One Year Of Love

Exactly a year ago, I started this thing called Managers Everywhere. It’s time for a moment of retrospective. What has changed during the last 12 months in terms of how managers behave? What have they been up to? Let’s recap:

1. They’ve been exponentially growing in their population compared to this time in July 2021. Corollary: all companies in the world have more managers than a year ago. If there is life on other planets, the rule still applies, unless advanced civilizations have discovered how to get rid of them

2. They have kept on taking credit for content and ideas they didn’t come up with

3. They have been citing Conway’s Law almost daily

4. They have been hiring incompetent people to prevent smart new employees upstaging them

5. They have been rewarding hundreds-dollars worth of bonuses to employees who saved them hundreds of thousands of dollars with their ingenuity

6. They have refused to promote people internally in favor of unknown John Does with dubious credentials coming from unrelated contexts

7. They have kept on deciding to carry on with doomed projects

8. They have profusely claimed to be “model based” and “agile”

9. They have confused early stage prototypes with ready-to-go products

10. They have embraced vapid fads and fashions. Refer to bullet nr. 8.

11. They have called to a myriad of pointless meetings only to repeat what was previously written in an email

12. They have enjoyed to start “quick round of introductions” in meetings

13. They have been solving people’s unhappiness with cookies and free drinks

14. They have been initiating conga lines in company parties

15. They have showcased their increasingly rich business-babble vocabulary: synergy, data-driven, leverage, enable, augment, dynamize, reinvent, unleash, motivate, perpetuate, streamline, synthesize, cultivate, transform, empower, visualize, engage, impact, aggregate.

All in all, honestly I wouldn’t have much to write about without managers being managers. Never change. I love you¹.

As Freddie Mercury famously sang:

And no one ever told me that management would hurt so much,
And managing is so close to pleasure.

1. That could’ve been a bit of an overstatement from the heat of the moment