MODERN MANAGERS WRITE AND READ A LOT
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Written by admin on August 11, 2008 – 8:14 am
A friend of mine has a senior position in one of the world’s largest and most prestigious organizations. This organization is relentlessly profit-focused and pursues excellence in practically everything it does – with the exception of content. My friend gets about 100 e-mails every day from other staff in the organization. He ignores about 85 of them. The 15 or so e-mails he doesn’t ignore often have attachments or significant points that need to be addressed.
At least half of his day is spent dealing with these e-mails. What an incredible waste! This is a big organization with thousands of people. If each employee is ignoring 85% of the e-mail from other employees, then this is an extraordinary – hidden – productivity drain. This performance-obsessed organization is being amazingly sloppy.
I have another friend who works with a big software company. He told me that he had done some basic calculations and that, by his estimation, the company spends more on publishing content about its software (marketing materials, support documentation, etc.) than it does on writing the code that creates its software!
The management of content is now a cornerstone of good management.
A few years ago, I stood in front of an MBA class and showed them a slide of a computer. I asked how many had one of these. Every hand went up. Then I asked them to imagine that we were transported back twenty or thirty years. “If I posed the same question,” I asked them, “do you think I would get the same response?”
Old style managers didn’t use computers – they had secretaries to do that sort of typing work. Old style managers managed by walking and talking, meeting and greeting, wining and dining. Generally, the role of reading and writing was a minor one. That has all changed; today, managers spend an increasing proportion of their day reading and writing e-mails and instant messages, reading and preparing reports and presentations, and reading and writing content for intranets and public websites. Managers, and the organizations they work for, are simply not properly prepared for the explosion of content that has occurred since the early 1990s. Content management will become a cornerstone of good management in this century.
