” “utilize,” and “wield (a weapon).”

Is there a common denominator shared by all these synonyms? Yes: They are all a one-way process. The managing person is telling the managed person what to do. In this context, “motivating” makes the assumption that the motivator has already decided what should be done; motivating is about getting someone else to do it willingly.

Leadership: The art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.

—Dwight D. Eisenhower

There was a cartoon in the New Yorker some time ago that illustrated this point nicely: A mother who is a psychologist is trying to convince her son to take out the trash. Wearily, the boy says, “OK, OK! I’ll take out the trash, but pleeeease, Mom, don’t try to motivate me.” Even a child perceives motivation as a kind of manipulation. In motivating, the focus is not on the what and why but on the how. The manager is the head of the department, and the subordinate (note the literal meaning: Sub-ordinary) is at best the right-hand man. And what does the right hand do? Unless you’re left-handed, the right hand does exactly what the head tells it to do.

1. It is elitist. In Hebrew, the word for subordinate is kafuf, which literally means “bent at the hips” – like someone who bows before you out of respect or fear.

Managers, on the other hand, have superior vision; that is the source of the word “supervision.” Military insignia illustrate this principle: A first lieutenant’s badge has one branch to denote his rank; a lieutenant has two branches, a captain has three. As we ascend in the military hierarchy, we are climbing the tree. A major has a leaf, signifying the top of the tree. And a general, with the highest supervisory authority of all, is way above the treetops, with a star. So you can see that the managerial process, as it is described and taught, is not a value-free process. It is not only a science and an art, but also an expression of sociopolitical values.

4. It is individualistic. Try the following exercise. Call all your top management into a room. Ask each one of them to write down the company’s top five problems. The rules are that, first, no names be mentioned; and second, that they not use the word “because” – no explanations for the problem are necessary.

Just ask them to note on a piece of paper, which they do not have to show anyone, the top five most critical, significant problems, undesired results, or processes that the company has.

All of these problems must be controllable by the people in the room; and it is not acceptable to define a problem as something “they” are not doing. Focus on what “we” are not doing. In other words, instead of saying: “Competition is increasing,” they should write: “We are not meeting competition head on”.

Now ask them: How many of these problems did the company have last year? Don’t look at or allow them to share what they’ve written. Just ask them: How many of the problems on your list did you also have last year? The answer is usually: One hundred percent.

How about two years ago?

Most of them, right?

How about three years ago?

Again, most of them!

Now, if this is true, then how many of these same problems are you likely to have three years from now?

Most! Right?

Why, though?

Because look at your list of problems again. How many of them can any individual in the room solve by himself?

None!! Right? If they could have, they already would have. Now ask them: How many of these problems would disappear if I gave you a magic pill that would permit you, as a team, to agree on the solution?

All of them, right? If you followed my instructions correctly and only wrote down problems that are controllable by the people in the room, then it is true by definition that a solution is possible if only the people in the room would agree to it.

So what is the problem?

The problem is that we usually have one executive or manager chasing ten problems, rather than ten managers chasing one problem at a time.

“The problem is not what you have on your list. What you have are manifestations. The problem is YOU!!!” I say. “You do not know how to work together. That is the problem!!!!”

The business world, in other words, is trapped by misguided principles of individualistic management that personify the whole process in a single individual who should excel at planning and organizing and motivating and communicating and building a team and making him - or herself dispensable.

In reality, however, such a manager does not exist and why it can not exist and what to do about it is the purpose of writing this book. The managerial process is far too complicated for one person to perform.

A similar bias can be seen in economic theory, which sums up the processes and dynamics of any organization in two words: “The firm.” “The firm” will do this, “the firm” will do that – all depending on the conditions that prevail in the market. But left out of the equation is how this “firm’s decisions are made; thus the economic theory that results from these assumptions tells us only how the decision-making process should work – not how it does work. (More about this later.)

Likewise, to the best of my knowledge, the questions of who is involved in management and how they actually make decisions together – versus how they should make them together – has not been addressed. Management theory, like economic theory, personalizes the entire process as if practiced by a single entity. This error leads to a misperception that ultimately hampers our efforts to manage successfully.

That is why, when I use the words “manager” or “management,” what you should be visualizing is not a person but a process, which by nature encompasses people who may not officially be identified as managers by rank or title.

