[marcinzm]

This product I feel misses that middle management exists to deal with people rather than information. People are messy and individual contributors often don't want to deal with them.

Currently: I have a product idea, I sell it to my manager, my manager sells it to others managers, those managers sell it to their teams. My manager deals with politics in a well defined group of people they are familiar with.

Proposed Future: I have a product idea, software chooses 10 people who are stakeholders and will vote In it, I now need to sell my idea to those 10 people. I deal with politics in an undefined group of people that constantly changes.

[doonesbury]

Hang on. Managers had damn well be getting rid of politics right? Also managers deal with info and people not either or primarily one right?

[Mumps]

Depends what you mean by politics. Asset allocations, company vision, long project coordination, ...

If _nobody_ is politicking between arms of an org, everyone will just ask for the moon and over-sell whatever their team in particular is focussing on. Resources will be drained, and likely the many projects would diverge into an unsustainable mess.

Corporate politics isn't inherently bad, in that a ship needs steering.

[doonesbury]

See ... what I do not like or agree with is the essentially paranoid, mistrustful nature of your statement. No, not everybody will "will just ask for the moon and over-sell whatever their team in particular is focussing". A couple of points here that go way, way back to pre-1985:

* one of the major problems at corporations is lack of openness. People BS all the time. Worse, and I've seen several of these in my job, people believe that if you do not manage-up and BS then you're a chump. Part of the management is to cut this BS out. The difference between you and me at this point in time is that it's an unchecked assumption for you, but not for me.

* Cross functional coordination is essential to proper corporate governance. In particular, manager's damn well drill into internal service suppliers they'd better be customer driven and not make whatever they want - see also Conway's law. A lot BS at companies is half-assesd internal suppliers who underperform because they get management cover 'cause we have to use them ... and they cannot be essentially fired without extraordinary cause. Cross functional coordination is essential to getting and keeping people on the same sheet of music.

I'd read "Human Element" (Dr. Schutz) and "Total Quality Management the Japanese Way" (K. Ishikawa [might be sp there but title is good]).

In my experience manufacturing knows this is true, even they don't always practice it. But most service companies are clueless.

Yes, if you don't have a management approach (TQM the Japanese way), you don't have a solid framework to human organizations and teams (Human Element), you don't have cross functional coordination, you don't have customer driven teams, and management tolerates the BS ... then you don't in fact have management and you do have politics whence I refer you to my original statement.

[Mumps]

(sorry, not getting response notifications for some reason)

Your point is well taken and I'll add those books to the read list.

I don't quite agree that "People BS all the time" really invalidates my point that you still need people directing a company. Flaws in the system, or people gaming it, doesn't mean the desired mechanics of the system aren't there.