49
See also: Beating the odds at start-up 20–21 ■ Take the second step 43 ■ Reinventing and adapting 52–57 ■ The Greiner
curve 58–61 ■ The weightless start-up 62–63 ■ Beware the yes-men 74–75 ■ The capability maturity model 218–19
way to the comfort of habit, and
in ever-dynamic markets habit
can too easily lead to stasis and
stagnation. The danger for
management is that, as US investor
Warren Buffet warned, “chains of
habit are too light to be felt until
they are too heavy to be broken.”
Middle management
The importance of middle
management was described by
business historian Alfred Chandler
in his 1977 text, The Visible Hand,
a play on economist Adam Smith’s
“invisible hand” metaphor, which
explains the self-regulating forces
of the market. Chandler noted that
before 1850, family firms dominated
business in the USA. These firms
had poor communication networks
and limited access to educated
staff, so rarely grew beyond groups
of family and friends who could be
educated, trained, and trusted to
manage the business.
However, with the growth of
national railroad networks in the
1850s, the management landscape
began to change. Improvements in
transportation and communication
allowed firms to grow beyond the
immediate gaze of friends or family,
and beyond the immediate locale.
But to prosper in this new
environment, companies needed
more rigorous processes and
structures. The increasing
geographic scope and size of
businesses required new levels of
coordination and communication.
Businesses had grown too unwieldy
for one person to manage; they
required the oversight of a team of
people. This marked the emergence
and rise of the professional manager.As standardization and mass
production emerged in the early 20th
century, the role of management
grew. Business was taking place on
an increasingly global scale. Even
before mechanization, coordination
from managers enabled mass
production. Standardization turned
management into a science, and
managers into a vital cog in the
organizational machine.Enablers and enterprise
In a 2007 Harvard Business Review
article “The Process Audit,” US
businessman Michael Hammer ❯❯START SMALL, THINK BIG
This requires
experienced handling.As a business
matures and grows it
will require systems,
procedures, and
protocols.Companies must balance
structure with
flexibility.Those systems are the
purview of middle
management.Companies must look
to the experience
of middle managers
for growth.But too much
process can stifle
innovation and,
therefore, growth.It is the structure of the
organization, rather than the
employees alone, which holds
the key to improving the
quality of output.
W. Edwards Deming
US business professor (1900 –93)