Why bosses lose touch with reality--Ignorance
One of the reasons management loses touch with reality is that they don’t understand the work. I wouldn’t be surprised if Henry Ford could have rolled up his sleeves and done any job in his factories. Today, in a large corporation the CEO couldn’t even come close to doing this. Even if they could once do the complex tasks that their employees do, after years of not using those skills, and having technology progress has rendered them incapable of doing or understanding everything that is being done in their organization. Ultimately the knowledge workers, as John Kenneth Galbraith calls them, reside in an interesting situation—where their boss controls their pay and advancement, but the knowledge workers control the flow of information to management. Since the managers are not technically proficient at the tasks they are managing they usually attempt to quantify what they measure / manage by necessity. A manager may not understand software programming, but they can certainly demand that 100 lines of code be written per day. Whether this makes sense or not is a separate issue, but the manager feels like they have somehow added value. This gap between what the knowledge worker does and what the boss can comprehend and measure does not help the mental help of the corporation.
posted by VanceH- @ 12:44 AM
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