Who’s on our side?

Abstract

One of the most disturbing aspect of a manager’s life today is the fact that nobody seems to love him. It is not just that he misses the warm feelings of esteem and regard which he feels in his due — though he does miss them, of course — but far more that he finds that an increasing amount of his energies are spent dealing with ignorant interventions into his working life by groups external to the enterprise, interventions which make no contribution whatsoever to his primary task and which harass him in his job in such a way that his arena of competence, the organisational space that he needs to enable him to deploy his skills effectively, is progressively reduced.