{"id":153,"date":"2026-06-30T03:18:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-30T03:18:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/markusstettler.com\/?p=153"},"modified":"2026-07-14T03:04:07","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T03:04:07","slug":"josef-kpi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/markusstettler.com\/?p=153","title":{"rendered":"Josef KPI"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

An all-too-familiar wave of mouldy odour creeps into my nose when I open the book \u2014 second-hand management literature from the 70s. It immediately sends me back to that archive, my first job, at eleven, working for my father. Sorting through mountains of information on faded paper, some still written on my father’s pale green Hermes Baby typewriter. Documents in hanging files made useless by time, not yet by technology. They were replaced not by zeros and ones but by heavy Bundesordner<\/em> that looked like they were made out of marble. For the young me it didn’t matter, I didn’t understand either. I just wanted to get some comic books out of it and maybe solve a mystery. My father was a manager, middle manager, not private industry but government, local education department. He had a secretary and some people working for him. They were always busy. My father did not seem to be, whenever I visited him \u2014 he read, or was on the phone, or had a guest in his office. They laughed. Yes, most of what he did was talking, and reading all those documents I did not understand. But even more, I did not understand what he was doing, what his job actually was. Sometimes I think even he did not fully understand it. Because when I asked him, his eyes got distant and sad. He was smiling and trying to explain. But it never made sense to me. He would go on about some of these documents, that they came from the minister, that they seemed really important \u2014 but those I understood least of all. And my father would call the ministry the castle, and say that he felt like K., the surveyor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I first became a manager, my kids would ask me the same. What does a manager do? I was in the middle of it and yet I could not explain it to them properly. I am in a lot of meetings. I have to read a lot. And I write documents. These were my usual answers. They kept insisting: \u201cBut what do you really do?\u201d I could not say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

The Board Room Version: The manager is the invention of the post-industrial age. We can observe what managers do. We still cannot agree on what they should. Mintzberg spent half a century observing it and found fragmented, verbal, reactive and interrupted work under permanent overload. Drucker shows that the stakes are higher than we realize. The manager is not just a busy person in a difficult role. They are the constitutional organ of the central institution of industrial society. The corporation should give people work, status, function and a place in society. The manager is supposed to make that happen. Drucker gives the manager dignity. Mintzberg gives the manager reality. The gap between the two is a design flaw and Follett shows the mechanism precisely. Accountability without real capacity to act. Power-over masquerading as empowerment. The one-man-show where a coordinator should be. The role was never properly designed. It accumulated. Management is not a failed profession. It is an unfinished one. Medicine, law and engineering went through the same development. The tools existed \u2014 Follett described them a hundred years ago. What is still missing is the institutional development that would make them the professional standard. What does a manager really do? Still the right question. And we should start answering it now.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Another kid who did not understand his father’s profession was Henry Mintzberg. The quest to find out drove him to become one of the most important management scholars of the last century. Trained as a mechanical engineer he became one of the very few empirical observers in that field. He sat with managers, watched and recorded what they did. He did so over a timespan of almost half a century. Before Mintzberg, the classical management school had a very neat picture of the profession. Plan, organize, coordinate and control. Mintzberg discovered quickly that this sounded very rational and orderly but was also pure fiction. Most studies before his worked with self-assessments by managers, surveys which managers filled out, activity logs \u2014 not independent observation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mintzberg published his studies twice \u2014 in 1973 in “The Nature of Managerial Work” and in 2009 in “Managing”. Surprisingly the results were not that different. The introduction of digital tools had not changed anything. Fast, fragmented, verbal and reactive were some of the words that best described it. The picture of the manager at the controls of a big machine had to be buried. Instead, he was stuck in the wiring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The manager’s tasks are short and numerous, Mintzberg’s studies found. Half of the activities of CEOs lasted less than nine minutes and only 10% lasted more than one hour. Most of the day an average manager spends in meetings. Scheduled and unscheduled, they make up more than two thirds of his work time. He can spend only about a quarter of his time at his desk. And even these periods were chopped up into pieces averaging 15 minutes. There goes the image of the strategic thinker, I guess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our manager also does not get the benefit of well