I'm management, albeit not at Intel, and I don't have/have no interest in an MBA, so read in whatever biases you'd like. Or decide I'm full of shit, that's poss

I'm management, albeit not at Intel, and I don't have/have no interest in an MBA, so read in whatever biases you'd like. Or decide I'm full of shit, that's possible too. There is value in management, but management has to realize that it doesn't exist for its own sake. That's a tough one when "management is the company" is effectively what anyone's been taught for decades now. The problem is, I think, that it is an oversimplification. Nominally management makes the decisions, but we aren't where the product gets built or sold. The company is as successful as its products, and so maybe the product is the company, and we're all doing our part to make it the best thing that people want. I'd like to think I'm a good leader. Probably not the best one - there are plenty of folks I look up to. Probably not the worst one, but that's not for me to decide. In any case, as middle management, [0] I see three major components to my role: 1. Hire and retain really talented people who are good at what we do; 2. Decide what we'll work on now, what we'll do later, and what we won't do; [1] and 3. Sponsor my team and provide air cover for #2 I generally have a pretty good idea of _what_ to do, but not always exactly. I used to know _how_ to do it, but I'm probably not the best at that today. My goal is to hire or develop a team that can put a fine point on the _what_, or challenge me when I'm wrong, and to own the _how_. In terms of sponsorship and air cover, it's taking 1 and 2 above, and keeping it on the rails with minimal disruption. I see good middle management as needing to be very team-focused, caring for the health and composition of the team above all. Sometimes that means absorbing a lot coming from above, and sometimes it means being really pushy upwards to get what we need to be successful. But the team should be free to execute if we're doing our jobs well, and their end of the bargain is to deliver what we agreed to do. This is not the philosophy of all middle managers, and I'm sure there are other models that work. This is the one I can speak to. -- [0]: "Middle management" defined as someone who manages other managers but is not C-level. [1]: This doesn't mean I cook this shit up. I'm listening to the team I manage, as well as the priorities and directives coming from above, and applying my filters. Gotta figure they hired me because I know generally what to do in my space, and the team agreed to work with me because I have the ability to point them toward the critical path and push the debris out of the way before they run into it. Without management, there are either too many ideas to harmonize, or you get lucky and the team converges on the right one. I think good middle management helps us converge on the right ideas faster.