Management

At a retirement party the other day, I spoke to someone who had been my boss's boss. He thanked me for pointing him some years ago to a passage by Tom DeMarco in Peopleware:

In my early years as a developer, I was privileged to work on a project managed by Sharon Weinberg, now president of the Codd and Date Consulting Group. She was a walking example of much of what I now think of as enlightened management. One snowy day, I dragged myself out of a sickbed to pull together our shaky system for a user demo. Sharon came in and found me propped up at the console. She disappeared and came back a few minutes later with a container of soup. After she'd poured it into me and buoyed up my spirits, I asked her how she found time for such things with all the management work she had to do. She gave me her patented grin and said, "Tom, this is management."

He had stopped by our department on some minor errand, and this brought the story to mind.

Our conversation the other day brought another bit of reading to mind, this from Herbert Simon's memoir Models of My Life. The passage is from Chapter 9, "Building a Business School: The Graduate School of Industrial Administration" (at Carnegie Institute of Technology, which later merged with the Mellon Institute to become Carnegie Mellon University). It concerns the first dean of that school, Lee Bach:

When I try to describe his style, it always seems too simple, too obvious. It's like saying of a tennis ace, "He always hit the ball squarely and with force, placing it precisely where he aimed." If you you can do that, you can be a great tennis player. But is the advice worth teaching? What do you do with that information?...

I warned you that I would say little about Lee that would tell you how to be a good manager, and I have made good my warning. The principles of good management are simple, even trivial. They are not widely practiced for the same reason that Christianity is not widely practiced. it is not enough to know what the principles are; you must acquire deeply ingrained habits of carrying them out, in the face of all sorts of strong urges to stray onto more comfortable and pleasant paths, to respond to provocations, and just to goof off. Lee had the self-discipline actually to apply the principles, to behave like a good manager and a leader. Not many of us do.

I am grateful to have worked for a few persons who had that self-discipline.