I have much more respect for managers than I used to have. Actually, maybe I just feel sorry for them. I'm a mechanic with his own business. It's a privilege.
The following snip (from this interesting article) jolted me back to my former employer... and I just cringe... cringe... cringe... thinking of what could have become of me... It's 3:42 in the morning... and it's all good because I survived!
Like the mechanic, the manager faces the possibility of disaster at any time. But in his case these disasters feel arbitrary; they are typically a result of corporate restructurings, not of physics. A manager has to make many decisions for which he is accountable. Unlike an entrepreneur with his own business, however, his decisions can be reversed at any time by someone higher up the food chain. It’s important for your career that these reversals not look like defeats, and more generally you have to spend a lot of time managing what others think of you. Survival depends on a crucial insight: you can’t back down from an argument that you initially made in straightforward language, with moral conviction, without seeming to lose your integrity. So managers learn the art of provisional thinking and feeling, expressed in corporate doublespeak, and cultivate a lack of commitment to their own actions. Nothing is set in concrete the way it is when you are, for example, pouring concrete.
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