Management for Scientists and Engineers: Why managing is still hard & if it will get better

By David W. Creelman

Why hasn't management improved the way way other fields have improved? Will it ever get better? That's the topic of this book. It's aimed at inquisitive thinkers, people like scientists and engineers, who wonder not just how to get through the day as a manager, but why that day is often so hard.

In this book we range from the insights about manage

• Language: English
• Publisher: Creelman Research Inc.
• Release date: Jul 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9780986698576

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20 Words

Real, rational, natural, whole

Even, polite, positive, perfect

Fractional, irrational, imaginary, odd

Complex, integer, infinite, prime

Transcendental, trapezoidal, surreal, and surd

They say the Inuit have 20 different words for snow

Preface

This book is for smart and sincere engineers and scientists who have ended up in management. They wonder why organizations are so full of uncertainty and folly.

This book isn’t a list of tips on how to be a manager; those sorts of books have already piled up by the thousand. No, this book is about the science of management, or rather why there isn’t a science of management, and if someday there might be.

In his book Idea Makers, Stephen Wolfram writes, "One of the things [Feynman] often said was that ‘peace of mind is the most important prerequisite for creative work’. And he thought one should do everything one could to achieve that. And he thought that meant, among other things, that one should always stay away from anything worldly, like management."

The reader may want to take Feynman’s advice: leave your job in management and race back to the comfort of the lab. If you are willing to risk some peace of mind, then read on.

Introduction

Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.

- John Von Neumann

I once asked Henry Mintzberg, Canada’s greatest management theorist, whether, looking back over his 40 years of research, management had gotten better. He said, Oh no, David, it’s gotten much worse. That’s a sorry state for a field of study.

I remember there was a lawyer in my MBA class. He was smarter than most of his fellow students but floundered in his attempts to deal with business case studies. The problem was that, unlike the other students, he was trained in a specific method of reasoning. In law, he’d learned there was a large and well-defined body of knowledge that could be applied to addressing an issue. In this particular MBA class, it seemed as if people were just making stuff up.

Alas, he wasn’t wrong. It wasn’t that it seemed they were just making stuff up—that’s more or less what they were doing. There was little in the way of a solid science of management underlying their ideas. The successful students were just making plausible arguments about the right thing to do and presenting them with great confidence. In fact, presenting with undue confidence got more points than a position that expressed the unknowns and uncertainties. A completely different course of action could be presented with equal confidence and there was no good way to choose between them.

Engineers and scientists have a similar problem as the lawyer. We are trained in a kind of rigour that, while useful in management, is nonetheless misaligned with much of the real world of organizations. If you’ve worked in organizations for a long time, then, just as John von Neumann has suggested, you have probably gotten used to management even when you don’t understand why it is the way it is. This book reflects my attempt to understand why working in organizations is so frustrating, why there isn’t a reliable science of management to guide us, and how we might build tools to help us avoid the bad management we see all around us.

Singer-songwriter Jon Brooks says he offers songs of solace, not solutions. And in that spirit let’s go on an adventure to wander through management as it really is, what we think it should be, and finally what one day it might become. At the very least the insights offer solace, and I’m not beyond hoping that they point toward solutions.

1

Learning from the Greats

Introduction

If our goal is to understand management, we should ground ourselves in a solid foundation of what is known. There is a wealth of literature that practicing managers have found helpful in guiding them through the challenges of management. We can’t begin to cover it all; this isn’t meant to be a survey of all the management greats. We have a different goal here. We want to look at just a sample of cases so that we can extract the major themes. To understand the nature of management, we’ll make sure we understand the nature of management literature. From there we should be able to move toward an improved science of management.

The classics

Let’s start with a classic theory that has endured for many years: John Eric Adair’s Action Centred Leadership. Adair was born in 1934, earning a doctorate at King’s College London before going on to become a management theorist and consultant. His starting point is that management is comprised of three distinct topics: tasks, people, and teams. You may have had a manager who focused on tasks but had no people skills. You may have had to participate in a training program about team building while you sat worrying about the urgent tasks you needed to get done. You may have led some great individuals who could never get along as a team. Adair points out that you need to balance all three aspects of management: tasks, people, and teams.

Adair’s model of these three elements is presented as a Venn diagram. Admittedly, the primary reason seems to be that every student has learned about Venn diagrams and rather enjoyed that lesson. You’ll find this something of a theme in management literature. There is a fondness for circles, arrows, and pyramids. You’ll find the occasional faux equation. It does us no harm.

Astonishingly, Adair has written more than 40 books on management. In these books, he explores the three components of management. For example, the topic of people involves motivation; to have a motivated group you need these eight factors:

Be motivated yourself

Select people who are highly motivated

Treat each person as an individual

Set realistic and challenging targets

Remember that progress motivates

Create a motivating environment

Provide fair rewards

Give recognition

These components of motivation are self-explanatory. Even with just this glimpse of Adair’s work, we recognize that there is a wealth of practical management theory we can apply. Disturbingly, in line with the laments of Mintzberg about the state of management, Adair says, "I am the world’s first professor of leadership studies. Why is it that I have failed to get across the core body of knowledge of what we know about leadership and the principles of leadership development?"¹

For all the commonsense clarity of Adair’s work on management theory, something seems to be missing that prevents its widespread application. We probably don’t need another 40 books from Adair; we need to get a sufficiently ‘meta’ understanding of the field so that we can transcend Adair’s failure.

