Middle managers get hit again
I see middle managers are getting hit yet again, this time in McKinsey Quarterly as ‘innovation blockers‘.
It seems to be forgotten that middle managers have the additional rather boring but important role of actually running the business that generates the cash flow that funds innovation. This is the group that actually knows how things work, as compared with juniors who only see their own function and seniors who move on every couple of years so never get to really understand anything.
With no organizational slack and perpetual pressure to hit targets with ever lower costs, they often don’t have time even to do that essential job properly, let alone contribute to innovation.
And too often, their ideas for innovation have been ignored for years.
Don’t copy what’s not relevant
A nice word of caution from strategy+business magazine about looking for magic strategy answers by peering into the ways of superstars. In The Google Enigma, they point out that ‘Unless your company makes money by selling advertising attached to digital goods, you may not be able to learn much from Google’s example’. You can say that again! … the staggeringly powerful technology behind Google is so idiosyncratic to its case as to dwarf the contribution of almost anything else they may be good at.
Shame, then, that management development and MBA training puts so much reliance on case studies with way too little attention given to the relevance of those stories to other contexts.