The Myth that You Can Manage Something You Don’t Know

When you watch shows like The Apprentice you see one of the biggest failures of business leadership on display. The thought is that if you are a good manager, you can succeed at managing anything. Hogwash.

As someone who has worked for people doing technical stuff that my bosses didn’t understand most of my adult life, I know that’s a joke. At the end of the day the “doers” and the “managers” need one another. The same is true as BlueCross as it’s true at a church as it’s at YMX. There is a big difference between a “doer” and a “manager of doers.”

There is a cool example of this myth over at 37 Signals blog.

Bill Gates was amazingly technical, and he knew more about the details of his company’s software than most of the people who worked on those details day in and day out. He understood Variants and COM objects and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables—and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date and time functions. He didn’t meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn’t bull**** him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual programmer.

For people who love what they do, whether that’s programming, design, designing watches, or building cars, that’s a great motivation to not grow your company too quickly. Enjoy the time when you can actually be a full participant in the actual activities themselves, rather than just managing them.


Posted

in

by

Tags:

Comments

Leave a Reply