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I ran into a toxic mentality on the East Coast where there was a class division between "thinkers/leaders" and "doers," and doing automatically placed a person
by api 14y ago
I ran into a toxic mentality on the East Coast where there was a class division between "thinkers/leaders" and "doers," and doing automatically placed a person into a lower class. The idea was that execution is for little people and ideas and "leadership" are for big people.
I met a bunch of over-stuffed narcissistic and ineffectual big people who could sell like crazy and drum up endless interest by way of their ivy league social networks but would then fall flat on their faces when it came to executing on anything.
- sudonim 14y agoThat's a dangerous mentality and I hope it's on it's way out. The way I see things is that especially in tech, it used to be that doers couldn't just do. They needed to drum up cash / etc... to facilitate the doing. Now that's just not the case. There's a quote (I believe from reddit) "Pics or it didn't happen". The benchmark as I see it with very few exceptions is "Prototype or you're full of it". Doers will do and the leaders? They can go and lead each other around in circles.
- dgreensp 14y agoPreferably the doers are also leaders.
- asmithmd1 14y agoI hate that divide also, either you are a manager (the most exalted status being a manager of managers) or you are an "individual contributor" WTF does that mean? Isn't everyone an individual contributor up to and including the president of the US?
- brazzy 14y agoManagers make decisions that directly affect multiple people and thus a larger part of a company (the entire company, for a CEO). Like it or not, that means that the value of a manager who makes good decisions is greater than that of an equally skilled person who does good non-managerial work. Note that this is perfectly compatible with the view of managers as faciliators - if a team of developers can't work effectively because they lack clear requirements or crucial hardware, then the manager who cuts through red tape to get them that hardware and direct access to a customer stakeholder is more valuable to the project than any of the developers. Of course the crux is that a manager who makes bad decisions is equally more damaging to a company than anyone doing bad non-managerial work, and there is good reason to doubt whether there really is a strong correspondence between the quality of people' decisions and their prospects of becoming (and being promoted as) managers.
- MartinCron 14y agoI left a job a few years ago the moment that I realized that the people who were allowed to have ideas and the people who were allowed to implement ideas were always going to be, by deliberate design, different sets of people.
- gaius 14y agoAs an aside, that is also why it is dangerous for a company to create an "innovation" or similar department.
- fleitz 14y agoThe idea people quickly find out how useful having ideas are when the doer people start walking out the door.
- juliangamble 14y agoWhen studying management theory - this behaviour is categorised as 'Taylorism' - you can read an examination of the false assumptions behind it here: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/06/the-management-myth/4883/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/06/the-mana...
- api 14y agoThe MBA strikes me as the American capitalist counterpart to the Soviet apparatchik.
- redwood 14y agoOy perhaps I'm walking into a trap moving to NYC!