An argument could even be made that the specific role of ‘manager’ is entirely about sharing information, and that all the other things managers often end up doing fall more within the scope of ‘leader’, says Matt Casey
‘The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager’
The above is a quote from Peter Drucker – arguably the inventor of modern management. Drucker’s book – The Practice of Management – was the first real management book. It was published in 1954 when this quote was undeniably true.
Kind of a lot has happened since then.
Over the decades that have passed since this book was published, almost everything has changed. Our communication tools are unrecognisably different, and both employers and employees now have far greater expectations of managers. Yet the management handbook is still built on the same central pillars outlined by Drucker nearly 70 years ago. If you were to read The Practice of Management today, it wouldn’t feel particularly out of date.
That shouldn’t be the case.
The management role is mostly sharing information. We send information about what should be achieved down the org chart, and we bring information about what is being achieved back up. We inform people how they are performing, and how to improve that performance. We let people know what they should do, when they should do it, and where. An argument could even be made that the specific role of ‘manager’ is entirely about sharing information, and that all the other things managers often end up doing fall more within the scope of ‘leader’. Even if you don’t agree with that particular viewpoint, you’d at least have to concede that the sharing of information represents a fundamental and crucial part of the management role.
And given that’s the case, it would be preposterous not to recognise that the unimaginable technological and societal changes that have occurred over the past 70 years should have led to the original management handbook being torn up by now. The Practice of Management should be a totally obsolete book. It should be so laughably out of date that it makes no sense in the modern world. The fact that it’s not is a damning indictment of how poorly we’ve kept up with the changes that have occurred around us.
The internet is the most powerful information tool ever invented, and the manager is dedicated almost entirely to the movement of information. By now, the role and the tool should have merged to become symbiotic. The handbook should have been thrown out entirely and rewritten with the internet at its core. We should have rethought every management activity we perform:
Is a weekly one-on-one really necessary in a world with today’s communication tools?
Is a performance review really necessary in a world where data can be collected, analysed and shared instantaneously?
Is a hierarchical management structure necessary to move information through an organisation in a world that has the cloud?
In 1990, Henry Mintzberg created a model for management where he outlined the different hats a manager needed to wear. He determined these to be:
Interpersonal Roles
- Figurehead
- Leader
- Liaison
Informational Roles
- Monitor
- Disseminator
- Spokesperson
Decisional Roles
- Entrepreneur
- Disturbance Handler
- Resource Allocator
- Negotiator
Without question, every one of the hats under the Informational Roles banner no longer needs to be worn by the manager. With almost no imagination at all we could devise solutions that use technology to meet these needs whilst completely removing the need for a manager. That isn’t what has happened though. Instead, the managers have continued to perform these roles, and simply incorporated the internet in how they go about doing it. Nothing has really changed.
Consider the death of Blockbuster Video. Video rental used to be the way we all watched movies at home before streaming was a thing. Blockbuster didn’t die because everyone started renting movies online though. It died because Netflix reimagined the entire transaction with streaming at its core. The dominant way of watching movies at home now is through unlimited subscription services, not through one-off online rentals. Netflix isn’t the same pre-internet solution delivered through the internet – it’s an entirely new solution in which the internet is the central pillar.
The way management has responded to the emergence of the internet has been to just move what it was doing before online. The management activities are exactly the same, the only difference is that in some cases we now use the internet to simplify them a bit. We’ve made no fundamental changes to those activities. We haven’t made the internet intrinsic to how we manage people, we have just begun to use it to help us do what we were already doing.
The management model is as out of date as Blockbuster’s.
It’s not just the Information Roles of the Mintzberg Model that should be reimagined either – almost all the other roles could be too.
Resource Allocator? Take a look at Uber and Deliveroo – they use technology to allocate their human resource literally millions of times a day all across the world without the involvement of a single manager. There are over 16 million Uber rides taken every single day. That’s 16 million different tasks allocated and organised seamlessly without a single manager having to put on the Resource Allocator hat. Imagine how many managers it would take to achieve the same thing, and much of a horrible mess they would make of it. In fact, Uber is another example of an activity that was completely redesigned for the modern world: they didn’t just let us book a taxi online, they redesigned the entire process entirely around the internet.
Figurehead? In the context of this model the Figurehead provides us with someone to be inspired by. In the pre-internet world the only way to achieve this was to allocate each employee a potentially inspirational manager who had enough time available to dedicate to them. But that’s not true today. Who do you follow on social media that inspires you? Have you ever met them? Have they ever dedicated even a single second of their time to you personally? It was once necessary for our Figureheads to be people we knew and had access to, and this created limitations of both geography and time. But this is no longer the case. If your company only has one truly inspirational person out of 10,000 employees, that one person has all the tools at their fingertips to be the figurehead for every single one of those employees without breaking sweat.
Go through almost all the hats we expect our managers to wear and it’s not even difficult to see that simply using the internet to help them do what they always did before is a lazy and flawed approach. The modern world has provided us with tools that should now be the central pillars of all our management activity. The role should be redesigned as a technology-human hybrid. This was true in the pre-covid world, and it’s doubly true now that we’re very likely to manage people who we will never share a physical location with.
In their very early days, the founders of Netflix offered to sell the company to Blockbuster for $50 million. Blockbuster laughed them out of the office. They didn’t think they needed to adapt, because everything they were doing had always worked before.
Any idea where your blockbuster card is today?
Matt Casey is a management expert, the co-founder of DoThings.io and author of The Management Delusion: What If We’re Doing it All Wrong out now, priced £11.99.
