A Slice of Advice

Business has to move with the times.

That’s the imperative that leads each new generation of managers to suppose a reinvention of management rules is overdue and down to them. Then, in practice, they find that what’s mostly required is the sensible adaptation of the tried and tested ones. And that’s hard for emerging managers in ‘edge’ industries using new technologies and multi-mutating communication tools because, for them, ‘history’ is something located not much further back than last year or last month.

Then corporate training kicks in and the practical value of their predecessors’ distilled, proven experience is warily admitted. They read the luminaries – Peter Drucker, Warren Bennis et al, they like the clarity and so they work with the thinking, discovering all over again that this profession is as much about working with human nature as with organograms or market testing.

Food for thought

To illustrate the point, Management Futures offers one hugely experienced manager’s simple set of business ‘rules of thumb’. He advises: 'To make your business sharp and successful, plan it clearly, reduce it to its key factors and keep implementation simple. Complicated analysis causes confusion. Good planning saves time. Good seasonal timing is crucial. Break your project into three stages: (i) preparation (ii) discussion and (iii) action. Allow the most input from colleagues in stage (ii). Involve the fewest possible in stages (i) and (iii). Record and share your thinking from the start because even rejection is preferable to indecision.'

Advice not from the third millennium but from 1625, from Francis Bacon’s essay Of Dispatch. And, wow, was he was qualified to give it! Under King James I, between 1603 and 1621 he graduated rapidly from the middle to the top management of the country’s business – from King’s Counsel to Solicitor-General and rapidly on to Privy Counsellor, Lord Keeper and Lord Chancellor; all in fourteen hectic years of major national and international events, huge socio-political, economic and religious changes and Blackadder-style high-office politics.

English bacon

Of course he didn’t word it quite as given above. Here’s his original text. 'Above all things, order, and distribution, and singling out of parts, is the life of dispatch; so as the distribution be not too subtle: for he that doth not divide will never enter well into business; and he that divideth too much will never come out of it clearly. To choose time is to save time; and an unseasonable motion is but beating the air. There be but three parts to business; the preparation, the debate or examination, and the perfection. Whereof, if you look for dispatch, let the middle only be the work of many, and the first and last the work of few. The proceeding upon somewhat conceived in writing doth for the most part facilitate dispatch: for though it should be wholly rejected, yet that negative is more pregnant of direction than an indefinite; as ashes are more generative than dust.'

Sometimes hard-earned experience really helps. Without it we would be 'but beating the air'.