Was discussing the “Don’t ask employees to be passionate about the company!” link from a previous post with Mike the other day and we got off onto a tangent about the difference between “managers” and “other employees.” The gist of our discussion was that managers don’t actually “produce” anything, but that’s OK because their job is not to “do” work, but to facilitate the work being by artists, programmers, file clerks, & etc. When this dichotomy is working properly, it frees the “non-managers” up to geek out on the technical or creative aspects of their work, without worrying about mundane details like whether there’s enough blank CD-Rs in the supply room, or big picture issues like whether all the parts of the project fit together as a coherent whole. Not to say that artists and programmers *can’t* figure this stuff out for themselves, or *shouldn’t* have an idea what’s going on outside their area of specialization, just that it shouldn’t occupy the majority of their time at work.
Joel on Software wrote a pretty great article on this topic awhile ago, and even though it’s targeted largely at issues that pertain specifically to programmers, I think his points can apply equally well to other disciplines that require a high level of concentration. For a slightly broader look at the situation, we can turn to this recently published essay by Paul Graham about the difference between “wisdom” and “intelligence.” It’s a deliberately provocative look at whether wisdom, which has traditionally been regarded as the more balanced and “virtuous” of the two traits, is facing obsolescence in our highly specialized society. I can’t bring myself to agree with everything Graham writes here, but I don’t think that’s really the point of his argument. The more clearly we understand the difference between wisdom and intelligence, he hypothesizes, the more comfortable we will be with the role each plays in our work and our lives.
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