Some years ago I worked for a large Australian company which will remain nameless. During a four or five year period of tumultuous upheaval at this company, the ramifications of which are still being felt, we had a succession of IT managers come and go. And each manager immediately introduced The Next Big Thing as they saw it. I suppose they had to do something to establish their authority at the outset, much like a cat marking its territory.

The occasional IT manager would talk to us about a paradigm shift, but no one took them very seriously, and they got shifted out the door pretty quickly.

One of the managers supplied everyone in IT, a couple of hundred of us, project managers, systems analysts, programmers, business analysts, admin assistants – everyone – with a copy of the book Who Moved my Cheese by management über guru, Dr Spencer Johnson.

The basic premise behind the book is that everything is changing and you had better accept it. Fair enough, things are changing. The only constant is change. etc, etc, etc.
But as a management philosophy it is flawed. The role of management hasn’t changed in thousands of years. The first project manager I can think of was Noah. He had a pretty major task building an ark. It was roughly 450 feet, or around 135 metres long. A pretty big boat. And this was a major change for not only Noah, but those who were involved in the project. No one had built a boat, of any size, before.

What were his constraints? Build it on time and to the specs. We’ve all heard that before. But the building was a technical matter. Getting it done on time was the management. And so it is today. The only, that’s right, only problem facing management yesterday, today, and I am sure tomorrow, is management of the people with the technical skills to get the job done.

You may be a small businessman or woman and you say that you are managing your business but you are working alone. I know how you feel, that is exactly the same position that I am in. But I am not managing. Most of my time I am programming or building web pages. They are technical skills. I have had to learn new skills, such as using my time wisely.

Some people call this Time Management. It is a misnomer. How can you manage time? It just passes. You can use it wisely, or foolishly. But that’s not management. It is discipline,to some extent, and a technical skill to some extent.

Management is all about dealing with people – their problems, their aspirations, what motivates them and what disillusions them. We have certainly learnt, over the years, better ways to deal with people. Throwing books at them which tell them their cheese has moved doesn’t seem to me to one of the smartest ways to deal with intelligent people.

The cheese is exactly where it has always been. People are intelligent creatures who need to be treated with respect. If you respect them you will usually find that your respect is not misplaced. And if you value their contribution you will usually find that their contribution is valuable.

When change does occur, and it will, equip your respected and valuable staff with the technical skills they need.

What do you do with the cheese? Serve it with crackers on Friday afternoon.