Industry has overrated and overemphasized “managing” for obvious reasons.
- The need for a qualification in management stemmed from the need to give legitimate justification for kin of Business Owners to walk straight into position of power, bye-passing the intellectual and professional hard grind, competition and long queue that a technocrat has to go through to reach anywhere near it.
- The content taught there is like “candy floss”; it is hyped and whipped up to make it look much bigger and attractive but it melts down to a spoonful of sugar.
- Use of clichéd templates, memorizing of facts and figures, stories of case study, verbose sophistry and jargon (imported from Japan) is thrown in to make it look difficult and something beyond common sense.
- Soft Skills, networking and personality development are certainly some of the plus points to be acknowledged there.
So there are simply too many who gravitate and get pulled towards management qualification and skill set BUT the question is “ Why do we need so many managers and is so much managing desirable to resort to?”
- Either you have what is exactly required ( in terms of plan, resources, information, support ) OR you manage
- You do not have to manage if you have a system that is friendly enough and robust to be usable with ease … you have to simply follow the system
- It is much healthier to have no need to manage :
a. Performance
b. Perception of Performance
c. Performance of Perception
d. Window dressing for image
- You have a complexity ridden rules and compliances, therefore you need experts to manage to steer clear of problems
- What was supposed to happen does not happen therefore you manage
- You have people and systems pitted against one another therefore you manage
- For getting undue things or things out of turn you have to manage
Conclusion: Ideally, there should be no need to “manage” if we had / did things as they should have been … Any case, having to manage disproportionately is symptom of a problem by itself. BUT, if we churn out too many “managers” what else do we expect?
AVINASH KHARE