Try this: think about what you do, then abstract it up into a named thing with inputs and outputs, and add a measure of how it changes over time. A thermostat

Try this: think about what you do, then abstract it up into a named thing with inputs and outputs, and add a measure of how it changes over time. A thermostat takes measurements and sends signals to the furnace and fans to optimize for a given temperature, and that temperature is a commitment to a habitable and comfortable home. That's what a manager does. They are thermostats. The meeting you've described is a bunch of thermostats talking to each other about the temperature they affect, and the furnace and fans looking at each other and asking "wtf? just say more or less and past a point I need more fuel or electricity." They're using abstractions to talk about relationships and power. What affects it, who has it, what the factors are. A channel is a category of potential customers with some common way to relate to them. A brand is a category of feelings strangers associate with your company and products. mono-/multi-/omni- means, "one, some, or all." Managing something means extracting value from it. If you are an individual contributor who does work, at best you are managing things from which you extract value and pass it to your team. Managing people means extracting value from the work the team does and passing it along as commitments and outcomes to your execs. Managing relationships means extracting value from the interplay between different desires, needs, opportunities and possibilities as they change over time. Managing money means extracting value from assets that produce money. Strategic anything means doing things that influence the balance or equillibrium of the things you manage. Multiple things happening at once is called a "dynamic." As a category, all management is extracting value from a dynamic. All dynamics are the relative equillibria of stuff that changes, and managing them requires sustaining the equillibrium of a dynamic - or influencing it without disrupting it so as to cause it to yield its value in a particular way. Very few people are actually dumb, but most average people can manage, because it's a knack for a very specific human ability to play things off each other. Writing code and building things is not managing, but running code and services is. Building doesn't scale well, but managing dynamics scales almost infinitely. The reason managers usually earn more money is because they extract value from more sophisticated dynamics of things than an individual simply solving problems and operating on things. Further, sometimes solving problems reduces their ability to be leveraged in a larger dynamic, and solving problems can even destroy value. This is why I often tell clients in large organizations, their stuff isn't broken, you just can't see who it is working for.