Have you ever heard about management being nothing but an unjustified overhead? I can’t count how many times I heard it, how many different counter-management viewpoints, ideas, approaches, how much justification and reasoning – developers can self-organize, agile mentality is a replacement for project managers, adult engineers need no supervision, etc. At best management is given a credit or more like a benefit of a doubt for taking care of admin tasks and HR benefits. Most of these arguments I find childish and plain silly. And still once in a while I have to defend the need for management that I believe is not much more than just stating the obvious.
One of the ways to illustrate the need for management is by juxtaposing management to the basic laws of nature.
Let’s just apply Newton’s law of Inertia to the traditional management. If you organize a team, set it on the right path and give it a little push it should go with a constant speed just by the shier force of inertia, according to Newton that journey will never end, the team will go on and on, that is if it operates in the vacuum. Otherwise, the inevitable friction will bring the team journey to the end and likely sway the team in some direction, and here we are back to need for the managers to adjust the course and push the team forward ;)
Well, application of the Newton’s law might be an overly simplistic metaphor. Let’s take it a notch up in complexity and look at the laws of thermodynamics. Without overly complicating the issue the Second Law of Thermodynamics can be formulated as “entropy always increases” or that there is always an increase in disorder.
As you know that the Second Law of Thermodynamics applies to all aspects of the world we live in. Organizational dynamics are no exception and the laws of entropy for the organization are absolutely identical, quoting Murphy – “Left to themselves things always go from bad to worse.”
Peter F. Drucker formulated it in his rather concise statement “The only things that evolve by themselves in an organization are disorder, friction, and malperformance.”
Or one more way to put comes from Dwight David Eisenhower – “The uninspected deteriorates.”
The uninspected deteriorates. Is there a better way to put it? And do you need any more reasoning for introducing managers in an organization? Of course there are more reasons to do so, but that one alone justifies a plenty of overhead…
BTW, the third law of thermodynamics states that you can’t get out of the game – absolute zero is unachievable… That spells like a job security for me :)
