The Evolution of Management (2019)
queue.acm.org
queue.acm.org
For comparison, a couple other generic watered down summaries of the book:
https://www.mudamasters.com/en/change-management-leadership/...
https://www.cleverism.com/leadership-pipeline-model/
As there are dozens of these, maybe it’s some sort of right of passage for blogging on LinkedIn?
The main takeaway for me from the book that doesn’t seem captured by the re-blogs, but is in the second paragraph here, is that the transitions are discontinuous. The leader is not sharpening tools in a tool belt, but changing out tool belts.
In this piece, author writes, “shift your mindset, and focus on building new skills that are often very different from the skills that made you successful in your previous role.”
To put more bluntly:
The leader must stop doing things that worked well when adjusting the system at a different scope, and now intervene completely differently.
Source, for Kindle:
https://smile.amazon.com/Leadership-Pipeline-Powered-Company...
E.g. how were factories managed in the early 19th century? What current practices would have been recognised by staff in the organisations concerned?
I can recommend the following books on the history of capitalism (which is closely linked to the exploitation of labor aka management):
- Empire of Cotton (Sven Beckert)
- Nature’s Metropolis (Cronon)
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slav...
I did zero research on the subject, and the only thing I was taught in school about its history was the usual story about Henry Ford, Fred Taylor and the rest of the company ...
but, I remember watching a documentary about the construction of the Egyptian pyramids. in it there was a part about how they hired people to monitor and 'motivate'(mostly with a whip) the workers (mostly slaves), how much their were paid (more than the workers) and the hierarchy above them.
This source is a fashionable, knee-jerk narrative from a heavily contested historical effort (1619 Project already discussed ad nauseum). This particular piece is basically a marketing piece from the publication that funded the project.
On top of that, the piece you linked doesn't come anywhere near making the argument you attribute to it. It has some sharp rhetoric from some totally random people that draws links between US capitalism and US slavery. There is absolutely no historical assessment of the evolution of managerial techniques vis-a-vis a link to slavery.
“The Visible Hand” by Alfred Chandler is an authoritative source on the transition:
As for "creating an environment where others can solve the problem", support staff would often be more valuable.
Last, we can also consider big successful community projects as more up-to-date examples of more modern organizations. Is Linus a "hands-off manager"? Certainly not, even if he mainly does not do exactly the same thing as when he started Linux; also when he intervenes and gives strong opinions on very technical subjects (even often down to quite detailed ones), is it some form of counter-productive "micromanagement"? In my opinion: also not.
If your main subject is mostly R&D, technical leadership should be more important than "old-school" management (and to be clear, the same caveats apply about the possibility for tons of people to really become technical leaders, it is not possible everywhere just because of mere growth reasons). I doubt the described traditional hierarchical organizations are the most effective in this context.