The Manager’ s Job • HBR CLASSIC
Today’ s gossip may be tomorrow’ s fact— that’ s why managers cherish hearsay. build mental models( e. g., how the organization’ s budget system works, how customers buy products, how changes in the economy affect the organization). The evidence suggests that the manager identifies decision situations and builds models not with the aggregated abstractions an MIS provides but with specific tidbits of data.
Consider the words of Richard Neustadt, who studied the information-collecting habits of Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower:“ It is not information of a general sort that helps a President see personal stakes; not summaries, not surveys, not the bland amalgams. Rather … it is the odds and ends of tangible detail that pieced together in his mind illuminate the underside of issues put before him. To help himself he must reach out as widely as he can for every scrap of fact, opinion, gossip, bearing on his interests and relationships as President. He must become his own director of his own central intelligence.” 9
The manager’ s emphasis on this verbal media raises two important points. First, verbal information is stored in the brains of people. Only when people write this information down can it be stored in the files of the organization— whether in metal cabinets or on magnetic tape— and managers apparently do not write down much of what they hear. Thus the strategic data bank of the organization is not in the memory of its computers but in the minds of its managers.
Second, managers’ extensive use of verbal media helps to explain why they are reluctant to delegate tasks. It is not as if they can hand a dossier over to subordinates; they must take the time to“ dump memory”— to tell subordinates all about the subject. But this could take so long that managers may find it easier to do the task themselves. Thus they are damned by their own information system to a“ dilemma of delegation”— to do too much or to delegate to subordinates with inadequate briefing.
Folklore: Management is, or at least is quickly becoming, a science and a profession. By almost any definition of science and profession, this statement is false. Brief observation of any manager will quickly lay to rest the notion that managers practice a science. A science involves the enaction of systematic, analytically determined procedures or programs. If we do not even know what procedures managers use, how can we prescribe them by scientific analysis? And how can we call management a profession if we cannot specify what managers are to learn? For after all, a profession involves“ knowledge of some department of learning or science”( Random House Dictionary). 10
Fact: The managers’ programs— to schedule time, process information, make decisions, and so on— remain locked deep inside their brains. Thus, to describe these programs, we rely on words like judgment and intuition, seldom stopping to realize that they are merely labels for our ignorance.
I was struck during my study by the fact that the executives I was observing— all very competent— are fundamentally indistinguishable from their counterparts of a hundred years ago( or a thousand years ago). The information they need differs, but they seek it in the same way— by word of mouth. Their decisions concern modern technology, but the procedures they use to make those decisions are the same as the procedures used by nineteenth century managers. Even the computer, so important for the specialized work of the organization, has apparently had no influence on the work procedures of general managers. In fact, the manager is in a kind of loop, with increasingly heavy work pressures but no aid forthcoming from management science.
Considering the facts about managerial work, we can see that the manager’ s job is enormously complicated and difficult. Managers are overburdened with obligations yet cannot easily delegate their tasks. As a result, they are driven to overwork and forced to do many tasks superficially. Brevity, fragmentation, and verbal communication characterize their work. Yet these are the very characteristics of managerial work that have impeded scientific attempts to improve it. As a result, management scientists have concentrated on the specialized functions of the organization, where it is easier to analyze the procedures and quantify the relevant information. 11
But the pressures of a manager’ s job are becoming worse. Where before managers needed to respond only to owners and directors, now they find that subordinates with democratic norms continually reduce their freedom to issue unexplained orders, and a growing number of outside influences( consumer groups, government agencies, and so on) demand attention. Managers have had nowhere to turn for help. The first step in providing such help is
harvard business review • march – april 1990 page 4