The Fetishization of Management
I’ve been working in Corporate America for a little over ten years, and I’ve realized that the most toxic aspect of Corporate America is the fertilization of management. We essentially have believed that as a society, there are certain classes of individuals who have the skill of management that transcends the field that they’re working in. In highly technical fields, this leads to a fairly toxic corporate culture as mid level and upper level managers devote more energy to playing politics rather than addressing the problems at hand. There’s also a great deal of insecurity involved because of impostor syndrome, as these managers are rabidly afraid of looking stupid and out of their depth, and thus they tend to kick down to the more knowledgeable people below them.
In the field of Data Science, I actually see a lot of groups in Pharma run by individuals who I believe have absolutely no business running a data science group. I’ve seen far too many cases where they believe that if they hire the right people, and shout AI every so often that it passes for leadership.
For the most part, I have been relatively lucky in the groups that I’ve been a part of. Most of my managers are very competent in the field I work in, and I generally believe that if I were hit by a bus, most of them would be able to pick up the slack on my projects. And in the case where I reported to a manager who couldn’t replace me if he were hit by a bus, the man had sufficient amounts of humility to basically acknowledge that I knew the subject better than he did, and he would do his best to keep the distractions out of my way, and to get me what i need.
Management itself is hard, and it’s one thing that’s not really taught in school or at least in most cases, poorly taught. I would even argue that getting an MBA from Harvard doesn’t help solve this issue. Because critically, a manager has to do the following:
- Establish the goal
- Provide an idea how the goal should be reached (note, this does not have to be the correct path, but it’s sufficient provided that it provokes thoughts into those that report to you)
- Know when to call out the bullshit that comes across from you.
Fundamentally you can manage people if you don’t know what you’re managing them for. The inability to do this I think has paralyzed a large number of American companies who have relied on MBAs to manage technical fields that they generally could not do on their own, and this is one of the contributing factors to off-shoring. Rather than looking at a problem and having the vision to solve it, they would rather outsource it to someone else to get credit for it and not have to do the difficult part of trying to actually fix the problem. And it is this that is slowly eroding the competitive advantage of US firms.
The latest casualty of this is Intel. The current CEO is Bob Swan and currently Intel has not released any new chip architectures and their foundry process is far behind, despite having a huge financial war chest to draw on. And I believe that a large part of this is because Bob Swan is a finance guy, and not fundamentally a semiconductor engineer. We contrast this to three companies that are currently eating Intel’s lunch. AMD on the CPU side, nVidia in anything related to HPC, and finally TSM on the foundry side. Aside from being run by Taiwanese people (Yay Taiwan), they’re all run by individuals who are electrical engineers (Lisa Su, Jensen Huang, and CC Wei), and so in terms of the chip design, chip manufacturing process, they’re able to identify the primary problems that their firms have to overcome, a basic idea how to get there, and when someone comes and tries to sell them something can smell the bullshit a mile away.