Management Philosophy
(veiw as a word document)

The management philosophy I have currently developed is taken largely from the book The E-Myth Manager: Why Management Doesn't Work - and What to Do About It. My first exposure to this insightful book was while I was preparing to leave my job to attend WWU for my MBA. At the time, the general manager, my boss, was setting up the entire company to run itself. He was putting systems in place and formalizing job descriptions, so that he would be able to be gone for extended periods of time leaving no manager and still have his company run effectively and efficiently. This concept was something he learned in a book entitled, The E-Myth.

The sequel to The E-Myth, called The E-Myth Manager, is the book I picked up this past summer when I returned to work for that company. I wanted to familiarize myself with how the company was being run and structured in order to be able to step in and manage appropriately. After one year's absence, I saw first hand the positive difference The E-Myth concept had made in the organization.

In The E-Myth Manager, the author's premise is that the manager should see him/herself as an entrepreneur within his/her areas of responsibility in the organization. The focus for management is on learning how to develop their own vision that will also fit with the greater vision toward which managers are leading their followers.

The book describes the current state of leadership by relating it to an image of the Emperor leading the building of the great pyramids. For the followers there is only survival and the Emperor's passion. People still feel like that today. In The E-Myth Manager, Michael Gerber appeals to the common, shared emotions and frustrations that managers often face, which is lack of purpose or meaning for what they do. He explains that this is because of the manager's inability to develop his/her own vision that also fits in the organization's (Emperor's) vision. In the chapter, The Emperor, The Manager, and the Technician, Michael Gerber states, "to the Manager who cares, management is not a stage, but a commitment to personal growth."

This approach comes closest to the Psychodynamic leadership approach which claims that the most important point is that the leader has insight into her or his own emotional responses and habitual patterns of behavior. Furthermore, it is even better if the team members are aware of their own personality characteristics, so that they can understand how they respond to the leader and to each other.

The leadership theory presented in this book is built on the idea that individuals must find personal meaning and vision in their organization. "When the systems are in place, the result is that more of our time is freed up to pursue the more meaningful questions of what it means to be a human being." That is where the 'Work of the Individual' comes in. The first step is to become more self-aware, then more aware of others, then more aware of the impact you have on others, and then more aware of how the world really works. Then you are to create a very clear vision of who you would be if you were the person just described and what that would mean to your life and to the lives of the people around you."

These five self-discovery steps are important to the organization because they bring about the five essential skills of concentration, discrimination, organization, innovation, and communication. In this model the manager doesn't manage the followers at all. He/She just manages the systems they are using, the processes through which they produce or fail to produce results. The focus is always on the process of innovation, quantification, and orchestration, and that leaves each individual to manage him/herself. The big question is, if a manager can't manage anything, what difference does it make what he/she does? The answer is to understand what you do and don't know, which opens the door to the process of innovation, quantification, and orchestration. If followed correctly, the concepts in this book should free up managers' time and bring more balance to their relationships and activities. These ideas and statements sum up much of my management philosophy about being a competent and supportive leader.