Management is as making it difficult for people to get things done
Lilia asks how do 'management' make life difficult for people?
Some points from my list (not necessary the most severe ones, but those I care about most):
- Thinking in terms of interventions, not personal productivity (re: personal knowledge management)
- Thinking in terms of formal organisational structures, not social networks and communities
- Measuring what could be measured, not what matters (re: invisible)
- Holding controls instead of giving responsibility to people (re: attitude change)
- Managing weaknesses, not strengths (re: strengths finding)
- Fitting businesses around market changes and equipment life-cycles while forgetting about natural rhythms of people and fun of flow (re: balance)
- Relying on codified knowledge and pushing codification
- Managing conveyor belts, not social ecosystems (re: middlespace)
- Lack of reflection and skills to facilitate reflection of others
- ???
See also: leadership as releasing energy of others
My simple contribution?
You could place these within Lilia's more academic take, I think, but thought it would be useful to pull these out. After all managers often are bloated with their own sense of self worth and take themselves far too seriously. Most are risk averse and miss out on multiple opportunities because they won't experiment (perhaps not willing to experiment would be better?) and lastly not trusting people who work for you is abhorrant. I guess this fits into Lilia's control and responsibility and yet there is something here about the nature of relationships which conceivably is about hierarchy and community, gets more to a psychology of the situation rather than social structure...