On the Nature of Managerial Work

Speaker A I was interested, and I'm not unique. There's a number of people are, but I was interested in how organizations work and how they get an organization to succeed in terms of whatever its mission is and the basic principles of what are we trying to do, what are the roles that we need? How do people interface? What are the relationships that we need to make sure are formalized and which ones we want to handle informally? It sounds like common sense now, but you just have to be interested in that, because if you don't want to spend the time at it and it does take a lot of time, and pretty soon I've asked people around here in a stratum four or stratum five role, well, what is the work of management that you think you're doing? If you're not worrying about this stuff, what is it you're worrying about? And of course, they always like to fall back on, well, I'm worried about the nuclear plant operation, or I'm worried about my wires project, or I'm worried about finances or whatever it might be the substantive part, which you have to be worried about. But a lot of people think that's all they need to worry about and not the structure and how the organization gets work done. So it's been funny.