The sum of the parts

I was meeting with a major bank in the Netherlands today. The meeting was most interesting for lots of reasons. At one stage the (British) client told me that there is a widespread belief in Holland in “general management” i.e. a good manager can manage anything without any need to understand the content. This reminded me of my days in Accenture… When I was an analyst and consultant in Accenture, I was always troubled by the fact that the manager always got the junior people to do the effort estimates on projects. This to me always seemed to call into question the credibility of the manager – surely he had to understand what was going on otherwise he was no more than a well paid fraud? Whilst I still don’t believe that a manager can run things successfully without any notion of the detailed content, I do however now believe that the job of the manager is to work out how to bring together lots of complicated sub parts to create a cohesive whole, rather than having to develop every single complicated sub part himself. Bringing everything together is already pretty complicated, and it’s something that I am pretty sure that I couldn’t have done as a lowly analyst or consultant.