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It is often argued that management is, by and large, a bullshit job because it has expanded so hugely and yet the same organisations (eg universities and hospitals) used to run perfectly well with smaller numbers.
Management seems to have grown with the ability of people to generate, communicate and store paperwork. If Person A is spending all of their time sending emails to other departments and then Person B is filtering a department’s incoming mail to sort out the dross, we can be back at digging a hole territory.
Previously, if someone took the time out of their day to physically travel to you and tell you something, you could reasonably expect it to be important.
I cannot speak for all managers but this description does not sound like any manager I have worked for. My managers have done key work in prioritizing the work for me and other team members. Coordinating work across teams. Translating high level strategy shifts from higher level executives into concrete terms for people like me. Their role has been very, obviously, valuable.
It is kind of funny to read this in a world where Office Space exists. It's a satire but I am under the impression the phenomenon it satirizes was real. Was it important to put the cover sheets on the TPS reports?
I have had some respect for my managers too, don't get me wrong. It's just that I also note that management has massively increased and I wonder how much of
really, really actually is valuable compared to the 1930s where this work was not done to the same degree. It feels valuable, but is it? Are those strategy shifts really necessary? Are lower-level workers essentially allowing their own abilities to plan and coordinate to be taken over by their manager? Is this all optimisation that gets 99% of the juice out of the orange instead of 95% at the expense of vast amounts of extra work? Is this all a Red Queen problem?
Those aren't rhetorical questions, they're questions I really don't have the answer to. Modern society has broadly done away with the originals (which one could take as evidence of efficacy, or of public goods issues) and for caste reasons I don't really trust the institutes like Harvard Business Review whose job is theoretically to answer these questions.
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That sounds more like administration than management. What I believe has been shown in multiple industries (but particularly the public sector ones) is that as administration grows, it decouples from the actual operations of the business itself and becomes self sustaining, and in fact starts doing less actual administration, in not only per capita terms but in absolute terms.
Its kind of like how teachers keep inventing new method to teach that clearly don't work, because thats more fun than just doing the same thing in a fairly formulaic way.
Very few actually want to do the real administrative work, so new more interesting work is invented.
Most managers are actually fairly directly involved with the real operations of the actual business, it's not a support function like more pure administrative departments such as HR.
Noted, and I'm not sure if I agree or not. Please see my reply to @Gillitrut.
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