Slacker manager talks about the license to manage

Referring to 'Slacker Manager's discussion of a HBR article on the possibility of making management a licensed profession. I'd argue for other advances in corporate governance before I argued for a 'license to manage'.

Other real professions such as accountants, lawyers, and doctors successfully use systems like licensing because they generally operate small firms or practices. Managers proper, and in particular those at the executive level, face greater resource coordination and allocation challenges than those professionals running a practice.

Executives take responsibility for large pools of resources which they often don't directly control. This is a challenge - and I would suggest that the issue of the best way to do this hasn't yet been solved. In fact, I would argue that the way we look at management is all wrong. I prefer to think of management as a 'technology' and not a 'profession' at all.

As discussed in the original HBR article, the idea of a management license relies on a 'Common body of knowledge resting on well-developed, widely accepted theoretical base'. I've long argued that the management 'profession' doesn't yet have this body of knowledge. For one, I've argued that the time for firms to be seen as an isolated command economy within the the greater market economy is well and truly over. That organisations continue to operate as command economies internally, when all around us the failures of such a system at the level of the nation has been exposed, is a blunder of cosmic proportions.

What's more, the specific failings of command economies are also interesting. Hayek's 'Road to Serfdom' illustrates well that in such a system 'the worst rise to the top'. Now I have nothing against successful people. In fact, I have a great respect for those that reach success through creating value and serving customer desires - that is, through perfectly legitimate means. But the driver for managerial licenses appears to be the rise of the worst. Where this has been the case it is more a reflection of failures in corporate governance than poor individual management. What were these people on top? is a more important question than Why did they behave how they did once they got there? Though both are interesting.

Part of this is the confusion between the success of an individual manager with their effectiveness. In the absence of good corporate governance an effective manager is equated with a successful manager.

One of the implied benefits of a management license is the ability for the license to improve the actions and behaviors of individual managers. This benefit logically can't be realised if the position of power implied by the very concept of management means that behaviors aren't effected.