A Requiem for the Manager

Prelude

History is written by the victors. The vanquished have little say. Management books tend to focus on what the ideal should be. The reality as seen by the silent subordinate is different.

As I look back on my three and half decades of managerial experience both  as a manager and as a subordinate working under a host of managers, guilt thoughts dominate. The gnawing feel is that I have not given my best; that the  tribe of managers (including myself) is  selfish, short and perhaps startlingly nasty.   So I must confess.

As an individual, I am a bold man but as a subordinate official I am a scared man. From the steel framed window of my organization,  now secure but soot laden;  suppressing but stoic,  I stare at  the world in somewhat of a lost confusion. The realities of organizational world then imprint my mind. I receive disturbing images and more alarming signals  of the ineffectiveness and inefficiency of management.  The membrane between my  hazy expectations and the actuality of experience has now become an impregnable wall of disappointment. Of lessons learnt but not implemented...

I perceive management as a purported science of exploitation and the art of deceit. We are circus clowns who believe that organizations run through us. I sigh at my organizational insignificance and my dispensability. I am afraid of this unemployment biased world. I  am awed by the technology that robotically threatens to unseat me. .

My managers are show offs : publicizing their readings from Harvard Business Review; they subscribe to Financial Times and Economic Times and Business Standard to Wall Street Journal to Business Line yet do not read any one of them.

They believe that because I am dumb, I have nothing to stay. I say to myself with my lips on to the wall 'There are no bad workers, there are only bad managers!'

People around me are complex personalities. Human relations are about fragile sensitivities. Handling people is like handling splendorous, many coloured glass. They could splinter if not handled with care. People are rainbows in the sky. They are delicate and  beautiful sights to observe. To me, they come in several hues.  They are different - in nationalities, tribes, gender, styles, ways of living!. Diversity adds to the colours in the prism. 

Managers harness this diversity.  

Management is the key to organizational success.

The Subordinate?

To be continued...