Management is an Art:Any Tom, Dick and Harry Can't be a Good Manager!

"The wise and all powerful beings who are responsible for the universe management undoubtedly know exactly what they are all about" 

[The Urantia Book 65:5.3]

First let me make some distinction about the word management. The word when used as a verb means the 'act of managing some work'. Here managing means accomplishment of an objective successfully. Management when used as a noun can have several meanings. It could mean the team of people who manage a business organization or the academic study topic that covers the principles of management.

I consider success in fulfilling the objective is an important aspect of management. Thus, when an act fails to fulfill its objective, I would say it was with no management. Thus success is directly linked to management. No success, then there is no management! It is not required to specifically qualify management as poor or bad or improper. At least that is the way I consider it, though it is now common for people to call some managements in that manner as failed objectives in tasks and businesses are becoming more and more common.

A person who accomplishes a task or a business or a project or a mission successfully is a good manager. His or her management of the task was good. If a team of managers sustain a business successfully, then they form a good management.

So for accomplishing success in our missions or tasks or projects or businesses, we need good managers to manage those. 

But the question is whether all people can be good managers always? Unfortunately, all are not good managers. Good managers seem to be a rare breed in the world today. Otherwise we would not have been encountering failed missions or tasks or businesses or projects very often around us!

I do not consider task masters who accomplish the work or task or business with apparent success for some time as good managers! They are clever pseudo managers with good knowledge and intelligence but with no ethics, character or honesty or compassion to other human beings. The success they seem to achieve are temporary in nature only to become huge failures at a later date! Their success is not sustainable! And non-sustainable success is no success at all!

It is possible to train or educate a person giving him or her some insight in to some qualities and skills that may prove beneficial for a person to become a good manager. But this alone need not make a person a good manager. Even people with no formal education also could be good managers! Management qualities are partially inherent and partially acquired by experience and observations.

Just as any person cannot be a good artist, just any person cannot be good manager. Management is essentially an art! It is the art of getting the resources optimally to accomplish the mission successfully. The resources are the people who do various kinds of works, the money, the materials, etc. Some observers often call the resources as the 3 M's (Men, Money and Materials).

In the resources, the men (and women) who form the work force are the most important factor. That is because the people are the only item that are living and have the ability to act independently with their own intelligence and thoughts.

Therefore, a good manager is the one who knows the art of making others work in unison for making the task a success. With the help of the people, the manager should get the best from the available money and materials.

For finishing the task successfully, it may be necessary to divide the main task in to many sub tasks and assign each of the sub tasks to the people so that each of those tasks are managed well. Thus, the people working for the manager for a particular task become associate or assistant managers for the sub tasks. The manager has to ensure that all the people in the team manage their own shows well towards the overall success of the main objective.

But how does the manager ensure that each of the people turn themselves to become good managers for their own tasks? It becomes a tricky job. The manager needs to delegate the task properly with due diligence! The right man for the right task will make things easy. Otherwise, the management becomes a mess! Indeed, this part is an art. The skill needed is the art of understanding people and the art of delegation of tasks to the right people.

Many people think it is a very simple thing. What is the difficulty in assigning work to the people? I agree, there is not much difficulty for that. The difficulty is in getting the work successfully accomplished. When the work or tasks are assigned the wrong manner, the overall task would never get managed. It will not be a success!

A manager is a person who knows the strengths, weaknesses, character and other personality traits of the people well and possess the leadership and authority to assign work honestly according to his assessments. Not only he knows the art of delegation, but also knows how effectively he communicates with his team.

While he possesses the power to interfere in the sub-tasks as assigned to the individuals in his team, he avoids using that power. A driver can use the control pedals and steering of a car the way he likes. But when he does that too often without any justification, he becomes a bad driver! Similarly, a manager who often interferes with the assigned tasks of his team members is a bad manager! A bad manager can lead the organization to mismanagement accidents that could be fatal to the organization!

There are many more things in management. Only good managers can find and judge other good managers. Someone who assigns the management task to any Tom, Dick and Harry can't be a good manager himself! 

Assigning tasks to the right people is the prime task in management. If this is done, success is at least half accomplished!

People say, India is a country which is poorly managed. If it is so, the reason is very simple. 

The people of India lack managerial abilities. They do not recognize the importance of assigning the right people for the right job! Perhaps they also do not understand the technique of judging and picking the right people or the good managers for the various managerial tasks of the nation!

It is my simple opinion. I am not sure what you might say! 

Women Can't Have It All; Neither Can the Men!

Today morning I was going through the excerpts of the views expressed by Indra Krishnamoorthy Nooyi, the high profile lady President and the CEO of the multibillion, multinational soft drink company of the world-PepsiCo, that the Times of India published. 

The Times of India titled the article like this: Why PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi Can't Have it All?

