Leadership is lonely. There's always a boss behind the boss, even in the C-suite. Good managers can translate in all directions of a network graph, not merely from the nonlocal to the local.
There's a Heinz von Foerster essay on free will within deterministic systems, "Only those questions that are in principle undecidable, we can decide. Why? Simply because the decidable questions are already decided by the choice of the framework in which they are asked, and by the choice of rules of how to connect what we call "the question" with what we may take for an "answer."", http://web.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/foerster.html & http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-park
Complex bureacracies (academia, airlines, government, large enterprises) illustrate that thinking humans are most valuable at the boundary of system determinism. Any human who just does what the "rules" or "book" or "computer" says, will eventually be replaced by a mindless algorithm/app. But airline customer service people in First Class, or executive assistants who have worked with the same CEO for decades, or great managers - define human free will and agency, with their decision-making capacity for handling the entropy of "irregular operations".
If we view large organizations as semi-deterministic programs for which we have lost the source code, how would that change our view of management?
The Manager Tools podcast gives insight into the language and thought processes of top-down thinkers. Useful for learning how how to work within and around such structures: http://www.manager-tools.com/2013/04/politics-101-chapter-3-... & http://www.manager-tools.com/2013/05/politics-101-chapter-3-... . This should be balanced by authors like Tim Ferris, Chris Malburg (http://www.amazon.com/How-Fire-Boss-Chris-Malburg/dp/0425127...), or your favorite historical barbarian.
There's a Heinz von Foerster essay on free will within deterministic systems, "Only those questions that are in principle undecidable, we can decide. Why? Simply because the decidable questions are already decided by the choice of the framework in which they are asked, and by the choice of rules of how to connect what we call "the question" with what we may take for an "answer."", http://web.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/foerster.html & http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-park
Complex bureacracies (academia, airlines, government, large enterprises) illustrate that thinking humans are most valuable at the boundary of system determinism. Any human who just does what the "rules" or "book" or "computer" says, will eventually be replaced by a mindless algorithm/app. But airline customer service people in First Class, or executive assistants who have worked with the same CEO for decades, or great managers - define human free will and agency, with their decision-making capacity for handling the entropy of "irregular operations".
If we view large organizations as semi-deterministic programs for which we have lost the source code, how would that change our view of management?