I think 100 is a bit much. A the place I work we have one manager for about 30-40 people. He's managing about a dozen projects. Why is he effective? 0 - He kn

I think 100 is a bit much. A the place I work we have one manager for about 30-40 people. He's managing about a dozen projects. Why is he effective? 0 - He knows he's not working on each project day to day, so meetings and decisions are not very top down and are mostly done by consensus. 1 - He's got about 20 years of experience, so he can provide technical input and bring in ideas from other projects. If we hit a problem he'll throw out ideas that have come across in previous projects. He's not a super coder or a math genius and technically isn't super strong (which can make it frustrating to explaining things to him) but he can quickly bounce ideas off of us. 2 - Since he's very familiar with a lot of people (both because he manages a large group and because he has the years of experience) if our team gets stuck or we are not sure of something he knows exactly who to bring in from outside the project to help. 3 - All the above could apply to anyone with enough experience. What makes HIM the manager is he's exceptionally good at dealing with clients. In part this is from experience and in part because he has a natural knack for it. By no means do I think he's the best manager ever. He has plenty of problems - but a the end of the day I have to say he's very effective in getting things done and getting the teams the help they need.