The Future of Managers
In an earlier book, The Dilbert Principle, I explained why incompetent employees are systematically identified and promoted to management. I will reiterate it here, in case you didn’t read my earlier book, or you were drunk, or you refuse to listen, or you are not very bright, or you enjoy reading the same stuff twice. Your reasons are your own. I’m just trying to meet you halfway.
The underlying fact that prompted me to write The Dilbert Principle is that it takes less brains to be a manager than to be the people who are managed. For example, it takes a big ol’ brain to write a computer program with a revolutionary new data encryption algorithm. A much smaller brain is needed to command that programmer to write status reports justifying his value.
If you’re a surgeon, it takes a great deal of skill and intelligence to perform an organ transplant. It is much less challenging to write a mission statement for the hospital that explains your deep desire to avoid killing patients accidentally.
Middle management is becoming a dumping ground for professionals who have no special skills. It’s the safest place to put them. You don’t want one of them performing heart bypass surgery on you. There are already millions of highly skilled employees being managed by people who aren’t nearly as bright, and this is not a stable situation.
Alleged True Story
The CEO of a small company decided they needed a motto to commemorate their longevity in the industry. This is what he came up with: ” Our innovation makes us first – our quality makes us last.”
The predictable result of the Dilbert Principle is that skilled professionals won’t put up with the indignity of being “managed” by idiots.
Prediction 31
In the future, skilled professionals will flee their corporate jobs and become their own bosses in ever-increasing numbers. They’ll become entrepreneurs, consultants, contractors, prostitutes, and cartoonists.
Recently, an executive of a well-known magazine told me that he couldn’t find any writers who were willing to join the company as employees. Several good writers were willing to work on a contractual basis, but none of them wanted a boss and a cubicle. Nor would they fall for the trick of agreeing to an exclusive contract. I predict you’ll see a lot more of this in the future – the smartest professionals will avoid becoming either managers or employees. They’ll have clients instead of bosses. They will be blissfully independent.
True Story
Yesterday ot the airport I ran into an ex-co-worker from my days at Pacific Bell. She quit the cubicle world two years ago to start her own consulting business. This week she hired her seventy-fifth employee.
We didn’t have time to talk, because she was rushing off to exercise with her personal trainer.
The gutsiest professionals are already quitting their jobs and going it alone. But they’re the exception. Most professionals are like sheep. (That’s why so many business suits are made of wool, in case you wondered.) Employees have been conditioned by their employers to be timid and frightened. The sheepish employees will have to make the transition the way I did – by launching a new career from the security of a cubicle while still wearing a little wool outfit.
People often ask me how they can put energy into building a second career when they are already giving 100 percent to their current one. This would be a big problem if your salary and job security were somehow related to your performance. But that’s living in the past. In the future, financial security will come primarily from your ability to divert company resources toward your new start-up business. I call it “employer financing.” That way it doesn’t sound so much like stealing. This is similar to when your boss refers to mandatory unpaid overtime as “being competitive.”
Some people would say employer financing is unethical, maybe even illegal. That viewpoint is important to remember, because you’ll want to remind people what they said later when they come to your new company and ask for a job.
-From “The Dilbert Future – Thriving on Stupidity in the 21st Century” 1997 By Scott Adams
Managing IA's 