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This floored me: "The professionalisation of management has, some argue, been the single biggest factor behind the economic advancements of the past 100 years.
by xaa 14y ago
This floored me:
"The professionalisation of management has, some argue, been the single biggest factor behind the economic advancements of the past 100 years."
Not electricity, rapid transportation, semiconductors/computers, telephones, the assembly line, or public investment in research. Professionalization of management. Mmkay.
- KeroseneKid 14y agowell the operative word is "economic" .. you may have all of the above but without commercial acumen there is nothing economic.
- stephengillie 14y agoYou can have economies without commercial acumen. And you can gain commercial acumen without a college education. Many have done this by growing fruit and then selling it.
- pjscott 14y agoI want to argue with this, but I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Please clarify?
- rayiner 14y agoYou're mixing up management acumen and business acumen.
- stephengillie 14y agoPlease note the past 100 years barely includes WWI. Professionalization of management is not a phrase I've read before, but I'm assuming it means management as a profession. The benefit here is that managers are supposed to be interchangeable gears driving a company forward. The drawback is that the "interchangeable gears" idea really doesn't work in practice.
- yuhong 14y agoIt reminds me of this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2011013 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2011013
- mseebach 14y ago> The drawback is that the "interchangeable gears" idea really doesn't work in practice. No, it's not just a part you can replace overnight, but interchangeability works like it does for software engineers. If a software engineer's career takes him from a bank to Google to an airline, nobody lift an eyebrow. A professional manager can take the same journey.
- TeMPOraL 14y ago> but interchangeability works like it does for software engineers. By which you mean, it does not? A lot of harm was done in the industry by trying to make programmers interchangable.
- mseebach 14y agoNo, by which I mean exactly what I wrote. I even gave an example.
- stephengillie 14y agoI believe you are working with a different concept than I meant. The concept of these "interchangeable gears" is that a person can walk out of one dev/manager/retail/teaching job and walk into another in a different industry, and be completely effective on day one. This is a concept I learned from several professors across many classes in 2 separate colleges. I've read it in management blogs too -- it's a widely held incorrect concept.
- ivix 14y agoWell, look at some countries with rampant corruption, nepotism and other abuses. They have all the technologies you mentioned available, but generally still do not have economic success.
- unavoidable 14y agoWhat they're lacking is not professional management, but the rule of law.
- richardjordan 14y agoAbsolutely. Rule of law trumps every other factor when it comes to long term success. You can mask a lack of it by flooding a local market with subsidized resources for a while, but that's not sustainable.
- richardjordan 14y agoGotta agree with you on the nonsense in that statement. Economic advancement maps very closely to increased availability of energy resources better than any other correlated factor. I'd suggest that's more of a driver than professional management qualifications. Psh...
- mseebach 14y agoProfessionalisation of management is what happened when managers started getting hired and promoted on the back of merit rather than their belonging to the family of the owner of the business. It's actually a story arc in the most recent season of Downton Abbey where the middle class lawyer/businessman Matthew Crawley bails out the old-money estate and with it it's undisputed master, his father-in-law, the Earl of Grantham. Looking over the books (which, it's implied, is beneath his new status), he realises that the estate is mismanaged, running a deficit and multiple avenues of efficiency are left unexplored. He faces stiff opposition from the Earl with reference to "that's how it's been done for generations". Eventually, (spoiler alert), Matthew, his brother-in-law, a mere servant (gasp!), and the Earl form a coalition to turn the estate around. The triumph of "the world of business and the law" over "that's how it's been done for generations" is the professionalisation of management. Whether it's the single biggest factor is of course disputable, but it's very big.