Over the past three years we’ve witnessed the demise of the Imperial CEO, whose irrelevance and wealth exceeded even the Windsors. Now in the Harvard Business Review, columnist Lynda Gratton signals “the end of the middle manager.” As a professor of management practice at the London Business School, she knows whereof she speaks.
How did the pointy-haired boss die? Gratton believes that educational technology killed him, and might yet bring him back in a new form.
She explains that middle managers - though ubiquitous - are not intrinsic to business organization. They are products of a bleak evolution: the de-skilling of the workforce that began with the Industrial Revolution and continued for about 200 years.
Over time, she explains, workers became less knowledgable, less skillful, less proud - and more commodified. They evolved from human beings into human resources, human assets, human capital. Use any term you like, they all have the same objective meaning. In one of my favorite movies they are dubbed replicants.
Thus arose a need for resource, asset or capital management of those former beings - by middle managers whose role is to organize, observe, measure and supervise. By standardizing this hierarchical model, industry adopted the ant colony as its organizational paradigm.
Have a look at E.O. Wilson and Bert Hölldobler's The Superorganism. Would that people were ants!
From time to time great managers have sprung from the lingering master craftsman class - consider Steve Jobs and Jim Dyson among boomers. But most middle managers are not masters of the crafts they steer. They were or aspired to become executives: masters of money whose precise contribution to the value chain has been increasingly hard to fathom. Pointy-haired bosses.
Gratton believes pointy hair will die out because technology is enabling the re-skilling of the workforce and empowerment of workers to become masterful human beings, as they were for most of history. As online laborers in modern times become smarter, more capable, more independent and autonomous - and younger people at least are doing just that - they will not suffer fools as gladly as their parents or grandparents did.
Gratton knows that her requiem for pointy hair will not be welcomed by real middle managers doomed to extinction, so she sugarcoats her prediction in two bright colors:
1. Invest in acquiring more personal knowledge or competencies in your area
2. Invest in developing personal proficiencies in other, more valuable areas
By learning how to become a modern master craftsman - or just by learning how to do something useful for a change - the pointy-haired boss can reemerge as an expert individual contributor. A far different aspiration than becoming an executive, but given what passes for corporate leadership these days, a far nobler one as well.
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