To the management born?

Abstract

The trouble with being a manager, of course, is that you don't have time to effectively learn how to become a better one, and so those hours grabbed in airport lounges clutching the latest offering from Prentice-Hall or Kogan Page can be time well spent, even if some of the self- improvement often feels like self-flagellation. According to Lonnie Pacelli, who has been a manager at Microsoft and Accenture, the 'Seven Deadly Sins' of management are arrogance, indecisiveness, disorganisation, stubbornness, negativism, cowardice and distrust. In his book 'The Project Management Advisor', Pacelli states that it is perfectly OK to be self-critical and aware of your own weaknesses and mistakes. This is fine in so far as it goes, but presumably the reason that he has listed and analysed these management flaws is so that we can learn from them. In other words, authors and educators in the field of management have an assumed starting position that the ability to manage can be learned. You may have a manager's brain, they seem to say, but it's pretty much the same as everyone else's. Of course, those in the field of management science already know this. Theirs is a discipline that uses mathematical models and other analytical methods to help make better business management decisions. When you consider that some of the fields MS encompasses are logistics, resources allocation, simulations, data mining and so on, it is absurd to suppose that a manager can handle this type of material innately.