documented information. While in the 1970s he received 60% to 90% of information verbally, this has somewhat changed in the 2000s with the introduction of email. But even so, information still gets to him mainly in informal ways. Hastily scribbled notes, not reports and analysis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He also does not get to stay on one subject for long and is often interrupted. Most tasks that require concentration he does outside core working hours. Fragmentation and interruption are the norm, not the exception in his day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All this apparent chaos does not mean it just happens. There are systemic reasons behind this. Information in classical organizations flows towards formal authority. I just heard something, the boss needs to know that. That report on everything needs to be read by the CEO. So the manager gets a lot of information \u2014 so what? The problem is that the more information the manager has already received, the more new information flows towards him. It gets more and more until there is an information overload. Our manager cannot process any information in significant depth anymore. This means fragmentation and superficiality \u2014 which is the opposite of what he actually should do. This is called the Nerve Centre Trap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another problem is also systemic: the One-Man-Show Problem. By design organizations are built so that our manager is a central processor for decisions, conflicts, the aforementioned information and disturbances. That automatically creates a bottleneck \u2014 numerous subordinates, superiors and colleagues are feeding one manager. That is obviously an issue \u2014 overload, open-endedness of the job, because there is no natural completion, because everything is just a fragmented decision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition there is something called the Action Bias. Our manager is pushed towards doing. That is supposed to be management. What gets lost is the thinking \u2014 because when should he have time for that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On top of that comes the problem of Decomposition \u2014 synthesis in a chopped up organization \u2014 and Delegating in an organization of informal information. The manager also has to balance things carefully. How much do I organise work? How many controls should I implement? How confident should I be in my actions? How much change to implement? How close should I stay to day-to-day business? Too much of any will lead to micromanaging \u2014 he takes care of everything and therefore nothing. Too little leads to macroleading \u2014 he is up in a cloud and has lost connection to what the reality of business is all about. All of these issues are connected to each other, causing and reinforcing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With all the different activities, responsibilities and issues Mintzberg observed, he tried to come up with the different roles a manager has to take on. He found ten \u2014 the Figurehead, the Leader, the Liaison, the Monitor, the Disseminator, the Spokesperson, the Entrepreneur, the Disturbance Handler, the Resource Allocator and the Negotiator. Just to make this absolutely clear, these are not alternative roles \u2014 versions of different managers. All of these have to be filled by our manager. One person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mintzberg also analysed what is expected from managers in management literature. Here is the list: courageous, committed, curious, confident, candid, reflective, insightful, open-minded, innovative, communicative, connected, perceptive, thoughtful, intelligent, wise, analytic, objective, pragmatic, decisive, proactive, charismatic, passionate, inspiring, visionary, energetic, enthusiastic, upbeat, optimistic, ambitious, tenacious, persistent, zealous, collaborative, participative, cooperative, engaging, supportive, sympathetic, empathetic, stable, dependable, fair, accountable, ethical, honest, consistent, flexible, balanced, integrative \u2014 and tall. Apparently tall people are supposed to have more energy. Well, that is quite a lot to ask of someone who hasn’t had nine continuous minutes to think since last Tuesday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mintzberg for all his wit still paints a dark and chaotic job description for the manager. Take into account \u2014 this is not based on theoretical assumptions. This comes from observational data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Again I remember my father invoking the castle. Did he feel trapped like our manager? Worse still \u2014 Kafka’s K. constantly receives information \u2014 messages, letters, orders \u2014 from the castle that are absurdly unclear and out of date. He has to somehow interpret them on his own since he cannot access the place of authority. Kafka was writing about the Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy. He wasn’t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If this should paint the picture of our modern companies, there would need to be more than one chaotic element in the system. Or is the manager that important? Well, we called him the nerve centre, the one-man-show. So he seems to be quite important. We also called him the gunslinger when it comes to decision making \u2014 the person making a cognitive error. Looking at his role, the systemic information restrictions and pressure to act, we see now where that error originates. It is programmed into his job profile. Our manager is also the middle manager who is unfairly trapped in between. See the connection \u2014 it’s in this flawed design. Or consider companies unable to change because