My Dad grew up poor, even though he wasn’t aware of it at the time. His own father was killed in an industrial accident at Pure Oil in the Toledo area, so his Mom had to ship him out to her sister's farm along with his brother. He would occasionally tell my brothers and I about eating biscuits and gravy for three meals because it's all they had. He never gave up on his education, eventually earning a Master's degree in mathematics and having a long and successful career in the aerospace industry. He would often recount a story about working on the Ohio turnpike to earn money to get through college. Men would line up to earn the princely sum of an extra ten cents per hour to operate the jack hammer. My Dad often told me that story to inculcate the value of an education to me. Unfortunately, I just thought it meant that I wouldn't have to work hard later in life if I got good grades. Even though I liked to plan ahead, I was naturally lazy; always looking for a way to get my work done with minimal effort. Who knew that I could parlay this into an entire management philosophy that has provided modest success? I call it planning to do nothing, the lazy man's guide to management. If you are looking for a book on how to become the CEO of your company, this is not your tome. But if you want to achieve some success in management and still go on the occasional vacation, I think I have some tips.
As with any self-help book, your mileage may vary. And if you know the origin of that phrase, you might want to give this book to your son or daughter. So we need a few caveats, or as the test team likes to say, some ground rules and assumptions. These will guide your use of my advice. First, I am not an expert. I just have experience, like to read, and have some good friends who are also experienced. I put all of this together and had some success. Some folks, who don’t work for me, liked my approach and encouraged me to write a book. I’m looking at you Sean.
Next, like any good project, this advice needs a box that bounds its usefulness. The walls around a project can be temporal, cultural, geographic, organizational, financial, or technical. Here is our box. Applicability is to the era of professional management that has evolved since World War II. Should this style of technocracy radically change, new rules will be needed. Having little experience outside of the English-speaking world, I feel safe to say that these rules aren’t applicable to Turkish corporate management, for example, and probably not even French for that matter. These rules apply primarily to large organizations like major corporations or the government. If you are running a small business, I recommend that you read “The E-Myth Revisited” by Michael E. Berger. I took some of his advice to heart, but the lessons don’t flow the other way to small business. I have primarily managed technical enterprises my whole life, so this book is primarily geared to the life of the technical manager, whether you are delivering services, products, operations, or projects. Finally, this is a book about management, not supervision; the distinction is that the manager is someone whose direct reports have direct reports. I find supervision distasteful for reasons I may discuss later, so no more of that here.
For those who need a CV or biography to know whether to believe an author or not, I will put my biography in an appendix. For the rest of us, seeing if this book confirms our already held beliefs will be the yardstick by which this work is measured.