Moving from A to B, we can look at the work of Warren Bennis. Born in 1925, Bennis is a bit older than Adair and had an illustrious career as a professor at the University of California; he eventually became president of the University of Cincinnati. Bennis is famous for a concept that remains extremely popular among management consultants today. His idea was that we need to distinguish between leaders and managers—and that, frankly, we have too many managers. Bennis explained that the manager administers whereas the leader innovates; the manager focuses on systems and structure while the leader focuses on people; the manager relies on control while the leader inspires trust.

As president of the University of Cincinnati, Bennis had a chance to apply his insights to the real world of leadership. It did not go well. Perhaps we can attribute that sad experience to the difference between a theorist and a practitioner. An expert on programming theory might not necessarily be a great programmer. Another possibility is that there was a fundamental flaw in his leadership theory. We can’t avoid noting that Mintzberg scoffs (and worse) at the distinction between leadership and management. The scoff points out that management without leadership is uninspiring. Who wants to work for someone with no vision? At the same time, leadership without management is disconnected from the actual work. Who wants to work for someone who is full of airy vision but has no idea of how things actually get done? The worse is that Mintzberg believes this distinction between leadership and management is one reason why the quality of management has declined over the past several decades. He suggests too many people, armed with fresh MBAs, are eager to be leaders without much knowledge of, or even interest in, doing the actual work.

Bennis attributes his difficulties as a university president to an unconscious conspiracy. By this, he means all the usual forces of bureaucracy and inertia that make leadership so frustrating. While Bennis’s ideas remain extremely popular, you have to wonder if he glossed over a deep problem: in a battle to the death, bureaucracies will always defeat our leadership theories. A theory that always loses in the face of reality is not much of a theory. Perhaps what we need is a theory on how to defeat the unconscious conspiracies of bureaucracies.

While I have no intention of going from A to Z in the foundations of management theory, I can’t resist going to C. Let’s look at just one more of the greats, the highly regarded Ram Charan. He trained as an engineer before heading into business via a Harvard MBA. Probably more important than his education as an engineer or MBA is his work in his family’s small shoe store in Hapur, Uttar Pradesh. That hands-on, close-up experience in business grounded abstract constructs like cash flow in everyday reality. We’ll touch on this later, but Mintzberg thinks this kind of grounded experience is essential before people can learn to become effective managers.

Charan comes across as being rather different than, say, a highly intellectual McKinsey consultant. He puts something of the guru into the phrase management guru. He has been a close advisor to many CEOs, including highly successful ones like GE’s Jack Welch and highly unsuccessful ones like Welch’s successor Jeffery Immelt. He had a close relationship with these leaders, to the extent we can judge from press reports: he guided their thinking and feeling rather than simply performing some sort of business analysis.

I have an odd story about Charan from two well-known University of Southern California professors. Charan gave a presentation to HR leaders hosted at the university. The attendees were wowed, giving him massive applause. One professor turned to the other and said, I have to admit, I didn’t understand anything he said. The other responded, Frankly, neither did I. The problem was that Charan had departed from the more common linear approach of here are three things that leaders must do to a more poetic, metaphoric, guru-like style. This was not at all what the professors were looking for but it resonated with the leaders in the audience.

That story suggests there is something of the mystic in Charan, and perhaps a hunger for something mystic among business leaders. This may be a clue that the rational, actionable advice we find in management literature is not as helpful as one would suppose. Managers have taken their MBAs and been to the consultants’ presentations and seen the lists of management competencies and still feel something is missing.

That said, Charan has written dozens of books that take a less guru-like, more linear approach. Let’s take a look at some of Charan’s foundational ideas. First, he explains there are three categories of things that a leader must do:

Pick other leaders

Set the strategic direction

Conduct operations

Based on this, if you are a leader setting your weekly agenda, you ought to ensure that you are working on all three categories.

He also points out that, if you are a leader, you also need to cycle through a focus on three things:

Financial targets

The external environment

Internal activities

In The Talent Masters, Charan shows that a leader’s main job is to develop talent, in particular the talent that will eventually replace them.

Far from finished in his work, Charan has also identified the eight skills leaders need:

Position the business correctly in the market

Connect the dots to pinpoint patterns of change ahead of others

Shape how people work

Judge people by getting to the truth of a person

Mould high-powered, high-ego people into a working team of leaders

Know the destination where you want to take your business

Set laser-sharp priorities for meeting your goals

Deal creatively and positively with societal pressures

This has just been a glimpse of Charan’s work, but you can imagine working