OPINIONS

1. Management should be part of the curriculum at all levels of education so that everybody, rather than just an obnoxious clique who think they have the right to control other people's lives, will be a manager.
2. The big, bad barons of the new feudal age are the owners, directors and 'top executives' of the big companies. They don't have to go to the trouble of extracting tithes from the tenants of their land like their predecessors, they take what they want from their company's profits and distribute what is left to their subordinates. Most of them do nothing remarkable and know little about the businesses they run, most of them are posers who do as much harm as good. Between them, the British ones have comprehensively ruined British industry and sold it into foreign ownership to ensure a sybaritic retirement for themselves.
3. Management is a soft subject, most books about it are as easy to read as novels, they contain little or no mathematics and no difficult concepts.
4. Many successful managers have had no formal training in the subject, most do it by the seat of their pants and by the application of little more than common sense.
5. Most managers are little more than admin. clerks who do routine scheduling, coordinating and progress chasing tasks.
6. So why are managers so generously rewarded? Because only one manager is required to coordinate the work of numerous other workers presumably.
7. Management should be a service performed for the people in an organisation who do the creative, innovative, technical, difficult, wealth creating work.
8. The management function should be shared, perhaps on a rota basis.
9. The management function and it's rewards must be downgraded to their appropriate level.
10. Managers think other people are as stupid and incapable of learning anything as they are.
11. Most managers are posers who know a bit about accounting, organisation and marketing but little else.
12. Management consists mostly of performing routine, well-known monitoring and control tasks, there is little innovation involved hence no justification for high salaries.
13. Established firms in mature industries should be made into co-operatives and be run by professional managers, not fortune hunters, ie. supermarkets, DIY stores, most retail businesses. These businesses don't require any innovation, they are almost completely routine, nobody should be making a lot of money out of them.
14. The top priority of most managers is protecting their own sordid position.
15. Decent people can't take important positions, they know they would be likely to be corrupted by the filth they would have to work with.
16. The job of company bosses is to give investors a reasonable return on their investment not the maximum possible, investors are basically parasites. Similarly, the employees of the company (including managers) should get reasonable rewards for their labour, profits should go towards future investment. Rewards can be increased proportionately all round if profits are high and investment needs are low.
17. Businesses shouldn't be completely isolated one from another, the profits from one might best be invested in another.
18. In the Western World the current trend in business is for companies to be very competitive and to restrict their activities to a small number of core competencies, this means they tend to get blinkered vision. In the Far East companies tend to be very large and highly diversified, this makes it easier for them to get a broad vision, to foster coordination and cooperation between the separate activities of their parts, to optimise the systems made from the products of the parts rather than the individual products, to detect ways in which combining separate products can produce simplification and cost savings etc. In the West, industry is fragmenting, disintegrating and, in this country at least, dying. There must be people or organisations whose sole function is to coordinate the activities of related businesses. It isn't sufficient to rely on opportunistic, individual entrepreneurs to appear from somewhere and perform this task, very often they won't and important opportunities will be missed. The large Far Eastern companies also seem to have the characteristic that they don't compete to the destruction of each other, they try to be top dog but not to destroy the opposition entirely, they are probably restrained from doing this when it wouldn't be in the national interest of their country. We need to organise our industry primarily to serve the national interest rather than as the dogma of New Variant Feudalism dictates. Capitalism is primitive, co-operation is sophisticated.
19. People working in not very profitable businesses shouldn't necessarily be paid less than those working in bonanza businesses.
20. Most chief executives of companies seem to be ex salesmen, accountants or lawyers. Salespeople are basically confidence tricksters who try to sell products for more than they are worth so that they get the fattest possible commission, high moral standards can hardly be expected from them. One of the main tasks of the high ranking accountants and lawyers in a company is to find all the tax and other financial dodges that can be legally used to improve the company's financial position, an activity that is underhand and anti-social. The professions of these people are not the most intellectually demanding; charm, cunning and ruthlessness are probably the qualities most likely to be displayed by successful salesmen; the maths used by accountants doesn't go much beyond primary school arithmetic; lawyers need to be little more than articulate and able to read and write; are they the right people for the job?
21. The job of managers/directors is not to maximise the profit made by the shareholders. They only merit a reasonable return on their investment and diligent protection of the capital they invested.
22. A reasonable return on a risky investment would be higher than that on a safe investment?
23. The principal duty of managers/directors is to maximise benefit to society, ie. to create the conditions for the generation of the maximum wealth compatible with the amount of labour available and other constraints such as the protection of the environment and the conservation of resources.
24. Most people become managers when they are no longer capable or energetic enough to do anything else.
25. Management isn't a particularly demanding function, there is no reason why it should be particularly well paid.

TOP