of organizational inertia. That is not the stubbornness of some CEO villain, not even an inexplicable systemic process. It happens \u2014 at least partly \u2014 because roles are designed without the authority to change things or the access to do so. Badly thought out control mechanisms and reward systems are a result not just of a bad system but specifically of a badly designed role \u2014 that of the manager on all levels, from supervisor to CEO. A role so absurdly overloaded and systemically set up that everyone taking it runs a great risk of being burned out or going mad. A person who is not supposed to be just a minor operational part in the whole thing. The manager was created to be the central figure of industrial society. The person through whom the organization thinks, plans, decides and steers. And isn’t it funny that post-industrialization has designed only that one big profession and has done such a piss poor job of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Please, don’t think of me as a doomsayer, but this is very important. And I am not the only one saying this. Peter Drucker, who we know as a voice of reason in management theory, has written about this quite early in his career. His social theory books “The Future of Industrial Man” and “The Concept of the Corporation” were published during and just after World War II. They helped lay the moral and institutional groundwork for what later became reduced to the language of corporate governance. No, not the money-laundering E-Learning you are forced to endure every two years. That is just the image-fragment of the original ideal behind it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The idea behind Corporate Governance is that large companies are more than just a private economic arrangement. They are representative institutions in society \u2014 meaning they have an important role beyond economics. They shape work, communities and give a sense of belonging. So they should also be judged by more than just profit. As important is that they give people Status \u2014 who am I here \u2014 and Function \u2014 what do I do here that matters. Only if all three are fulfilled do companies reach their intended role. Drucker’s broader point was that every functioning society must give people status and function. Industrial society had to do this through its dominant institution: the corporation. In the pre-industrial society \u2014 called the mercantile society \u2014 ownership still made authority visible. The owner acted. The owner decided. Responsibility had a face. He did that with varying success. But at least the responsibility was clear. In the industrial society, with ever larger corporations, ownership became a dispersed and distant concept. It still existed but it was largely not something that could be acted upon. Shareholders don’t do things in companies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s when the manager enters the stage. He is the actor \u2014 sorry, the one who acts. Although he does not own, he is meant to control resources \u2014 because the owner cannot act directly \u2014 he directs people, influencing their lives, and makes decisions which have social consequences beyond the company. But where does he get his legitimacy from \u2014 why can he do all those things? Someone hired him \u2014 the owner, even if indirectly. But Drucker was very clear that this does not work. In the large corporation ownership is no longer a strong enough reason, it is no longer direct enough. Ownership, as mentioned, has become a diversified concept \u2014 there are many people and institutions owning a company. Power from ownership cannot simply be transferred from one person to another as with a representative. So it must be expertise. The manager is simply the best at whatever the company does. But that is exactly not the role of the manager \u2014 he is not a specialist but a generalist. A gummy bear company is not run by a food technologist most of the time. So there must be something else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Drucker, managerial authority is tied to the function of the company in society. Not so much a profit producer \u2014 he actually sees profit more as a condition for existence than the purpose \u2014 but someone running an institution that gives people work, status, function and a place in society. To be clear, both are very much part of the manager’s mandate \u2014 productivity of a company and its role in society. Urgh, yet another role for our manager? Didn’t Mintzberg show that he already has too much on his desk? Yes, he did. But Mintzberg showed the resulting mess of what managers have become. Drucker shows the ideal of what he actually should be doing. And it didn’t just flow out of his head like a wild utopian dream. Drucker studied GM while writing the two social theories \u2014 a company that had heavily decentralized and had given managers, especially those in the middle of the organization, a role as translators of policy. They were not yet trapped in today’s dense web of KPI dashboards, reporting layers and escalation rituals. They were the constitutional organs of the corporation \u2014 less restricted, more enabled to act intelligently. Just to make this clear, GM did not turn out to be a Drucker dream company. They rejected most of his ideas when it comes to the company as a responsible institution in society. But they had at least created the structure for it. Drucker was not naive. Adding a paternalistic manager figure in one simple move does not solve all legitimacy problems. That question would need to be solved at a much deeper level. Trust me, we’ll get to that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Drucker showed what the role of the manager could be. A vision of a more dignified profession than just a KPI pusher. But the reality of Mintzberg remains. So how did we end up with that managerial mess?