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> How many managers do you know who studied to be managers of people? Isn't this one of the aims of officer training in the armed forces?

by scrlk 3y ago

hotnfresh 3y ago
Yes. But the military has effective, focused training with little room or tolerance for bullshit (now, overall, yes, it’s hilariously bullshitty as an organization, but the training tends to be about as serious and efficient as you’re likely to find) They also have a couple other benefits: 1) The clear command structure, obviously—however, I think the “they gotta follow your orders” aspect gets overstated in importance, and is actually a minor part of it. 2) There’s minimal experimentation and bike shedding. Low and mid level managers have little room to fuck around with whatever new method from the idiotic airport book they read last week. Here’s how we do it: now, go do that. This is how you manage, and how you run things, if you don’t know what to do, here’s the document you read, and here’s who you talk to. 3) Crucially, 2 is supported by having a well-defined way things run. Most corporations are an absolute mess of tribal knowledge and fucked-up procedures that nobody with perspective realizes are fucked up, by comparison. Officers and high-level NCOs move around every couple years, and everything’s got to be ready to keep running even if the #1, #2, and #3 guys in, say, a brigade, all get killed at the same time. Your military’s simply fucked if it’s dysfunctional in the same empire-building, managers running around doing their own half-baked thing, onboarding is an afterthought, any new VP can radically shake up the way whole segments of the company run on a whim (and different divisions might run totally differently, probably not for any good reason), way that most corporations are. 4) They actually train leaders. How many companies do that? Of the ones that do, how many take it even 1/10 as seriously? Almost none. Companies act like leaders have to be minted by an MBA (and, let’s face it, being the Right Sort) and like most people aren’t really cut out to be leaders and have to prove they can do it before they get any support or training at all, or like leadership is some secret that only those who’ve figured it out on their own deserve to know (why, imagine if leadership became too common a skill! The horror—for managers’ salaries). The military’s approach is that leadership’s not rocket science, and most folks with half a brain can be taught to achieve some useful level of leadership skill. Will they all be great? Will they all be generals? No, but most folks could be trained to be bottom-of-the-pyramid managers at least without doing too horrible a job of it, on average. And unlike an MBA that’s full of learning about business more broadly with practical leadership training as a kind of side-quest, military leadership training is focused on leadership per se. It’s efficient, and honed to reliably produce fairly OK results, at least.

> How many managers do you know who studied to be managers of people? Isn't this one of the aims of officer training in the armed forces?

by scrlk 3y ago

> How many managers do you know who studied to be managers of people? Isn't this one of the aims of officer training in the armed forces?

hotnfresh 3y ago

Yes. But the military has effective, focused training with little room or tolerance for bullshit (now, overall, yes, it’s hilariously bullshitty as an organization, but the training tends to be about as serious and efficient as you’re likely to find) They also have a couple other benefits: 1) The clear command structure, obviously—however, I think the “they gotta follow your orders” aspect gets overstated in importance, and is actually a minor part of it. 2) There’s minimal experimentation and bike shedding. Low and mid level managers have little room to fuck around with whatever new method from the idiotic airport book they read last week. Here’s how we do it: now, go do that. This is how you manage, and how you run things, if you don’t know what to do, here’s the document you read, and here’s who you talk to. 3) Crucially, 2 is supported by having a well-defined way things run. Most corporations are an absolute mess of tribal knowledge and fucked-up procedures that nobody with perspective realizes are fucked up, by comparison. Officers and high-level NCOs move around every couple years, and everything’s got to be ready to keep running even if the #1, #2, and #3 guys in, say, a brigade, all get killed at the same time. Your military’s simply fucked if it’s dysfunctional in the same empire-building, managers running around doing their own half-baked thing, onboarding is an afterthought, any new VP can radically shake up the way whole segments of the company run on a whim (and different divisions might run totally differently, probably not for any good reason), way that most corporations are. 4) They actually train leaders. How many companies do that? Of the ones that do, how many take it even 1/10 as seriously? Almost none. Companies act like leaders have to be minted by an MBA (and, let’s face it, being the Right Sort) and like most people aren’t really cut out to be leaders and have to prove they can do it before they get any support or training at all, or like leadership is some secret that only those who’ve figured it out on their own deserve to know (why, imagine if leadership became too common a skill! The horror—for managers’ salaries). The military’s approach is that leadership’s not rocket science, and most folks with half a brain can be taught to achieve some useful level of leadership skill. Will they all be great? Will they all be generals? No, but most folks could be trained to be bottom-of-the-pyramid managers at least without doing too horrible a job of it, on average. And unlike an MBA that’s full of learning about business more broadly with practical leadership training as a kind of side-quest, military leadership training is focused on leadership per se. It’s efficient, and honed to reliably produce fairly OK results, at least.