Does management destroy value?

I saw this thought provoking quote today on Facebook which comes from the website Keep it on the deck.

What it got me thinking about was value creation and value destruction. These are themes that are very topical in marketing academia.

Value destruction can happen through incompetence, unfulfilled  promises, rudeness, aggression. Usually this is meant to refer to service staff treating customers badly.

But what if the same applied to managers and staff and coaches and players?

In business the idea of ‘managerialism’ is taken for granted. We all assume things can and need to managed. Otherwise we have chaos and wasted and misdirected resource. Things need to analysed and controlled for there own good otherwise business would be a bun fight a free for all. Managerialism manifests itself in sport through sports science and match analytics.

Managerialism aims to stop businesses looking like a junior school football match where all the players chase like a bee swarm after the ball. No roles, no system, no tactics. 

But what happens to talent when it is overly constrained ? what happens to  what sociologists call ‘agency’, what Antony Giddens calls our ‘ability to do otherwise’?

Managerialism is a toxic phenomenon beloved by the unimaginative. They love it and enforce it control the one thing they haven’t got and envy. Talent. 

Uniqueness comes not only from doing otherwise but ‘seeing’ otherwise. This is an imaginative capability that is not uniformly distributed amongst human beings.

Soccer fans intuitively know this. The player that ‘reads’ the game differently and better to others, the player that breaks the pattern to create surprises.

So I urge managers to ask themselves if they inadvertently destroying the value that is created in their staff through their fundamental passion for customers and the service they provide.

Just look how junior doctors are being treated to see what I mean.

I don’t ever believe skill was ever or will be the result of management. It’s a result of a love affair between a person and their profession.

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