THE BELIEFS AND VALUES OF MANAGEMENT
Managers are meliorists: they are people who think that they can act to make things better: the word 'melior' is Latin for 'better'. So managers believe that by their choices and actions they can achieve things that would otherwise not happen, or prevent worse things that would happen if they in a didn't act. Finance managers believe that if they don’t manage, then the company will go broke. Operations managers believe that if they don’t manage, nothing will be produced on time, or nothing will be produced at all. Name any function in a company or organization, and those who manage it will tell you that its function would fail without them managing it. In the words of an old management credo: ‘Failure to plan is planning to fail’.
Yet companies do grow broke, products are not produced on time and all types of functions within organizations fail at one time or another. The standard reason given for such failures is that the management was not good enough. Failures in organizations are seen as failures of management, and in particular, as failures of foresight.
I used that word ‘credo’ deliberately. It is a religious term from the Latin which means: ‘I believe’; and if we look at the language of management, in everything from job adverts to company reports, it frequently has the flavour of a religion: ‘mission’, ‘commitment’, ‘vision’, etc.
WHAT MANAGERS TRY TO DO
If we look at all the differents things that managers think that they are doing, they can all be summarised by one word: control. Of course, in these days of Psychology as Religion, society does not like the word. 'Control' is stereotyped as 'dictatorial', 'autocratic' etc. Managers prefer to see themselves instead as enablers, motivators, or by some other acceptable label. Yet whatever spin is put on it, management is about acting in a way that tries to make things happen the way that managers want; so whatever cosy label is used to disguise it, management is about:
CONTROL
So what's behind this word? Is it just about bossing people around or being obsessed with order?
