Knowing Your Business

One day, for a brief period of time, a 'quotation' showed up on a white board in a very prominent area.  It said:

If everyone on the 2nd floor left, product would still ship and money would still come in.  If everyone on the 1st floor left, no product would ship and no money would come in.  Any Questions?

You can already tell why the message did not remain on the board for long.  You can probably also guess why it wasn't signed.  You can probably find dozens of managers who would say that the writer was a coward for not leaving their name.  No, sorry, it's smart.  They learn that in the military.  You don't stand up to get shot by the sniper.  Management seldom rewards people who show them that they are wrong.

The one thing about that statement is that it touches the base depth of knowing your business.  This is realization that a company survives by selling product.  Therefore, the most important people in an organization are the people who build your product.  It doesn't matter how many MBA's you have in your organization or how many 'Lean' event you have.  If you don't have a workforce to create your product, you're dead broke.  Yoo-hoo, management, there's no money coming in!

Everything else is a support function.  So every other function has to facilitate product being built and shipped.  There should be no argument here.  Management is a support function.  At this point, you can break down management into two types:  Symbiote or Parasite.  A Symbiote is an organism that will live off a host, but will also contribute to the host.  A good example is the bacteria that lives in our guts.  While it feeds on the food in our gut, it also helps us digest food material that we cannot otherwise.  Both benefit.  The contrast is the Parasite, which feeds off its host, not caring whether it lives or dies.  It contributes nothing to the host.  The best example of this is the leech, which attaches itself to a host, drinks it's blood until it's full, then drops off.  Later it will find another host.  Doesn't this sound like a familiar management style?

Management has a role to play in an organization.  It's not just there to soak up money and perks.  Management, if it does not contribute, is unnecessary in any organization.  Management's product, to the organization is decisions.  You can't call a company meeting for a vote every time there is a decision to be made.  If management does not work to get the information to make a decision, or refuses to make a decision (enpowerment, mentioned in an earlier blog entry), then they are parasitic.

To be continued.....didymus7