Thoughts for managers

William J. Reddin

Management Development

• A manager’s job is to create added value, to make decisions, and to make subordinates effective, and training should reflect this.
• Magic is a belief in a cause-and-effect relationship that has no basis in science. Many management development programs are based on magic, not theory.
• The one thing the behavioral sciences have clearly accomplished is to make some managers feel guilty.
• The most underused management development device is responsibility. The second most underused may be the book.
• Young managers should not be trained by those who have ceased to learn.
• Some managers are sent to courses as autocrats and return as hypocrites.
• The title of many management training courses should be “a survey of the problems of social science”.
• The best training is simple, not exotic. The best visual aid is the thing itself. The best quantity is one per trainee.
• The real trick in management development is to teach managers what they know that isn’t so.
• Ninety-five percent of management development occurs in the context of the superior-subordinate relationship.
• When training managers tell me of their plans for a bottom-up change program, I remind them the penalty of mutiny is death.
• If sermons could change things, it might be great. However, they don’t change things much. So what is the value of lecturing to management training courses?
• If you think training is expensive, try ignorance.
• There is nothing more useful than a good theory properly applied.
• Motivation is not what you do to people; it is what you allow them to do themselves.

Organizations:

• The truly effective firm must be flexible.
• Any effective social system has a reward-and-punishment method that operates. Take the orchestra, for instance.
• One aspect of system design is optimum managerial turnover.
• Functional management leads to low job rotation at the top, while profit-centered management makes top managers interchangeable.
• An organization chart is best seen as a defense against anxiety. You organize around the things that must not go wrong.
• The power that staff “advisors” have should be made clear to all, whether full power or no power or something in between.
• Any power level can work as long as it is known.
• The military still has a lot it could teach to organization designers.
• The one-over-one relationship causes trouble unless one works with the outside and one works with the inside.
• Power diffusion can be just as bad as power concentration.
• We should build organizations around computers, not simply insert computers into existing organizations.
• I know an organization with a 100-to-1 span of control. It produces a variety of complex products. It works only because each person is highly trained, the production process and each product is expertly designed, and everyone obtains immediate and continuing feedback on performance. It is the symphony orchestra. Why not design other organizations this way?
• Positions labeled “coordinator” usually indicate a poorly designed organization.
• We know how to build bridges, but we are still not too sure about building organizations.
• We can predict what will happen to a beam under stress, but not what will happen to a manager under stress.
• Organization change does not have to mean structural change, but always discuss the structure issue first.
• The central organization design issue is no longer “what business are we in”, but how do we build a top team and organization that continually adapts to a volatile environment.

Change

• The only real skill I claim to have is that of getting managers together, in what at times are unusual combinations, to talk about what they should talk about anyway in an atmosphere of trust and interest in effectiveness.
• The best reason for change is to achieve an image of potential; the worst is to quiet noise in the system.
• I was once asked to plan a change program for a subsidiary company that had fired four general managers in six years. It turned out they needed a cost accountant, not a change agent.
• One measure of my success as a change agent is that more people whistle on their way to work rather than on the way home.
• No change agent can take responsibility for change, only for creating a climate conducive to change.
• I know a major airline that has been reorganized by three different consulting firms three times over a six-year period.
• What this proves is that the airline learned nothing in the process.
• Clearing out the deadwood is usually a naïve approach to change. It assumes that individuals are being deliberately less effective, not that the organization has driven them to it.

Taken from the book: “The Smart Manager’s Book of Lists”, by W.J. Reddin,
Lake Publishing Company, 1989, pp. 30-37.