There is a question that has been on my mind for a long time. Why is most management today so ineffective? Why do the things they say sound more like a wish list than a plan?
I am not talking about every manager in every industry. I have seen exceptions. But the pattern I have witnessed across the lifetime of my career is hard to ignore.
They have never done the work
The core problem is simple. Most managers have no idea of the actual extent and effort required to do the things they ask of others.
My father gave me the clearest example of this when I was young. He said: how can you manage a single worker if you have never done the job yourself? Say you ask him to move a thousand bricks from point A to point B. If you have never carried a brick in your life, you might sit down and calculate two minutes per brick, multiply by a thousand, and come up with a deadline. Clean math. Completely useless.
Because you do not know how many bricks one person can carry in a single trip. You do not know how exhaustion compounds over time and exponentially degrades performance. You do not know what else that person is already carrying, figuratively and literally.
You just show up and say: I want those bricks moved by 2pm…and it sounds naive when it is one worker and one task. But scale it. Give that same manager five workers doing five different things, one moving bricks, one driving between sites, one handling ceramic plates. Now multiply that across a real organization. The manager has no mental model for any of it. They have never been in any of those positions. They are making decisions in a vacuum and calling it leadership.
Intimidation is not a strategy
What fills the gap between not knowing and still needing to deliver? Intimidation.
The manager shows up to the meeting, sets an arbitrary deadline, and relies on people’s fear of losing their job to get things done. It works, in the short term. People scramble. Things get delivered. The manager looks effective.
But this is not scalable. You can move bricks that way. You cannot move a company.
The difference between a leadership team that builds something real and one that just keeps the lights on comes down to exactly this. If the entire management chain operates on pressure and fear rather than on actual understanding of resources and capacity, the organization does not grow. It just survives, until it does not.