Common Sense

The last time I made a perusal of the memoirs of a manager; I came very close to a point of saturation; where questions began to pop up in my mind in a sequence similar to a web page (You know the way stuffs just pop up on these pages). Let me be quick to assert that I am deeply humbled by a lot of things and this statement believe me is not another plot to show some deep humility. Not that I don’t embrace the virtue of Humility; in fact I am a proponent of this; that the proud shall be abased. However, this is not a Humility session. Back to the issue at hand. I have a lot of traffic in the capital of my mind at this moment and like I said these are questions that stirred up in my mind.

Management by Values has been said to guarantee optimum delivery and more (Ken Blanchard Paraphrased). Management is a trade-off between Revelation and Results; Action. Getting things done through people and with people (Mary Parker Folliet). A social process entailing the responsibility for effective control and a constellation of other functions. More recently a mentor defined management as Common-sense put to work!

Apologies to those with perception that differ from this proposition.

Taking a cue from the Genius of all time Albert Einstein who defined madness as doing the same thing overtime with expectation of different result. The gem here is that while management is no child’s play, the fact is, it is not a rocket science either. It is a complex mandate. I know I am treading on very dangerous paths and would likely incur the sanctions of some cabals of management gurus who have come up with Laureate models and have devoted time and life to proving theories and metrics.

Let me be quick to state that it will be foolhardy of anyone in an attempt to display whatever level of initiative to faulter such great thoughts. I have been blessed by the works of Fredrick Winslow Taylor, Elton Mayo, Henri Fayol, Hertzberg, Maslow, Levi Strauss and other great scholars and opinions. Apart from the fact that these schools of thoughts are widely accepted they are simply dexterous. These philosophies are time tested and water tight in most cases and I proclaim kudos. In my humble opinion however, they are simply common sense expressed.

What then is the motif behind this “quest”? Is this just an outburst of a rookie? Are these just random musings from the stables of a troubled soul? Is this another critic?

A little of everything I guess. Without playing to the gallery or stating rhetorically or unnecessarily rebellious for no reason I put forward that in fact the space between a model and outcome is that very thin line. What is that thin line? What do we call it? How do we measure it? Why should we measure it?

I guess it all comes back to the fact that management beyond activities is just a system or should I say a religion of dreams, performances, controls, measurement and assertions.

To manage is to Create, Connect and Evolve.