Managerial joys

For the modern middle manager, there are countless pains and two pleasures.  Both derive from the control he or she exercises over their fiefdoms.  Since the control is limited, the pleasures are necessarily tiny but, to the connoisseur, also exquisite.

The first relates to what is usually called the trading statement.  It presents as a snapshot the state of the manager's concern.  Typically it shows a breakdown of income, of variable costs, fixed costs, and any other overheads.  Each figure is presented for the time period in question - a week or a month, perhaps - along with its variance from the figure predicted in the plan for the year, determined previously.  There is also a cumulative figure for the year to date, together with variances.  There may also be sundry other statistics offering different cross-sections of the business - turnover per staff, return on sale and so on.

This document offers to the manager all the challenge and excitement of a good crossword puzzle or detective story.  For hidden within those figures lies the secret truth, the definitive facts about what he or she and their team achieved in that period.  It contains inarguable clues as to failings by them or their suppliers, offers implicit admonishments to all without fear or favour; it hints subtly at trends, nudges helpfully towards solutions; it crystallises and memorialises the very essence of the manager's actions, both a symbol and instrument of rank.   To read the latest trading statement is, for the true middle manager, akin to the experience of reading the score of a Mozart symphony for a musician.

How much greater then is the second pleasure, that of preparing business plans.  For if the trading statement is simply a passive recollection in tranquillity of past corporate deeds, the business plan offers the manager the unique privilege of predicting - and shaping - the future.  It is pro-activity incarnate.  Preparing the plan, the manager feels the stream of time coursing through the veins.  He or she becomes a conduit, able to influence in their own small way the turn of events to come.

This supreme managerial joy is born of a sense of poised equilibrium between power and impotence.   The power stems from the detail required: typically a business plan needs the same kind of information provided by a trading statement - though without the variances - for each time period in the coming year.  It is like a map through time of the department's actions.  The impotence arises from the ultimate unknowability of the tomorrow: even the best manager is frequently surprised by unforeseen problems - and opportunities. He or she feeds off this thrilling tension.

Recently, this latter joy has been enhanced by a technology that exposes its true, playful nature.  The advent of the micro-based spreadsheet - effectively an electronic budget sheet - has meant that the preparation of plans has become both easy and fun.  Significantly, the speculative element has been enhanced too; the so-called What-if? function allows the wildest fantasies to be effortlessly, safely - and secretly - indulged.  Oh, to be a manager, now that April and the new financial year with its attendant need for a fresh business plan are here.

 
(9.12.89)

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