As I See It: Management by Intercourse

by Victor Rozek

Catchy title, isn't it? But, no, it's not what you thought, or perhaps hoped. It has nothing to do with managers having sex with their employees. Most companies frown on such unions although, heaven knows, they would give a whole new meaning to performance evaluation and would probably do wonders for management school enrollment. At the very least, everyone would do their homework. Nonetheless, the name was apparently too provocative for those whose eyes are focused on the bottom, ah, line, because Management by Intercourse was changed to the less piquant Management by Interaction (MBI).

Now, admit it. If I had titled the piece "Management by Interaction," I would have deprived you of that little rush and myself of some readers. Based on the definition, however, neither name accurately describes what is assuredly an atypical style of management which, until a few weeks ago, I happily didn't know existed. I became interested in it only after a reader asked me if I'd ever heard of it because her manager intended to implement MBI in her IT department.

So I did a little research. As defined by The Institute for Management Excellence, MBI is a management system that "emphasizes communication and balance of male/female energy as well as integration of all human aspects (mental, emotional, physical and spiritual), creating an empowered, high-energy, high-productive workforce."

Where the intercourse comes in isn't clear.

The Institute for Management Excellence lists well over a dozen management styles on its web site and they all give me a headache. The problem with management theories is that they're mostly a combination of abstraction and pretense attempting to predict human behavior for the purpose of controlling and exploiting it. But human behavior is maddeningly hard to predict, and if management theories actually worked as advertised, we wouldn't be subjected to a new one every other week.

The transience of traditional management theories has given rise to a new genre of metaphysical systems that apply the questionable gravity of pop psychology to the global challenges of big business. From The Management Methods of Jesus, to The Seven Secrets of the Corporate Mystic, they are heavy on idealism and generalization but short on realism and practicality.

MBI, is a prime example of abstraction over substance. I've never actually met a manager who worried about "balancing energies." Providing clean, reliable power for a bank of computers, sure, but the only thing male and female about that are the plug and the socket. "Balancing energies" may be relevant in Chinese medicine, but in the business world, the closest thing to "balancing energies" is hiring with an eye toward diversity.

Being a relatively new field, IT has not been as burdened with traditional inequities. Since IT flourished at approximately the same time women were asserting their rights in the workplace, it naturally benefited from gender diversity. The doors to IT advancement were not closed by historic precedent. IT was never a traditional male bastion such as accounting, where women are typically clerks while men congregate in management. The equalizer in IT is the computer itself. The results it produces are gender neutral: No one cares who wrote the program as long as the program works properly.

As for integrating the mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual aspects of our natures, most people find it hard enough to do that in their spare time, much less while attending to a full time job. Emotional and spiritual displays are seldom encouraged in the workplace and adults are expected to manage their own integration, preferably at home. Besides, does a spiritual backhoe operator dig a better hole? Does troubleshooting a network have an emotional component? (OK, frustration maybe, but pounding on the console won't do much to impress your co-workers with your professionalism.)

IT is a science-based discipline that isn't well suited to metaphysical management theories. The care and feeding of computers requires logical, cause and effect, linear reasoning. But MBI, and other theories of its ilk, addresses an alternate universe where reason is trumped by the unknowable. "We must begin" according to MBI's tenets, "to deal with the unknown factors that are operating at all times--the spiritual, mysterious, unseen forces that operate around us and often are stronger than those forces which we can see with our eyes, hear with our ears, or touch with our hands."

Just how does one manage "unknown factors" and "unseen forces?" Even physicists scratch their heads at the complexities of the universe and they aren't maintaining networks and churning out application code. And if these forces function "at all times" like a cosmic operating system, perhaps we humble users shouldn't mess with them.

Can't you just see it:

Manager: "How did you manage to completely screw up the application development project?"

Programmer: "Unknown factors, sir, unseen forces."

Manager: "Ah, that explains it. You failed to actively use energy produced through synergistic and symbiotic differences to complement and enhance shared goals."

You may think I made that up, but I didn't. I kid you not, "actively using energy produced through synergistic and symbiotic differences to complement and enhance shared goals" is a stated objective of Management by Interaction. What the hell does that even mean? What exactly are synergistic and symbiotic differences? Are they grounds for divorce? And how do they produce energy? And what does "actively using" them mean? Can you use something passively?

When pretense masquerades as profundity, anything is possible.

Management is not shamanism. When you strip away the layers of theoretical gobbledegook, there are basically two things any good IT manager has to be able to do:

1. Get work done

2. Solve problems

If managers can do those things respectfully, they will be successful more often than if they can't.

There are a lot of management experts making a lot of money writing books and articles which offer advice on how to get these basics done: Management by Coaching and Development, Management by Consensus, Management by Competitive Edge, Management by Exception, Management by Matrices, Management by Objectives, Management by Organizational Development, and Open Book Management, just to name a few. And if you prefer more esoteric approaches to business management there's always the oxymoronic Jesus CEO or 30 Management Principles of the U.S. Marines. (IT as boot camp. Semper sigh.) But, ultimately, none of it matters much because it is the manager who makes the theory work, not the theory that makes the successful manager.

Here's the unpleasant reality that management theorists don't care to admit, and it's something they don't teach in business school: If you can do the basics, you don't need a management system; and if you can't do them, a system won't help you much.

So, if I were the employee whose manger wanted to implement Management by Interaction, I'd be tempted to tell him to go and interact with himself.

But I'd do so as respectfully as possible.

[Editors Note: MBI is a mirror image of IBM. Meaningful or coincidental You decide. . . ]