(2017-03-03) Unbundling The Manager

Venkatesh Rao on Unbundling the Manager

Today's newsletter is inspired by my friend Kim Malone Scott's new book Radical Candor, due out next week (preorder here). In it, she argues that the job of the modern manager is to artfully combine direct truth-telling with sincere, personal caring. She lays out a model (based on the excellent 2x2 below) to help you recognize that that is in fact your job as a boss, and doing it well.

But let's talk about the big story, within which radical candor is one of the final chapters: the unbundling of the manager

In the 1950s, the rise of a new kind of manager over the previous half-century, the middle manager, inspired a whole era of management thinking and writing

That niche, however, began shrinking in the late 70s. Since that time, a gradual process of unbundling Middle-Management functions has been underway

A lot of routine logistics, information dissemination, and large-scale coordination used to depend on it.

You can think of four broad phases, each taking about ten years, and each concerned with a core unbundling principle: autonomy, efficiency, innovation, and empathy.

The radically candid manager is in a sense the last manager: the core role that has emerged as the enduring one, after four decades of brutal unbundling of management as a function

You can read about the autonomy phase (1975-85) in books like Tom Peters' Thriving on Chaos

After autonomy, the focus shifted to efficiency (1985-95).

The impact on managers -- a focus on process discipline, monitoring and feedback, is captured in Andy Grove's classic High Output Management (1983)

Many middle-managerial functions such as signing off on routine paperwork or disseminating information, were simply computerized or networked away.

Other functions were downcycled

Process discipline helped cleave line management from project/program management, shrink the former (absorbed into "staff" functions in many cases), and frame the latter in "core competency" terms.

Managers began to be held accountable for end-to-end value addition rather than just the internal silo-functioning metrics, setting the stage for the "innovation" era.

By 1995 the stage was set for the "innovation" phase. Fueled by books such as The Innovator's Dilemma (1997), the surviving middle managers turned into risk managers

Chet Richards' Certain To Win (another top recommendation of mine that I use all the time), captures this last management-as-innovation-maneuvering aspect.

The focus on innovation meant the static peacetime construct of "job description" transformed into constant maneuvering against shifting internal/external competition.

A big part of the Great Recession was that "caring debt" had come due. We were paying the costs of an economy based on manipulative insincerity and obnoxious aggression

A party based on ruinous empathy -- the tendency to cloak important truths in "PC" and hypocrisy -- lost to one that specializing in obnoxious aggression and manipulative insincerity.

This is not a nice-to-have feature of society. A society can create meaning and be worth living in only if individuals actually sincerely care about each other and show it.

At the same time, a society that lacks candor and the ability to challenge lies directly, is one that lacks the ability to function at a very basic level

The answer is the grounding the key 1:1 relationships of society in radical candor

The effect of the first three phases of the unbundling of managers was that a lot of managers, if they survived at all, shifted into one of the two lower quadrants.

1970s style managerial caring was usually not accompanied by candor and direct challenging. Workplaces were dominantly in Kim's top-left quadrant: ruinous empathy.

Which means this "native" way of thinking comes with some big blindspots I share with others of my generation, which 70s-era managers would have recognized.

The biggest blindspot has to do with the role of caring in management.

Middle managers became like VCs or angel investors, stewarding agendas defined by "porftolios" of "strategic" projects with varied risk profiles and "ROI" expectations.

Like many Gen Xers in their early 40s, I am a product of the first three phases, spanning 30 years, of the long-term unbundling of the manager.