il buono, il brutto, il cattivo
The Good

For a short time I worked for a company set up by some Aussies near reading. They had some half decent kit - GPS/GPRS units to fit to vehicles not only for tracking but for mobile internet too. The boss of marketing was called Colin and he was a top notch chap. He'd worked for the MD and money men before in Oz, and so was more than happy to sign p for a move halfway round the world - not least because it would leave him minted if it took off.

He already had some classical sales people (the "hit the phones", cold-caller types) and took me on from the dole because I was more your FMCG account manager type back then, and they'd paid six figures for some customer research that was going to give us solid gold leads.

The offices were in some converted farm buildings looking out over fiels - you could sit at your desk and watch deer, hares, and all kinds of wildlife, and the other people in the business were all diamonds.

The trouble was, they were late entrants to the market; a lot of the big logistics fleets already had similar (if lower-spec) kit installed, so we were very reliant on the research guy coming up with really good, hot leads that wouldn't need much hard selling before they signed up.

And after three or four weeks, it became very clear they'd managed to pick a fat ginger beardy twunt who'd basically charged six figures to re-type the Yellow Pages out. I'd forgotten more about research that this guy would ever know.

Colin kept me on for another couple of weeks to try the cold calling approach, but I hated it and wasn't very good at it, and it showed. We went to see one lead together, and afterwards we just sat down and - without a hint of bad feeling or recriminations - agreed to go our separate ways. I wasn't entitled to a pay-off, as I was still inside my probationary period, but he made sure I got an extra week's wages anyway. Alas, the company staggered on for another couple of months, then it all went tits up and I've no idea what became of Colin. I hope he's ok. (This is relevant because I think Colin's boss was the bad manager - he took a good idea but implemented it way too late when the market was already saturated.)

The Bad
Mark was a bright young thing brought in to head up a new style of product management team in the logistics business I worked for in Birmingham in the early 90s. He thought he had the gift of the gab, and it worked to the extent that he talked himself into this new and v high profile job (not just in our company, but the whole industry).

Our biggest customer at the time used to call their main monthly promotional vehicle their "Drive Brand". Mark had to give a presentation to their PLC board spent all his time on his creaky Compaq monochrome laptop (state of the art at the time) putting together something in Powerpoint. He wasn't a natural - I did most of the PC work, and another guy called Neil gave him most of the content. Critically, though, Mark kept the Drive Brand work to himself.

Two weeks later we all sat at a swanky boardroom, across from proper City directors (FTSE 500 at least) while Mark expounded on the best way to apply the "Dry Band". He didn't last long after that.

The Ugly

My current boss, Nick, is an engineer by training and mindset, and used redundancy money in the early 90s to set up business himself in his shed 15 years ago, and he has grown it to employ 25 people. Kudos for that.

But, in common with a lot of business founders, he's used to insisting on being involved in all the detail and taking all the decisions. He'll say stuff like "bring me solutions, not problems", but won't delegate any authority to exercise them without his say-so, and when you suggest the solution he wants all the details of the thought process used to arrive at it i.e. he wants to know the problems themselves.

He's fantastically inarticulate - meetings with him can take five hours to discuss the first agenda point, and anyone with something at or above GCSE English will end up frustrated and guessing what he means before he's finishes saying it, which in turn makes him angry and frustrated so he shouts and personalises his comments to make them, frankly, dangerously close to the type of bullying that'd have him strung up by the ankles at any industrial tribunal.

He flat out refuses to set any deadlines, which means it's impossible to use any kind of project management on any of the work we do; - customer deadlines are treated as mere aspirations at best and annoying constraints at worst. And, nobody in the business has had a development review for the past two years, putting him in breach of contract with every single staff member.

But over the past four years I've gone from finding him totally infuriating to seeing that, while it takes him forever to communicate something or even think it through, he does usually come up with a good answer/suggestion/solution. And he knows he's the main limiting factor on further business growth, he just can't quite steel himself to hire an Ops manager to run the detailed stuff for him. (He did try once but the guy he hired got so pissed off with having no authority he left after two weeks.) He's not an utterly bad boss, just terribly clumsy at dealing with people.
( shinyshinyscalp less a man, more a way of life, Fri 11 Jun 2010, 16:08, 2 replies)

The Aussies could almost read?

(Pie of Meat ___°¬¯O¯____\o/_____/\_,____Y¯¯Y, Fri 11 Jun 2010, 20:10, closed)

The ugly
I suggest you buy Nick (anonymously if necessary) the book 'How I learned to let my workers lead', by Ralph Stayer.

It's short, well-written interesting and a bit like a bed time story. It'll also show him the benefits of hands-off management.
(sugar_tits, Sat 12 Jun 2010, 18:44, closed)