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Interestingly enough, to answer this we best go way back \u2014 at least when speaking of the managerial timeline. When Mary Parker Follett graduated in 1898 it was not in business administration, which was only just emerging as a discipline anyway. Her degree was a Bachelor of Arts, having studied a wide range of subjects such as government, economics, law and philosophy. By the 1920s she had become an important scholar and consultant in the field of business. She died in 1933 and was then largely forgotten. Peter Drucker called her the prophet of management and was heavily influenced by her. And rightfully so. Her analysis of management activities and their issues remains to this day very relevant. She described the mechanism that put our manager in such a maddening role \u2014 not by pointing fingers or screaming incompetence, but by showing the fundamental design failures in mainly two areas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first is the mismatch of accountability and responsibility. Accountability is what the company, the system, demands from you. Responsibility is what you can actually do in your job. They are not the same \u2014 close but not the same \u2014 and especially in business often confused. Which is part of the problem. See, if your job is cooking, having accountability for cooking means you are to be blamed if there is no food or bad food on the table at dinner time. Responsibility is the ability to decide on the dish, buy the ingredients, cook it and serve it. I am using responsibility here in Follett’s stronger sense \u2014 not blame, but the real capacity to respond. You see the difference? Accountability asks something of you. Responsibility enables you to deliver it. Like Josef K. in The Trial you can have accountability but no means of exercising responsibility. Similarly our manager is summoned by the board regarding KPIs he cannot fully influence, questioned on processes he has not designed and cannot change, and judged on outcomes he cannot control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Follett explains the requirements for responsibility in even more detail. Enablement doesn’t just mean somebody tells you “You can do this.” That would again just be accountability dressed up as enablement. Responsibility means being part of the actual situation, understanding it, and most importantly being able to influence the different levers that shape the outcome. In other words our manager needs knowledge, resources, direct contact and recognised authority to decide. Is this too nuanced? What about the quality manager who has no direct influence over operational decisions? Or the middle manager who receives all his orders from top management, serves only as a translation layer, but is measured on the KPIs of his department?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second important analysis Follett made is on how power is understood and distributed in organizations. The classical view of power is power-over. The CEO tells our manager what should be done. This can produce compliance. What it cannot produce is engagement. Engagement must come from the affected person \u2014 it cannot be produced or extracted externally. There are other drawbacks of power-over that were discussed when we looked at control measures and reward systems. Mainly it also produces resentment. Our manager doesn’t like to be pushed around. As a side note: democratic societies abolished power-over between individuals at least half a century ago. In the business world it is still the normal mode.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Follett also saw power-over as a misconception of power. For her real power cannot just be given by a title or an org chart. Power \u2014 she calls it power-with \u2014 is only real if it grows out of the situation. What she means is something very simple. In an organization people create capacity together to make things happen. For that capacity you need resources, knowledge, and other people \u2014 everything that is practically needed to produce an outcome. Remember, that is responsibility. Plus you will need the authority to act. Combine those two and you have power-with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reading Follett is truly interesting because she has the uncanny ability to develop one brilliant idea out of the last. Everything is connected. She looks at conflict resolution and develops the win-win method, then connects that to how orders should or should not be given, then develops organizational setup and power-with out of this. She eventually also touches on another important point \u2014 the illusion of final authority. We usually think that the person at the top of an organization has the final authority. All decisions come from the top. The thing is decisions are based on information. And the information giver is actually in control of that. Before a CEO decides, many other things happen first. A consultant defines the problem, an analyst selects the data, a manager frames the options. So the final decision is really at the end of a long selection and filtering process. It is not useless or stupid in any way. Somebody has to say either A or B \u2014 but only after C, D and E have all been eliminated first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Follett puts much more weight on the different contributions people make in organizations. So she designs her manager differently from how we understand him. He is by design a coordinator, not a resource allocator or decision maker. He is responsible for