1. It is industry based. The classic management textbooks teach that managers plan, decide, lead, organize, control, and motivate an organization. However, there are organizations in which management is not supposed to perform some of those functions. Some years ago I studied the management of performing arts organizations – opera, dance, theater, orchestras – and I became aware that artists cannot be managed in the same way as, let us say, one manages workers in industry. Administrative directors need artistic directors to lead the organization. They practically co-manage. Decisions cannot be made by either of them alone. “We are the two wings of the Austro-Hungarian eagle,” the administrative director of the New York City Opera told me in the 1970s about his relationship with the artistic director. “Without both of us, this opera will not fly.”

I noted the same phenomenon in the health and educational systems. Here, again, the administrators do not perform all the functions of management: For example, they do not decide policy matters, since the physicians in health delivery institutions and educators in educational institutions have a major say on those subjects.3 In high-tech companies, an engineer who knows the technology or may even have significantly contributed to inventing it is indispensable to managing the company. But his financial know-how and business acumen are usually limited. For successful management, he needs someone to make the business decisions with him.

Why does our definition of management exclude so many important organizational models? Because management theory was developed based almost exclusively on industrial experiences. Fayol was a mining engineer. Urwick was a military officer. Koontz took his insights from the airline industry. Taylor was an industrial engineer. Drucker’s early experiences, from which he derived his ideas on management, were in the automotive and publishing industries. Even recent gurus such as Tom Peters and Steven Covey bring experience from the for-profit and industrial spheres to their books.

1. It is socio-political. The managerial process as understood in the West is not universally accepted or practiced. In some countries around the world, the managerial process the way we teach it in our Western textbooks is actually prohibited by law. In Yugoslavia, for instance, during the Communist era of self-management, managers were constitutionally prohibited from making decisions the way we do – in other words, for the organization. Rather, the manager’s role was to suggest to and convince the workers, who had the ultimate authority for determining salaries, production quotas, investments, etc.

The self-management system, which adapted democratic principles as they had been conceived for nations and then applied them to industrial organizations, was called industrial democracy. In industrial democracy, the managers belonged to the executive branch. Their role was to recommend and implement decisions that were made by the legislative branch, or the workers council.

In some other countries, management is socially discouraged. During the heyday of the Israeli kibbutzim, for instance, management was deliberately rotated every two or three years, so that nobody became what in the United States is called a professional manager: A person whose profession it is to decide for other people what they are to do.5

1. It is culturally bound. In certain languages, such as Swedish, French, Serbian and Croatian, the word “manage” does not even have a literal translation. In those languages, words like “direct,” “lead,” or “administer” are often used instead. When people in those countries want to say “manage” the way we mean it in the United States, they usually use the English word.

In Spanish, the word manejar – the literal translation for “to manage” – means “to handle” and is used only when referring to horses or cars. When they want to say “manage” in the American sense of the word, they use the words “direct” or “administer.”

I suggest that there is a confusion in the field, which stems from our difficulty in defining the process and what it is supposed to do, and is manifested in our vocabulary – or lack of one.

Management is not a group of people in the hierarchy of the organization. It is not a rank. It is a process, by which organizational goals are identified and continuously re-identified and eventually achieved. Whoever is involved in this process and wherever he is in the organizational chart – whether he is called an executive, administrator, consultant, leader, manager, or worker – is involved in the managerial process and by this definition is a manager. (I want to emphasize the word “worker” in the previous sentence, because although workers are not customarily considered part of management, they can and often must perform managerial roles if a company is going to be effective and efficient in the short and long run.)

Usually we look at the managerial role as one of managing PEOPLE. If no one reports to you, you are not management. (Do you see the elitism, the hierarchy here?) As should be clear from the above paragraph I define management as the process of defining and accomplishing tasks and whoever is involved in this process is part of the managerial team even if no people report to him or her. While no one REPORTS to them they still have to interrelate with others to accomplish the common task. They will not be telling but they must be selling their ideas and perspectives on the task. Instead of controlling that the reporting structure affords (maybe?) they have to motivate and communicate. Thus it is not the reporting relationships that makes one a manager. It is interrelating for a common cause that makes them part of the process and thus, of the management team.