{"id":33126,"date":"2017-08-16T01:00:07","date_gmt":"2017-08-16T05:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=33126"},"modified":"2019-05-20T09:27:26","modified_gmt":"2019-05-20T13:27:26","slug":"qotd-management","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/08\/16\/qotd-management\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Management"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am no great admirer of management as a science or of managers as people. The latter tend to speak a strange language, a jargon neither elegant nor poetic; they buy very dull books at airports, they are often shifty and ruthless, and they seem to me to live in a constant condition of bad faith. They are bureaucrats pretending to be entrepreneurs even when they work for the state, an organization that secures its solvency by the simple expediency of printing more money \u2014 in fact, not even by printing it anymore, simply by adding a few naughts on computer screens. We live in a regime of paper money without the paper.<\/p>\n

Presumably most managers want<\/em> to be managers; it is their ambition to become such, though some, I think, are sucked into management from other activities without a full realization of what is happening to them. At any rate, they soon come to have a sense of importance and entitlement by comparison with everyone else in society, even the nominal owners of the enterprise in which they work, for they believe themselves to be doing the world\u2019s real work, as it were. James Burnham, in his book The Managerial Revolution<\/em>, pointed this out as long ago as 1941:<\/p>\n