Rule based

My first full-time job after completing my tertiary degree was with Intel's Penang Design Center in 1995. The first meeting I had with my then manager was lunch! After that I was introduced to the "family" and was shocked when I was given a one person team to lead! Even though I had to manage only one person I had no prior people/project management experience and I was given a "though nut." It was a pretty frightening experience to say the least. Things got worst when my manager got me to conduct interviews. I can still remember very vividly that I was more frighten than the interviewee during the first interview I conducted! I was really out of my league and the whole non-technical experience was very daunting.

As you would expect of a PhD, I started to learn as much as I could about people management. New to Penang (an island on the north-western corner of peninsular Malaysia) and unfamiliar where the libraries are, I hit the bookstore. I would go to a bookstore almost every weekend while I wait for my wife to finish her shopping. I would browse around the management section looking for any thing that has the word "nut" in the title! I was, after all, looking for a way to crack a though nut in the office! Interestingly, I did find a book about managing though nut or something to that effect but that was not a good book. I read a lot of management books that year and that was how my interest in people and project management got started.

During the early phase, it felt as though there would be a set of management principles that would make me a good manager if I were to master them. Over time, I realized that I was not able to find any! Not that I did not observe any good management principles but that each of them seems to be valid conditionally. In other words, there seems to be no universal management principle, or set of principles, that holds true all the time regardless. Which gives me the impression of a rule base system. In other words, a management principle comes with boundary condition when it is applicable and you need to be aware of these boundary conditions.

A real life example is as follows. An associate once read a book about the Chicago Bull and he was telling me how the team don't seem to have a specific leader. He was applying that principle to a young organisation he was starting up and didn't understand why it was not working despite the fact that he has been telling all his guys that the Chicago Bull, a very successful team, is not always lead by one person! This person's team is not matured enough to have his organisation operate at the level of the Chicago Bull and he didn't understand it.

Another was this principle of being open and transparent with your people. I once met this very successful operation manager at an American MNC in Malaysia. Curious what her secret was I asked her to share what makes her such a successful operation manager. One of the things she shared was this. She said, if you are grooming someone for a more senior position, keep that to yourself. She was telling me how having an open and transparent policy regarding such topic backfired on her.

In summing, management principles and many learnings in life are rule based. You need to know the condition upon which a particular principle is applicable. Now at this point, I am very conscious of the previous post in this blog and may someday produce a list of principles I just said don't exists!