[HN Gopher] The Evolution of Management (2019)
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The Evolution of Management (2019)
Author : mavelikara
Score : 37 points
Date : 2021-05-23 04:52 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (queue.acm.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (queue.acm.org)
| KineticLensman wrote:
| This is about how your role changes as you progress through
| different levels of management. Interesting, but I would be
| interested to read how management practices have evolved over
| time, in different contexts.
|
| E.g. how were factories managed in the early 19th century? What
| current practices would have been recognised by staff in the
| organisations concerned?
| vincentmarle wrote:
| This is not the rose-colored answer you might be looking for,
| but contrary to popular belief (which usually start with Henry
| Ford) a lot of modern day "management techniques" were actually
| invented at slavery plantations [1]
|
| I can recommend the following books on the history of
| capitalism (which is closely linked to the exploitation of
| labor aka management):
|
| - Empire of Cotton (Sven Beckert)
|
| - Nature's Metropolis (Cronon)
|
| [1]
| https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slav...
| gryn wrote:
| isn't much older than that?
|
| I did zero research on the subject, and the only thing I was
| taught in school about its history was the usual story about
| Henry Ford, Fred Taylor and the rest of the company ...
|
| but, I remember watching a documentary about the construction
| of the Egyptian pyramids. in it there was a part about how
| they hired people to monitor and 'motivate'(mostly with a
| whip) the workers (mostly slaves), how much their were paid
| (more than the workers) and the hierarchy above them.
| elefanten wrote:
| This take deserves so many asterisks and caveats, that it
| won't be recognizable coming out of the other end.
|
| This source is a fashionable, knee-jerk narrative from a
| heavily contested historical effort (1619 Project already
| discussed ad nauseum). This particular piece is basically a
| marketing piece from the publication that funded the project.
|
| On top of that, the piece you linked doesn't come anywhere
| near making the argument you attribute to it. It has some
| sharp rhetoric from some totally random people that draws
| links between US capitalism and US slavery. There is
| absolutely no historical assessment of the evolution of
| managerial techniques vis-a-vis a link to slavery.
| tafda wrote:
| Railroads and the need to coordinate with precision across
| greater distances forced the evolution of managerial practice
| from single site to something recognizable as today's practice.
|
| "The Visible Hand" by Alfred Chandler is an authoritative
| source on the transition:
|
| https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674940529
| larrydag wrote:
| One of the best books on management I've read is Out of the
| Crisis by W. Edwards Deming. While not specifically a management
| book he calls out management and leadership with his 14 points.
|
| https://deming.org/explore/fourteen-points/
| temac wrote:
| There are several things that are weird enough not to be taken as
| absolute logical premises. I mean they certainly can and have
| worked for many people in many companies, but let's just think a
| little more about them, especially in an industry of R&D
| knowledge workers. Going from "IC" to a non-practicing manager
| (like the article describes and even recommends) is in many ways
| a lateral move: you are not going to use your preciously acquired
| past skills and expertise a lot, and you are actually going to do
| quite a different job. The only thing that will help you in said
| new job is your general knowledge about the industry, maybe the
| subfield, and maybe some of your memories about your past job.
| This _should not_ be a very common "promotion" path (and maybe
| in many contexts this should not even be considered a promotion,
| more changing profession), this actually already _is necessarily_
| pretty "rare"; unless you are "managing" just one or two people
| (and even then), or people that just come and go quickly, it is
| doubtful it is actually so common, because even with a very large
| growth of the industry, this would require just not a sustainable
| overall exponential growth rate for it to be the most common
| career change.
|
| As for "creating an environment where others can solve the
| problem", support staff would often be more valuable.
|
| Last, we can also consider big successful community projects as
| more up-to-date examples of more modern organizations. Is Linus a
| "hands-off manager"? Certainly not, even if he mainly does not do
| exactly the same thing as when he started Linux; also when he
| intervenes and gives strong opinions on very technical subjects
| (even often down to quite detailed ones), is it some form of
| counter-productive "micromanagement"? In my opinion: also not.
|
| If your main subject is mostly R&D, technical leadership should
| be more important than "old-school" management (and to be clear,
| the same caveats apply about the possibility for tons of people
| to _really_ become technical leaders, it is not possible
| everywhere just because of mere growth reasons). I doubt the
| described _traditional_ hierarchical organizations are the most
| effective in this context.
| kuharich wrote:
| Past comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21751983
| Terretta wrote:
| At first blush, this feels a little like the many blog blurbs for
| _"The Leadership Pipeline"_ by Charan and Drotter. To be fair,
| this is richer than most, an independent take on something
| intrinsic.
|
| For comparison, a couple other generic watered down summaries of
| the book:
|
| https://www.mudamasters.com/en/change-management-leadership/...
|
| https://www.cleverism.com/leadership-pipeline-model/
|
| As there are dozens of these, maybe it's some sort of right of
| passage for blogging on LinkedIn?
|
| The main takeaway for me from the book that doesn't seem captured
| by the re-blogs, but _is_ in the second paragraph here, is that
| the transitions are discontinuous. The leader is not sharpening
| tools in a tool belt, but changing out tool belts.
|
| In this piece, author writes, "shift your mindset, and focus on
| building new skills that are often very different from the skills
| that made you successful in your previous role."
|
| To put more bluntly:
|
| _The leader must stop doing things that worked well when
| adjusting the system at a different scope, and now intervene
| completely differently._
|
| Source, for Kindle:
|
| https://smile.amazon.com/Leadership-Pipeline-Powered-Company...
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