[jason_tko]

Interesting - when you have 20 people working for you, and you need someone to manage your clients and their projects and timelines, and also figure out what your your staff should be working on, and also balance staff requests for holiday leave and sick leave, what do you plan on calling that person?

[wpietri]

"Manager" is a power relationship. There are other ways to organize teams.

For example, at my last startup we had a shared vacation calendar and we'd just negotiate time off. We'd manage projects and timelines by discussion. We'd figure out who was working on what through short conversations every morning.

A major tomato processor has no power relationships; nobody can tell anybody else what to do:

http://morningstarco.com/index.cgi?Page=Self-Management

They're now putting together an institute to teach people their approach:

http://www.self-managementinstitute.org/

[PM_Tech]

False.

Management refers to the coordination of people, not the exercise of power. It is to coordinate the people towards a goal in conjunction with available resources in an efficient manner.

Example - A Project Manager has no power over the workstream leads other than to assign them tasks, resources and milestones in line with the vision of the Project Board.

Self-Management is nonsense. One or two use cases does not make it applicable to the entire corporate world. How does one discipline a colleague for taking 180 days off per year?

Who exercises executive authority over mergers/acquisitions/hiring/firing/downsizing/scaling/purchasing?

You are arguing for the sake it, no need to reply. I am done with your drama.

[vaib]

True. There would be people who 'manage' things and people but I think you missed my point here. Don't want to have people who just sit and talk a lot. Don't want to give the reigns of power to such folks. Don't want to have an 'engineering manager' who codes no more!

[jason_tko]

I don't think I missed the point, I think we agree.

It's not that all managers are bad. Good managers are invaluable. Bad managers are highly destructive.