The views expressed by this lady CEO essentially highlight the high work load of a CEO and the problems that such persons face in their lives due to paucity of time for the home and family especially when the CEO happens to be woman. The lady CEO is in the dominant role of the boss at her work place but has to be in the conventionally submissive  family role of a daughter, wife and mother at home!

Coping up with these mutually antagonistic roles is not an easy task, according to Ms.Nooyi. She has been 'trying all kinds of coping mechanisms'. 

As compared to the men, the women have additional problems. 

'The biological clock and the career clock are in conflict with each other'. Indra Nooyi admits from her experience.

So having all the benefits of the career and the family in one go is very difficult for the women. Women simply can't have it all!

So, those women who can't cope with all these either sacrifice the career or some thing of their family life!

Otherwise they have to do the continuous balancing act consciously through out their lives just as the trapeze artists. It is indeed a risky game of life! You simply can't enjoy a high profile career and a good and satisfied family life simultaneously, unless you are prepared to do some adjustments!

But is it an exclusive problem of the women alone? I think, men also can't have it all without doing the trapeze acts! But unlike the women, they prefer not to complain because of their male egos. Perhaps there won't be any one to listen to their problems.

Biologically men and women are to become complementary pairs to form the basic unit of mankind, the family. They are naturally made for different functions to complete the human functions. They are not made for doing the same functions!

Thus both husband and wife cannot be both heads of the same family at the same time. Life becomes smooth and natural when men and women go according to their natural designs. 

CEO's by nature are people who have the first degree priority attached to career growth and official work regardless they are men or women. All of them face the dilemma of prioritization of priorities of life and have willfully chosen career as the first priority over others. That is how they have become the CEO's. But having accomplished that they have to cope up with the pressures of prioritization of priorities! 

They have to do the cope up acts, the balancing acts, the sacrificial acts and many such things which are difficult for normal human beings. Many CEO's thus become naturally abnormal as a consequence of their balancing acts!

But all bosses are essentially minor replicas of God on earth. 

If they knew something of the great secrets of God, perhaps they could have accomplished all their tasks much easier. 

Because God is the Supreme CEO of the Universe and yet He copes up with all the CEO pressures so easily without any one ever noticing it. 

And one of the most important secrets of God as the Universal CEO is the manner in which God has delegated work and power (responsibilities) to all His subordinate personalities of the universe. [Read the potential of delegation in progress and development!]

Our management gurus know much about the power of delegation and mentoring in management whether it is management of the family, small business, big business or even the governments. 

But we are all with human weaknesses and that prevent us from perfectly practicing what we know. 

Most CEOs fail utterly in delegating work and authority. They fail utterly in mentoring people to perform and progress. They keep indulging in others work because they fail to trust people even after delegation, making their delegation degrade to pseudo-delegation.

Have you ever seen the Universe CEO interfering in your life? God has delegated you free will for all decisions and choices. Having done that, God will not interfere in your free will in any way even while He possesses all powers to do that. 

And imagine the problems of God, had He been to solve the problems of all in the universe even after he delegating the powers of solving the problems to all below! But God is perfect and He never changes the rules in between, even while He has the powers to do all that.

And just imagine the situation, when the human CEOs ( we are all CEOs in one way or other for some situation) trying to imitate God and work as true replicas of God on earth by truly using the God given powers wisely! Perhaps then, the work of others would not shift unfavorably to a few others, making imbalances in our human relations. 

Perhaps we might tend to become a society in true progress with less and less individual problems.

Neither Indra Nooyi nor any others like her need not be over worked and without paucity of time, provided they know how to delegate responsibilities to those who are capable of discharging those responsibilities equally well.

A good leader or boss knows the art of distributing his or her powers and responsibilities to each and every individual down below in the team commensurate with their individual capacities to make use of those delegation effectively.

When the boss does delegation of authority and responsibility improperly, the organization fails to perform adding to the woes of the boss. 

In the family too, such delegation of work and responsibilities is to be implemented with much care. If done well, the family too would become a smooth running mini organization.

When every one is enabled to perform according to their inherent capacities we get complimentary families and organizations that run well without causing problems to others.

At least, things would be better and bosses may not be required to devote more time than their subordinates to make their organizations perform.

The gender of the boss would not make any difference too!

The Potential of Delegation in Progress and Development!

In the beginning nothing existed but the Sole Deity.

The Sole Deity existed as a living power over an enormous non-living energy-matter concentrate.

The Living Power that prevailed over the non-living energy-matter concentrate of a unique nature had all the prerogatives and potentials of thought, creativity and personality. 

There were no universes, no galaxies, no stars and no planets.

Everything was static and there was no dynamic activity or movements. So time had no meaning. And there was no space as we now know.

