Hacker News Reader

Comment by jayparth | Hacker News Reader

I think it's interesting how this article painted middle management as the good guys. In my experience, "intricate layers" of middle management is not a good thing- most of these "layers" do not add value and it's why companies chase a flat org chart.

Arguing that management takes the lion share of pay, and McKinsey has captured this value away from the middle class, is also a silly argument. McKinsey's revenue is small on an absolute scale- $10B last year. Companies in the Fortune 100, which they mention, generate trillions in revenue. They haven't really captured this value at all.

Here are some things that are true:

- A typical company nowadays has slimmed down, especially in middle management, compared to 50 years ago.

- The profits of this slimming have not necessarily trickled down.

The rest of the article feels like fluff.

View on HN

> In my experience, "intricate layers" of middle management is not a good thing

Well, the academic research paints a different picture. Here's what we know. Even within the same industries, in the same markets, there's a substantial dispersion in management practices and adherence to best practices between the best and worst firms.[1]

The firms with the best management practices have substantially higher productivity and profits than their poorly managed counterparts.[2] We also know from randomized control trials, that interventions designed to improve management practices at the organizational level have long-lasting effects on firm performance.[3]

Moreover this isn't just a case of "good management" meaning abusing employees. There's a strong positive correlation, at the firm level, between management best practices and employee satisfaction.[1]

That's a pretty strong indicator that management, at least done right, isn't just BS. That it makes a significant impact on tangible economic output. Incompetent management really is just pure inefficiency with no upside for anyone.

[1] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.24.1.203 [2] https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/122/4/1351/1850493 [3] https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/128/1/1/1838606

This is a great fact based argument. However, it is confusing "good quality management" with "more managers". "Best management practices" does not necessarily mean "more managers". I would actually argue that the more incompetent managers you have, the more of them you need to get business done. Finding incompetent managers and highlighting them is something consulting firms can help to do.

I'm torn between these two viewpoints:

1. Organizations need to be flatter. Too much hierarchy leads to both inefficiency and politics.

2. You can't have more than 5-8 direct reports and hope to do each of them justice, in both day-to-day operations and career growth.

The lionization of middle management is a bit off putting, but there is definitely an interesting point in there about the centralization of decision making and power, and how it has affected society.

I don't have the data to back this up (yet), but I suspect that the gutting of middle management disproportionately affected smaller cities and towns, and the elimination of those mid tier management jobs deprived those cities of thier elite classes.

Your idea was fleshed out using St. Louis as an example in this article from Washington Monthly (warning: explicitly partisan source): https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/maraprmay-2016/the-re...

Thanks. That is an excellent case study.

I didn’t feel like it painted just middle management as the good guys; it argued that all levels played some sort of managerial part.

Also, I think it argued that the costs saved from concentrating management went mostly to shareholders and executives.

A typical company nowadays has slimmed down, especially in middle management, compared to 50 years ago.

The profits of this slimming have not necessarily trickled down.

Don't trivialize these points. This has been the econo-political trend for decades, and only now is the general public starting to become aware of it (thanks in no small part to Andrew Yang).

It's also the dark secret of the idealistic neoliberalism taught in undergrad economics classes, where they like to emphasize that "the pie has grown" with little regard to how said pie is distributed. Economists understand the subtlety here, but it doesn't end up in the lesson plans and kids come away with some pretty warped ideas about what economic policy.

Most importantly, it’s not consultants causing this, it’s tech making organizing large groups easier. The consultants are mostly just helping slow changing orgs inch towards better business models. Not crazy cutting edge tech either.

We still haven’t seen the business world fully meet the low hanging fruit potential of excel, email, and messaging.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com