You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss, But It Helps...

"you've got to be kidding. as compared to what? trusting in your big impersonal corporation"

Yep! Why do most people look for employment rather than entreprenurial opportunities? They want a steady income. They want to know that if they do their job, they'll get a paycheck, and it will be consistent. So yes, the big impersonal corporation protects them from market forces. To a certain extent, it protects them from dry spells, delinquent payments, etc. So long as they have a job, they have constant income. When you're self employed, you're much more vulnerable to market forces. You're vulnerable to customers not paying you, customers defrauding you, market dry spells, etc.

That's where managers come in. Sure, people might thrive without management. I know I do. I'm self employed and I love writing whatever code I choose. But that doesn't mean that I'm productive. I write the code that intrigues me, and satisfies my own desires. Not necessarily the code that is profitable. That's where a manager can be useful. He helps guide his team on paths that will be profitable for the company. Sure, the total work done might be less than people working on their own, but there's a good chance that it's going to be a whole lot more profitable for the company. And, that's how the company ensures constant incomes. By being profitable.

I agree with Piccolo Principe. This study doesn't really provide much evidence for anything. And the analogy of employees and lions has gone way off (whatever) track it was on.

Jurgen, you state that, besides protecting their employees a manager should do as little as possible. I submit that most of your blog posts are all about what great things managers can do to and for their teams. Lets hear a bit about what the teams can do for managers. I would like to hear that your team agrees that protecting them from bad people is a good use of your time. An empowered team can, by definition, protect themselves. I don't hear much about how teams make their own decisions in this blogs. And having a service manager/ program manager/ functional manager, and quality manager as enumerated in your Resource Planning entry doesn't seem to leave much decision making space for team decisions.

Jeff

Of course it's not really practical to have a discussion about what was meant to be an what wasn't. If you start by saying people weren't meant to have a boss and people werent meant to work in large organisations then it's only a question of time before you end up with discussions about if it was a good idea to leave the trees a couple of million years ago.

Some people like large organisations better and some like small organisations better. If you work in a larger organisation then it's a good idea to have some managers walking around to make sure everyone has what they need to do their jobs. If you have a good manager then having a manager is actually a luxury.

"What about two teams fighting for shared resources? The strongest one will win if you leave it up to self-organization, and the weakest team will be the victim."

That only makes sense if the teams are set up so that they are in competition. If they are setup so that the well being of the whole company is more important to them than the well being of their single project, it shouldn't take more than perhaps a bit of facilitation to resolve such issues by collaboratively finding the best solution for the whole.

"Without management there would be *no* incentive for individual teams to optimize for the entire organization, instead of optimizing only for themselves."

Well, what incentives would there be for them to optimize there own project to the detriment of the other project?