What do managers do?

I was at a Bucks Show on the weekend, at the awesomely old-school pool hall Chalkers at Glenelg.  I played a game with Joe, who is an excellent bloke I get to see around the social circle from time-to-time, and as I successfully avoiding potting the 3-ball into the pocket I was aiming, he asked me what did I do before I became a consultant.

As I started to bore him with the details of what the business I used to oversee actually did, he stopped me with “yeah…but what was your job?”.

I had a quick think, and answered with my job title back then – General Manager.

He laughed and said “If someone could explain to me what managers actually do, that would be great”, then headed off for a pit stop.  Read more…

Who should get the milk?

In the kitchen at work the other day, I made a coffee, opened the fridge to grab the milk and there was none.  After the initial surge of disappointment and frustration passed, I put my cup of black coffee with one sugar in a safe place and commenced the trudge down the hall toward the canteen.

Got to thinking along the way – how do we work out who should get the milk?  In my area we don’t have a defined role to take care of this sort of thing, which leaves it up to everyone.  At the same time, we seem to share an assumption that menial tasks such as milk collection should not be done by ‘important people’.  So how do we work out who is important? Read more…