Part Three: the Control Theory Manager

Part Three: The Control Theory Manager

Glasser transmogrifies only slightly the terms of management responsibility contracted by Deming who considered the key to continued viability of any company was the superior knowledge of what constitutes a good manager and good management. Considering the primarily destructive nature of waves of middle-management layoffs over the last fifteen to twenty years, otherwise viable management was always within the abilities of most major western corporations. However, the ultimate destruction of developed world management has been the elimination of "Type B" management methods, otherwise known as quiet, unassuming, and modest managers who often think before they act, or those extremely popular with their employees.

What has remained fairly dominant, due to their insistent crowing, have been a majority of "Type A" managers in business who have managed to retain their positions because they not only excel at framing their arguments more synergistically, they seem to come up with statistical methods of productivity and results-based compensation rewards which support their increasingly outsourced dwindling encampments. The result is that very few modern world managers have a respect for either experience or theoretically based strategic research, as it is inherently their quality of being to insist that such attributes are neither necessary, nor preferred. However, their own statistics would probably support such an assumption. Basically, these managers often operate as if one half of a brain is not only preferred but sufficient, that rationalizing such an argument as to the direction of management of business, or the management of anything, only requires the shortest-term or latest statistics. Incidentally their essentialness to decision-making based on sometimes almost nothing is the norm, and that double or triple the costs of servicing their businesses through the employment of outsourced, sporadically employed (formerly fully-employed and fully valued) "Type B" managers is not only a good business idea but that they came up with it.

So Glasser renews Deming's thoughts on management and how both halves of a tennis ball, or even a shared orange, must be present to serve the purposes of well-roundedness, which implies orbital mobility, a tractable, adaptable, and successful management team which gathers profits from its own gravitational velocity as a snowball gains weight not in melting over decisions but making them and rolling with the weather fronts.

1. A manager is the only one who can secure an employment future for his or her workers.

2. It is the manager's duty to ensure highest quality and lowest costs for external and internal customers of product or service.

These mantras are too holy to be considered mere mottos. Every manager on earth worth their salt ruminates upon these two as devoted brahmins mutter over verses of the Upanishads. It is clear that such dedication has been the element which once existed in developed world management norms, readily identifiable by Deming a mere sixty years ago, but has been squeezed out of the sponge of practice much as liquidation of immediately more profitable sales of divisions and bricks and mortar have squeezed short-term dividend yields out of a system all being duly reallocated to highly speculative financial investments which so rarely ever employ more than an increasingly fewer number of computer jockeys, brokers, and bean counters.

Eventually one question will have to be, "When will consumers no longer have the employment income to support such a cashing in of assets, resources, and systems?" Another question will have to be, "When will modern world managers gain the experience and theoretical knowledge of truly successful management practices when they have early retired the vast majority of their managers, almost it seems especially the ones who might have even taught them, for free?"