This period is known as eternity about which no one knows any thing except the One that existed from eternity.

The Living Power of eternity which possessed life, thoughts, creativity and personality was God, the First Source.

During eternity, God the the First Source undertook some acts of Creation by self-division. We see self-division in single-celled animals like amoeba. 

God the Second Source and God the Third Source thus came into existence during eternity. God the First Source had thus become the Father God. God the Second Source had become the Eternal Son God.

The three together became the Trinity God. 

Further during eternity, the three singly or jointly created innumerable perfect living beings having innumerable functions and prerogatives creating the pantheon of gods or immortal celestial beings.

For them they created the enormous and magnificent eternal universe consisting of a billion of perfectly created globes which all revolved around the static matter concentrate that existed originally with the Sole Deity. But all these were still not in the form of matter and energy that we are familiar with. The eternal universe too came in to existence during the eternal period.

Time and space as we now know have not begun yet.

The eternal Trinity knew the potential of delegation in effecting creative progress and development.

Hence the Trinity God delegated the power to create material and energy from the pre-existing matter and energy of eternity (let us call it the spiritual matter and energy as I had written some time ago) to a group of divine beings who were to use another technique called the controlled evolution for this creative activity.

Thus started the process of evolution for the build up of visible energy and material from the infinite source of invisible eternal energy and matter (or the spiritual energy source). The moment this process of evolution started, time and space came into existence as we know now.

The evolutionary process of material creation began in various sites at various times there after. All such sites became vast regions of space filled with evolving matter, initially in the form of the single atom gas called Hydrogen. Living eternal beings supervised the evolutionary process and made necessary changes wherever required at appropriate intervals of millions of years.

The living eternal beings of several kinds in innumerable numbers performed various functions including long duration observations in millions of groups. Each group performed under a group leader responsible for material creation, called the Creator Son of God. The matter and space created by each group became vast galaxies containing innumerable stars, planets and other celestial objects and became a material universe of its own called a local universe. Thus an enormous conglomerate of material universes got created around the eternal universe which got divided into seven enormous regions called the seven super universes having almost same matter and energy content.

Each local universe under the leadership of the material Creator God became the domain of dynamic activity and further creations. Several orders of divine beings and materials beings then got created in each of the local universe by various creative techniques.

By evolutionary techniques planets were formed. Some planets were fine tuned as homes for the creation and further development of evolutionary material life in the form of plants and animals. Such material life sustainable planets eventually became homes of advanced life such as the humans of earth.

Human like life was a preferred material life form for the Creator God and also his eternal parents because it was a life form which could be entrusted with some of the special prerogatives that God himself had- the prerogatives of personality, thought, creativity and independent decision making, though in a much limited manner.

The planets where life could be made sustainable and where human like life could evolve and sustain have become the material worlds. There are millions of material worlds now in each of the local universes.

The Creator God and his innumerable celestial subordinates keep observing the evolutionary progress of all humans in all the material worlds.

They feel happy when human beings make positive progress in the same way when a human scientist feels when  his robot or machine performs in the desired manner.

No doubt, the Creators could have made a perfect world having perfect humans. They had done that way elsewhere. But in humans and in the worlds for the humans they have different plans.

The Creator God and his associates want humans to progress using whatever abilities, creativity and talents that they have inherited while they were born as individual material beings of their material worlds such as our earth.

The Creator God and his associates want humans to develop qualities similar to them by their own volition or desire. 

The Creator has created human beings not by any magic. The evolutionary creative process has been a group activity for billions of years. The Creators have stopped their interventions in human activities the moment humans have got the required abilities for self development and progress. The Creators have become observers and guides ever since.

The human life is intended for gaining varied experiences of material life and for willfully differentiating and adopting good from bad. Good is that which is considered as acceptable to the divine creators or God.

Human life is for experiential learning. Humans who have failed to learn and understand the essential truths by experience have achieved nothing in this life even if he or she might have succeeded in becoming a resourceful king or ruler of other humans.

One of the essential learning that humans have to experience and accept is the power of delegation or the power of sharing just as the divine beings are doing. 

God has shared himself and his power. That is how all the universe and its innumerable beings came in to existence. They all have delegated their powers and abilities in varied manner. That is how the universes have been developing and progressing.

The more you delegate or share, the more power you are likely to get. That is a universal truth. The more we share, the more our world will progress. The more you realize this fact, the more you have learnt some fundamental truth by life experience.

The opposite of delegation and sharing is greed and selfishness and the latter two qualities are disliked by God and would lead to unhappiness eventually.

Those who have learnt the beauty of delegation and sharing have learnt one of the greatest life experience and are perhaps preferred by God for taking up higher responsibilities.

The more such learned people on earth, the more our earth would progress in development!

Could you understand anything what I wrote above?