I'm always impressed when someone is able to distill instinctively common-sense concepts into a concise response. My attempts often lead to something unwieldy ending in 'you know what I mean?'Below excerpt is from today's NYT Business section, an interview with Cristóbal Conde, president and CEO of SunGard. Conde's BS is in physics and astronomy, and he's mentioned that he often interviews potential employees with engineering backgrounds. I like science-y people, and his concrete take on management dispels the myth that science backgrounds lack people skills and social insight.
"If you start micromanaging people, then the very best ones leave.
If the very best people leave, then the people you’ve got left actually require more micromanagement. Eventually, they get chased away, and then you’ve got to invest in a whole apparatus of micromanagement. Pretty soon, you’re running a police state. So micromanagement doesn’t scale because it spirals down, and you end up with below-average employees in terms of motivation and ability.
Instead, the trick is to get truly world-class people working directly for you so you don’t have to spend a lot of time managing them. I think there’s very little value I can add to my direct reports. So I try to spend time with people two and three levels below because I think I can add value to them."
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