The task of management is to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant. This is what organization is all about, and it is the reason that management is the critical, determining factor.

With all the emphasis that management gets on synergy, sums being greater than the parts, and so on, there’s very little on ameliorating weaknesses collectively. I suppose it follows directly from division of labour, but I have to wonder if it might provide better returns consciously applied.

(From The Daily Drucker, a neat few-paragraphs-a-day book full of excerpts from Drucker’s writing.)

Ideally, managers create organizations to carry out their plans, and they keep a watchful eye on their resources, especially the most valuable resource, time. Given that, a few questions arise naturally, and it is the specific responsibility of a manager to find out or figure out answers to them:Why are we here?

Where are we going?

What should we do?

Who should do what?

How do we balance decisions for both immediate and long-term success –or even just survival?

Most of the time, managers’ jobs are defined by the rules, processes and implicit and explicit expectations of their management chain; things like doing nigh-meaningless performance evaluations and firing people who spend all their time surfing porn. And since the managers are still skilled technical professionals at heart, they also end up doing bits and pieces of their subordinates’ jobs which are either too hard for the subordinate or too much fun to resist playing in. And since this takes all available time, nobody goes looking for trouble in the form of the real work — the work described above, which is uniquely that of a manager and no one else.

From Pumas on Hoverbikes: Sysadmin Management, part of Monkeybagel.

You don’t say! We should do this every year.

What I propose is that we take 12-tone out of the “Great Monuments of Western Music” bag, and put it in the “Curious Dead-ends of Music History” bag.

via Citizenx