[ This post is a version of my reply on LinkedIn to a post by Euan Semple,
‘A Plague of Managers’ (upon your WikiHouses?).
See: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/plague-managers-euan-semple ]
There’s an interview with Jimmy Wales of WikiP in CMI’s ‘Professional Manager’, Winter 2016. He says a manager has five functions: planning, organisation, co-ordinating, commanding and controlling. Wales would like to change the last two functions to: inspiring and coaching.
The ‘Agile movement’ is pushing the remaining three functions towards fluid planning and self-organised, networked teams rather than hierarchical power-structures. That suggests to me that the only function left is picking sufficiently inspirational strategies to keep the attention of your teams and to meet their coaching needs. It seems an environment in which teams should be appointing their managers.
If I was a manager, with no remaining knowledge of ‘how things are done now’ myself, I’d be fighting against all this modern nonsense and trying to maintain the status quo; lashing myself in position at the top of a tree made of single-points of failure for information flow, so that I could cut off any branches as threats emerged.
Ah… I see!
On The Outside 