Middle Managers That Weren't

 The 1940’s to the 1990’s were the golden age of middle management. World War Two was foisted upon a United States that still had a large agricultural population. To ensure quick learning for workers transitioning from farm to industry, it was necessary to break work into small tasks, with rigid supervision of personnel and production of reports. This method won the war.

The high overhead of this kind of supervision meant many jobs for middle managers, who often were picked from liberal arts colleges rather than the assembly line. As foreign countries built their industries along different management systems (such as Japanese quality control or German quality design), high overhead costs and large internal bureaucracy strangulated profits and ingenuity. 

To rework these byzantine processes and procedures, “re-engineering the corporation” meant re-evaluating the hierarchical organizational charts. Work once performed in narrow silos, (for example- clerks who processed one or two lines on a form) now became assigned to functional groups centered on a tangible result (customer satisfaction or widget-making machines repaired). Prospective management, which prevents employees from inducing errors; was replaced with less-costly retrospective management, which trusts the auditing process to find errors.

Middle management stood outside of the “value chain”, as found in Six Sigma theory; or the rolls of “essential workers” in the COVID-19 Pandemic. While the implementation of re-engineering created efficiency and return to profitability; the 1993 namesake book’s author, Michael Hammer, did not discuss what to do about displaced middle managers; or how the nascent internet would many first post-college jobs obsolete. Nor what to do about the continued rate of business and liberal arts majors graduating college each year; as college counsellors were late to the news.

Broken expectations are topics for a different day. Even if these graduates never reach the upper-middle class lifestyle, there is still a baseline consumption of goods and services; think food shelter, and medicine; which must be provided by essential workers. Those large student loans are a millstone on disposable income, whether it is to start a family or small business, or buy a home.

Many essential workers in the oft-forgotten “value chain” proclaim themselves “open to work”. They are commonly credentialed in multiple trades and professions; yet if they’re shipping war matériel to Europe, they aren’t available for offshore oil drilling. If they’re building houses, they aren’t available for over-the-road trucking. They are in-demand, and many are paid handsomely up-front; in contrast to the long-term payout envisioned by future middle managers. For whatever the reasons, vocational-focused colleges tend to be magnitudes more affordable than liberal arts colleges. 

How do you retool those middle-managers to become more essential, and to become part of the value chain? Some might cite the use of vocational aptitude tests, to determine that many people are not suited for manual labor, technical, or field work. But the experience of the military, through its promotion rates of Corporals and Petty Officers, shows that at least half of the population is suited for both labor and supervision; blue-collar and white-collar work (not just in today’s highly-selective military; but in Cold War times, when most volunteers were accepted for service). Occupational elitism is another concern: Would degreed construction managers lend a hand on the worksite?  

When colleges and non-essential businesses were closed during the heart of the Pandemic, I could see with my own eyes that many young adults rolled up their sleeves, and went to work on construction sites, as independent-contract delivery drivers, and as trade apprentices. If it was not just the ennui of boredom, the Invisible Hand of Economics finally did its work. Those college graduates will have some concrete skills to put on their resumes.