Not🐧A🐧Convicted🐧Felon5d ago
After spending five years alone in the wilderness as a manager, I wrote a conference presentation called "The future of Management", in which I asserted that the average manager underperforms the market, and could usefully be replaced with a Magic 8-ball.
The _entire field_ of management is hopelessly broken, especially when it comes to knowledge work, and should be rewritten from scratch.
Yes, I know the answer is never to rewrite things from scratch, but in this case I believe it is justified.
As Shakespeare said "First, kill all the managers".
https://manganiello.social/objects/1bf46e19-a33a-4a99-b5a6-2a834bd649bf
Fabio Manganiello (@fabio@manganiello.social)

Why Bell Labs worked so well, and could innovate so much, while today’s innovation, in spite of the huge private funding, goes in hype-and-fizzle cycles that leave relatively little behind, is a qu...

Show threadNot🐧A🐧Convicted🐧Felon
I mean, everything Fabio writes about modern management is basically spot on.
I thought I could improve things, working from the inside.
I was wrong.
You cannot, in fact, polish a turd.
Yes, I know, dorodango, but it's not just one turd, it's an entire industry full of them.
Jun 8 at 6:21amWeb
Show threadNot🐧A🐧Convicted🐧Felon5d ago
Rich Hickey talks about the topic of having uninterrupted time to just think deeply about a thing in his talk 'Hammock driven development' https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc
This is where Clojure and Datomic came from.
The book Slow Productivity by Cal Newport has plenty of other examples of great things being done by people who could just spend time thinking about and working on stuff uninterrupted by managers https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/197773418-slow-productivity
From Charlotte Brontë to Leonardo Da Vinci.
Hammock Driven Development - Rich Hickey

YouTube
Show threadSteven G. Harms4d ago

@sleepyfox

I don’t dispute the merits of slow work, but Newport’s story feels like a just-so tale.

DaVinci regularly demonstrated to his investors; that’s what patronage required. He was good at handling management.

Brontë had time to work because of her family’s station and the rigorous *management* of her time by social expectation. But as part of the budding middle class, she and her sisters were expected to work — and not deep work — they managed their craft slowly, as side projects. They were good at handling management.

Newport’s 4 (iirc) kids are managed by…Mrs Newport. I’ve never seen him cop to this and, I will extrapolate there is managerial overhead there.

If anything, the Bell can’t exist anymore story suggests to me that engineering education rightly ought introduce more interpersonal dimensions so that engineers manage up better.

Eisenhower was a star tactician and politician; his game of choice was contact bridge, not chess.