The Future? High School Science Club Management
December 15, 2020
With the discrediting of MBA programs, legal training, and art history, what’s a hard charging, Type A, materialistic over achiever supposed to do? The answer, according to Fast Company, is revealed in this article: “Everyone Should Be ‘CEO’ of Their Job and Manage As If They Own That Part of the Business.” However, before I highlight some of the insights in this high school science club management schema, I want to mention that “everyone” is singular; thus, the “their job” should be “an employee’s job or his or her job,” and the plural verb “own” is a singular; ergo, “owns”. Now that the sloppy grammar is behind me, let’s turn to the post MBA world.
Here’s a passage I circled in red:
My mantra is that everyone should be the “CEO” of their own role and manage their area as if they own that part of the business.
Now let’s try to focus on the message, not the sloppy grammar. The idea is that if I need a person to paint a wall, I should allow that person to be the CEO of the work. What about selecting the color? Should the painter pick another color? What about arranging elevator buttons?
Yes, initiative.
What if the wall must be painted before the guests arrive? Is the painter to select the time and pace of the work or just keep painting when the visitors pop in the door.
What about a minor project like replacing an Oracle database with a whizzy Amazon system?
Okay? Now we have arrived at the point which makes it clear that most people who are supposed to be managers are out of their comfort zone. MBAs, lawyers, accountants, and art history majors with an influential father and a great smile have to confess, “Hey, I know zero about this Amazon AWS Quantum Database idea.”
What’s the fix for the clueless president or senior manager? Here are the tips that will guarantee a Covid response type solution or the security methods in use at companies like FireEye:
Take the initiative
Be a team player
Ask for help
Listen
Take risks.
Let’s look at each of these.
Taking initiative is okay, but when people are paid to do a job, those people need to do the job. Yes, that includes protesters at Google type companies. A person is hired for a reason; therefore, do the work. Forget slogans. Put down the mobile phone. Do the work.
Be a team player is great when there is a team. I have news for the science club management adherents: Talking on Zoom and sending Teams messages is not a team environment. Since most companies are seizing Covid as an opportunity to slash costs, yip yap about teams in a asynchronous, distributed Zoom-type world is the antithesis of team building.
Ask for help. Great idea but from whom. Should the person struggling with AWS ask his or her boss for guidance when the superior is an art history major. Sorry, cutting out canvas and stretching it is not a skill directly applicable to the Byzantine world of database system engineering.
Listen. To whom? A colleague whom one does not know on a Zoom-type call? A contractor who shows up and asks, “What’s the problem?” Does one listen to a lawyer from Steptoe & Johnson explain how to break an encrypted message, or does one seek an NSA-type specialist to do the job?
Take risks. Now that’s a super idea, particularly when the individuals may not have a good understanding of the context, upsides, downsides, and costs of a particular decision.
To sum up, the high school science club management method is not one which makes me feel warm and fuzzy. There are old fashioned ideas which seem to have some merit; for example:
- Expertise
- Planning
- Commitment
- Detail orientation
- Persistence
- Integrity
- Effort
- Thoughtfulness.
What do you get when everyone is a CEO? Check out the availability of personal protective equipment in some major US cities, the delivery of packages by the United States Post Office, and the content filtering mechanisms in place at some social media outfits.
That’s what high school science club management methods deliver and in thumbtyper time.
Stephen E Arnold, December 15, 2020
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