If you are given a choice

If you are given a choice to be a manager, don't take it if you think it will be the job you're doing now only with better pay. Uh-uh! The pay is better, the hours are longer and the job becomes the act of managing, not doing.

Every once in a while you will find yourself doing work that should have been given to someone else. You may even know it should be given to someone else, but you do it anyway. Keeping your hands in the clay, so to speak.

MBWA, managing by walking around, is another thing you'll find yourself doing. It was a short part of an 'inspirational film' we have all been subjected to. Really what you're doing is pissing on trees. Marking your territory. Letting the minions see their own immediate bosses react to you as they feel they react to him.

There are some who will argue that managing is doing. They lie through their teeth. They are also probably fairly good mangers. I say fairly because lying is a cheap way to get things done.

In the military, a place I briefly occupied thirty or so years ago, we had a command structure. A pure pecking order where the general told the colonel, the colonel told the major, the captain, the lieutenant, the first sergeant, the buck sergeant, the corporal and then the floor got mopped. That's a chain of command.

In the business world we now have a thing called flat management. The CEO tells his SVP then the SVP's secretary sends an email and the floor gets mopped. A lot less middle management.

The floor got mopped today because a SVP's secretary sent an email to a VP's secretary and I was cc:'d. It is amazing how quickly one man's wishes can now move through the corporate tom-tom.

In my youth there would have been a memo, the memo would have wandered through the mail for a while then get stuck in an IN box, reviewed, forward, IN Box on another desk, sorted, and filed. No floor, no mop.

I just re-read the above paragraphs and came to an epiphany. My job can be very boring. It isn't all the time. Some times you have to pay with boredom. It's just another currency in the market of life.

=30=