I loved this from Michele Zanini earlier this week.
And since it’s nearly May day, I’m simply going to pinch it, and comment on it:
“Among the panoply of skills that are critical to an organization’s success, bureaucracy elevates one above all others: administrative expertise. What distinguishes managers from non-managers is not creativity, foresight or technical expertise, but mastery of administrative arcana—how to develop a plan, set performance goals, build a budget, interpret financial results, coordinate a project, conduct a performance review and give employee feedback.”
What if every one of your employees was enabled to deploy the most important of these skills?
Supported by a framework that helps them learn and practise as they go, in keeping with the ethos and purpose of the bsuiness, first in rehearsals, then in real live performances with their own real live audiences?
What if you also automated as much as possible of the drudgery of administration – the collection, presentation and delivery of data to the people or person responsible for interpreting it and acting on it?
You wouldn’t need ‘administrators’.
At all.
“While a few organizations have career paths that recognize technical expertise, the typical bureaucracy is an aristocracy of administrators. Yet why should administrators, as a group, have more decision rights than marketers, software engineers, R&D staffers, or product designers? Why should they have more say than physicians & nurses in healthcare, or teachers & professors in education?”
If administrators aren’t in charge, who is?
Nobody.
A business is not a person. It is a system for enabling and supporting human beings to make and keep a specific Promise to a specific set of human beings, and for continuously improving how it does that.
The system supports the people, and the people improve the system, for the people they serve.
Discipline makes Daring possible.