Many readers ask me why I don’t write more about management. Here’s why: learning business fundamentals is more important to your long-term success. Management study is a great complement to strong business skills, but it can’t replace them.
Business and Management are not the same thing. If you follow the business media and the business academic world, it’s easy to get the impression that management is what business practice is all about. It’s not: business and management are two separate but complementary skills. Personally, I choose to focus on teaching business, which is more essential and better suits my interests and skills.
Business is fundamentally about creating and delivering value to paying customers. Management is about organizing a group of people to accomplish a common objective. Management is often an important part of most businesses, but by no means is it the most important part.
There’s a clear distinction between people who actually get things done and people who help other people get things done (see Are You an Implementor or an Enabler?). Businesses can (and do) exist without managers. Businesses can’t exist without the people who actually create and deliver value to paying customers.
Management as Politics
Management has more in common with politics than it does business practice. That’s not a bad thing: skills that help you discover what the people you interact with actually want, help you influence them, and help you organize them around a common goal are incredibly valuable.
Large businesses inevitably suffer from what I call “communication overhead” – as an organization grows, every individual in it must spent a greater percentage of their available time communicating enough with others just to stay on the same page, leaving less time for actual productive work. Developing your skills as a leader and standard-bearer is useful in these situations, since without some level of organization, it would be easy for everyone to spend so much time communicating with each other without completing any tangibly productive work. That’s why effective managers are in high demand in large companies.
There’s a catch, however: without business skills, it’s possible to organize and lead a group of people towards the accomplishment of the wrong objectives. Unless certain fundamental objectives are achieved, the business will fail. Without a firm understanding what’s actually important to a business and what’s not, even the most effective manager can lead the most talented and disciplined team to ruin.
What Management Study Won’t Teach You
Here’s what the study of management won’t teach you:
- How to discover what people want to buy.
- How to create tangible value people are willing to pay for.
- How to find and communicate with potential customers.
- How to complete a profitable transaction.
- How to manage your business’ cash flow.
- How to set up useful processes and systems.
Whether you’re a manager or not, if you want to succeed in a business setting, you need to know how to do these things well. Otherwise, you risk wasting good work and valuable resources pursuing the wrong objectives. Without creating and delivering real value to real paying customers, a business will inevitably fail.
Where (and When) to Hone Your Management Skills
If you want to hone your management skills, websites like Manager Tools are fantastic – they’ll teach you what to do and why it works. If you have management responsibilities (or want to have them someday), I highly recommend spending time learning management techniques.
Before you focus on management, however, it pays to spend time ensuring your business skills are solid. After spending time with the PMBA Business Crash Course, reading the books on the PMBA reading list, and studying other sources of business information, you’ll be much better prepared to lead your team to the objectives that will really make a difference.
(Photo credit: svilen001 at sxc.hu.)
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks Josh,
excellent post. The business fundamentals need to be in place before management and leadership skills will be of much use. But at the end they are both needed.
I am particularly struck by this statement, “Businesses can (and do) exist without managers,” one which I think is particular important to many of the people who would be attracted to this course in the first place.
In hindsight, it was clear from the first, entry-level job I took: I am suited by both interest and temperament to learn and excel at business (systems, creating products, etc.) and completely unsuited for the political-social aspects of hands-on management. Corporate businesses don’t have an easy or natural place for non-managers who are not technical. I think this is why we’re seeing a boom in coaching and businesses like PMBA. These professions are attracting those of us who have both business and people skills but aren’t particularly interested in controlling and influencing the specific behaviors of other people as a primary job function.
Thanks for great staff you are bringing. Many people are scared to start a business because there risk averse and i used to be one of them. I left my job 2 months ago and started a project with little capital and i believe in it. I just got a tender which is 1 week old to supplier Laboratory equipment to University. Believe it or not, my adversaries when i quit are now becoming my best partners. Lets create it.
Reading through it, it seems so obvious, but it is not(or was not, to me at least).
I seem to have confused one for the other, or see management as something that should inherently have the business knowledge first, just as you state in your post. But looking back to quite some years of real-life big company experience, I feel quite a few managers don’t show any evidence of having the needed business skills. It might even be the underlying cause for all the internal communication on how entrepreneurship is something wanted, but in practice there seems no real ground to cultivate entrepreneurship in any way.
From the title and experience, I could even draw the conclusion there are only a few rare places where business and management can coexist in balance, and this balance can only exists if business is the leading power.
The “unsuited for political-social aspects of management” , as Barbara describes, sure seems to fit me, but in a management-prevailing company these political-social aspects seem to be needed to get on on the management-system and get yourself a career.
I better get in to a smaller company, the chances I will be closer to business and can use business skills seems quite high to me…..
Looking forward to the crash course!!!
I’m a little surprised by the suggestion that this site is not management focused, especially coming from its author. At least in terms of the reading list, I would almost suggest there is more of a management focus than a “business skills” focus. In fact, I don’t really have a complaint with the reading list, but I would like to see some more suggestions for books covering the more technical aspects of business like finance, operations, strategy, economics, etc. I’ve found the PMBA reading list useful as a supplement to my traditional MBA classes, even though I know that conflicts with the original intent of the list. Its well known that MBA programs have a tendency to focus more on the analytics and not enough on people, and supplementing traditional MBA classes with this reading list helped offset that problem for me. Conversely, I don’t feel that a person would be fully competent analyzing or making decisions about non-management business issues (referring to the terminology from this post) simply by reading this reading list. The more quantitative and complex business skills relating to operations, finance, economics, valuation, etc. are not covered in these readings. Please don’t take this as being overly critical, I love the site and the reading list, I’m making an observation about what you can and can’t learn from this reading list. If some books like “Valuation” from McKinsey & Co were added, there would be a heavier dose of the technical “business skills”.