creating the conditions in which the organization’s distributed knowledge can be put to work. See the difference from Mintzberg’s manager? Information does not need to flow towards one person \u2014 the manager enables information sharing when and where it is needed. Not a one-man-show who takes all the decisions but a coordinator who enables decision making where the knowledge already sits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To Follett it was clear that this was not to be achieved simply by creating techniques, titles and training programs. A real profession has an accumulated body of knowledge, social function, standards of practice and professional ethical responsibility. Medicine, law and engineering are useful comparisons here. All of these professions went through that exact development. The first surgeons had limited ethical boundaries \u2014 they were at the same time barbers who cut, amputated and bled whatever they saw fit. Engineering could build bridges, boilers and machines before public safety became the profession’s explicit ethical centre. What happened is that mistakes were made and the profession had to respond, understand, establish rules and standards but most importantly create a system of values. Management is roughly a hundred years old as a named discipline. The tools existed already then \u2014 Follett described them. The discussion on the value system had also been started by Drucker. What is still missing is the institutional development. Companies are still like children that haven’t yet learned that you need to take responsibility if you want to sit at the grown-up table. Children with a lot of money and influence, but still children. And the manager is something like an untrained nanny, totally overloaded, trying to keep it all together somehow. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Management is not a failed profession. It is just unfinished. It is a development. X marks today. Medicine passed that point gradually between 200 and 50 years ago. And medicine has had practitioners for millennia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still I find myself thinking of that kid again, and of my children. The generation of my father who was burned out in the madness of the castle. My generation seems to be on trial by the next generation because their questions rightly sound sharper, although the words are the same: What does a manager really do?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I guess there is more to explore \u2014 and we should do it now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Have your kids ever asked you this? LinkedIn<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Don’t just take it from me, here is some good stuff to read:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mintzberg, Henry. The Nature of Managerial Work. Harper & Row, 1973.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mintzberg, Henry. Managing. Berrett-Koehler, 2009.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mintzberg, Henry. The Manager\u2019s Job: Folklore and Fact. Harvard Business Review, March-April 1990. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Drucker, Peter F. The Future of Industrial Man. John Day, 1942.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Drucker, Peter F. Concept of the Corporation. John Day, 1946.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Follett, Mary Parker. Dynamic Administration: The Collected Papers of Mary Parker Follett. Edited by Henry C. Metcalf and L. Urwick. Harper & Brothers, 1941.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Follett, Mary Parker. “The Illusion of Final Authority.” In Freedom and Coordination. Edited by L. Urwick. Management Publications Trust, 1949.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wrapp, H. Edward. “Good Managers Don’t Make Policy Decisions.” Harvard Business Review, September\u2013October 1967.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kafka, Franz. The Castle. 1926.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kafka, Franz. The Trial. 1925.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An all-too-familiar wave of mouldy odour creeps into my nose when I open the book \u2014 second-hand management literature from the 70s. It immediately sends me back to that archive, my first job, at eleven, working for my father. Sorting through mountains of information on faded paper, some still written on my father’s pale green […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":154,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-down-the-rabbit-hole-en"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/markusstettler.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Copy-of-Copy-of-Copy-of-Copy-of-A-Few-Good-Managers-on-markusstettler.com_-3.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/markusstettler.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/markusstettler.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/markusstettler.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markusstettler.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markusstettler.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=153"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/markusstettler.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":155,"href":"https:\/\/markusstettler.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153\/revisions\/155"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markusstettler.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/markusstettler.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markusstettler.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markusstettler.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}