The difference between good management and poor management can be the loss or gain of the entire organization.
Financial planning is a vital part of management. Good financial estimations and the ability to figure out, without vast accounting, the way things are in an org is an ability which is vital to good management.
The manager, given a few vital facts, who then needs an accountant to tell him how things are, is of course incompetent.
Management is a high skill. Socialist or worker governments are flat on their uppers because they do not comprehend the degree of insight required in a successful manager. When they harass, mess up and sometimes shoot their managers, they promptly begin eras of starvation as in Russia, China and to some extent under their socialisms, in recent years, England and the US. The amount of time any manager has to spend in the US or England battling with government clerks who aren’t skilled enough to run a tricycle, assisted, is easily a third of the manager’s time.
The essence of good management is CARING what goes on. The worker-oriented fellow cares for the worker but not for the organization. So we have a final extinction of the worker by the organization vanishing and no longer able to employ. The consequence is the widespread depression just beginning. Real help for the worker is also making sure there will be work for him to do. When the organization is gone, there is only misery, the dole, revolution and sudden death. The “worker-oriented” manager lacks the insight into the skill necessary to manage. So to him an organization is something to be bled. It is a bottomless pit of money. Such a person’s total “skill” is how to get something out of the organization. But you can’t take out more than comes in. Management is entirely beyond the ability of such people. They don’t know what it is all about. They do not care what happens to the organization. Then suddenly the machinery all stops and everyone starves.
Whole countries go this way when the mess begins.
The basic difference between organizations that run and those that collapse is simply somebody caring what happens to the organization itself.
A good manager takes care of the workers. He also takes care of the organization. A worker-oriented fellow — union leader, agitator, do-gooder — cares only for the worker and thus does the worker in. So he is actually a suppressive. For the whole bang shoot goes to pieces and the end product is dismal unemployment, depression, malnutrition, starvation. You have to have lived through such a period to learn dread of it. And that’s what caring nothing for the organization finally results in.
A worker-oriented person is deficient in pan-determinism. He or she cannot see that the health of all demands he take into account workers and the org. Therefore he or she is below the ability to determine both sides of things and so makes a very poor executive, being lopsided, given to “them and us,” playing favorites and unable to see two sides of a question. Such abilities are vital in an executive, so he isn’t one.
A worker-oriented person is not nice to individual workers — he or she may shoot them — but only about collective “workers.”
Poor source identification goes with lack of pan-determinism so a person cannot see or solve the real problems around. So such people can’t even operate as executives.
Thus you can know them. The org or country always fails.
So you want to watch this “poor-worker” pitch in an executive. If he cares only for the worker and nothing for the org, if he is only interested in what he or the workers can get out of an organization, then you are looking at somebody who in the long run will put one and all on the street.
You see here and there bared teeth at the org or the idea of the org. Along with it, if you look, you will find a heavy carelessness about the org’s money and property and also a heavy effort to get something for the workers. Here you have a full-bodied case. This person won’t ever succeed and should never be an executive. Never. For he’ll do the workers in.
A good manager cares what happens, what’s spent, what prosperity can occur, how the work is done, how the place looks, how the staff really fares. He is dedicated to getting the show on the road and he takes out of the line-up obstacles to the org’s (and staff’s) progress.
Caring what goes on and not caring is the basic difference. Caring for something else while working is the mark of the laborer, not the executive.
If you have to start an economy drive, look for the people who fight it. Quietly remove them from executive posts. You have a laborer, steeped privately in “us-poor- workers” and “get what you can” and “spend the org out the window.”
If you care what happens to the org and the size of the paycheck as well, you will be very careful to develop an insight into finance, efficiency and the state of the org.
If you see bills owed soaring above cash on hand, you will also see executives who care nothing for the org. They are worker-oriented, anti-org people and you had better put a thumb down on continuing them as executives. Along with that unfavorable graph you will also find demands to borrow money, sell assets to pay bills and a near refusal to promote or make money.
I have learned all this the hard way. I pass it on for what it is worth. I can say these things because no man on Earth could seriously challenge me for not caring about people or staffs. I do care. And the ultimate in caring is to make sure there is an org there.
So please be alert to these points in conducting Ad Council meetings. Inevitably the hardest job is financial planning. But in that sphere you will show up the executives and the laborers. Watch and when you find you have a worker-oriented person there, realize you don’t have an executive. Get one.
Bad management is therefore detectable on these points:
1. The bills-cash ratio will be high in bills and low in cash.
2. There is an effort to borrow money rather than earn it.
3. There is a heavy effort tosell assets rather than make money.
4. There is more effort to collect debts, particularly from seniors, than to make new income.
5. There will be an effort to be supported.
6. There will be low affinityin the org for the org and its public.
7. There will be protest andflash-back at efforts to get them solvent.
8. There will be noncompliance with orders of senior management.
The remedy is to
A. Find the most worker-oriented senior executive and remove him or her.
B. Find the anti-org executives and staff and remove them.
C. Put in the senior posts those who most care what happens to the org.
D. Enjoin and conduct careful financial planning and measures.
E. Remove from executive posts those who object to them or don’t comply (that may have been missed in A and B).
F. Resurrect neglected orders and main programs and get them complied with.
G. Be exceedingly careful not to appoint people there in the future who don’t care what happens to the org.
It does not much matter how one goes about this. If one wants the org and its staff to prosper, the above measures must be done and quickly when the bills-cash ratio of an org threatens the continuance of it and the staff their jobs.