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On a cold and rainy weeknight in the early spring of 2010, I treated myself to a light movie (Valentine’s Day) at a small movie theatre. Only a handful of moviegoers were there that night.  Before the film, I discussed movies generally with the manager, who had been playing cards on his office computer.  He had just one employee working.  She was acting as cashier, concessions clerk, and film projectionist.  The image of the manager playing solitare on his computer while the employee covered these functions reminded me of something that has bothered me about American management more generally.  This in turn prompted me to come upon an insight regarding managing and presiding (which in turn prompted me to write this post).
It struck me that the manager of the small theatre was essentially presiding.  That is to say, he was literally “sitting before.”  He misunderstood management as “being there” in case there are any problems that would compromise the theatre’s viability.  But with just one employee doing conventional tasks, the likelihood of such a manager being called into action for any “macro” problems was pretty remote.  I would argue that he was confusing presiding (something a president does) with managing.  To manage is to be actively engaged in the operations of an organization; it is not to “sit before.”  In other words, being the manager is not a free pass out of taking part in operations.  For example, the theatre manager could have manned the concession stand (or ticket counter) even if the other employee was not busy. The manager - employee distinction has been overdrawn in American business.  In effect, management has been replaced by presiding.

What makes the “management by presiding” oversight particularly interesting is that the reverse has been the case among presidents of large companies (and the US), who essentially manage.  The president of Microsoft, for example, does not function as a figure head.  Rather, he has a managerial function.  I submit that virtually every large American business is misusing the title “president” (and vice-president).  Essentially, what they mean by “president” is just another upper-level manager (with the emphasis on upper-level).  I think it could be argued that very large businesses could use real presidents, whose role it is to act as the figure-head—actively intervening only when intestine arguing within or a major incident compromising the continued viability of the company occur.  An ongoing management role would undercut such a president’s credibility (and power) in stepping in when there really is a major problem.  We see such undercutting in the modern US Presidents, whose ongoing partisanship has compromised the respect they would need in intervening in a major crisis facing the US.  The overwhelming majority of US Presidents have spent their “presiding capital” in putting out bush fires…hence they have too little water left for the rare but potentially devestating major forest fire.

Therefore,  in the US, we have small managers acting like presidents, and harried presidents acting like managers.  I suggest that the “management vs. leadership” fad that so mesmerized American business schools in the 1980s finally be replaced by “managing vs. presiding” because we need to clarify these two roles.  A potentially interesting question involves where to place “leadership” in this new dichotomy.
We should resist the temptation to apply “leader” to both managing and presiding.  Leadership too often in presiding undercuts that role (as one can lead the way to a bush fire), and leadership applied to management at a low organizational level can backfire as presumptuous and pretentious. Leadership applies to presiding only when a president 1) stands for the entire organization or polity in mapping out a general direction that the management/government can follow or 2) actively intervenes in a crisis that theatens the entire organization or polity.  Leadership applies to managing only when operational tasks or legislation are informed by a change in principles or ideal.  Just as managing should not be switched with presiding, leadership should not be applied willy nilly just because it sounds good.

Without realizing it, I was essentially following such a fad when I wrote my dissertation on leadership (and ethics) after swimming through a decade of the “leadership vs. management” fad. I have since dove deep into ethical and political theory to touch a more solid intellectual foundation.  From this vantage-point, I have looked back up at the water’s surface to see the frogs still playing on the surface—jumping from lilly pad to lilly pad as if the green patches were foundations.  For a while, I published articles in the Journal of Business Ethics, only to have a reviewer (and a section editor—a lawyer actually) so obviously not understand the philosophy applied yet still, in a presumptuous manner, procede nonetheless to pass judgment on that which they did not understand.  You can’t fight ignorance, especially when it is puffed up with itself and in a position of power. Would it kill a business ethicist to admit to not understanding Nietzsche, for example?  A while back, I received an email from a business ethics “scholar” boasting of having taught a college course on the philosopher after having read one or two of his books.  Incroyable!  Nietzsche would call such pretentious weakness utterly emetic. The literature on “corporate citizenship”—another fad following on the heels of corporate social responsibility in business ethics—is no better. Here “scholars” who have not studied political theory (beyond a few books) presume to spout their ideology qua scholarship.  I mention all this by way of uncovering the squalid state of the “academic” field that ran with “management vs. leadership” in the 1980s (and into the 1990s).  I would argue now that ethical principles (i.e., business ethics) are not the primary vantage-point from which to study “management vs. leadership.”  One would do better to consult organization theory and the leadership literature in political science.  I would like to think that twenty-first scholarship would put an end the ideological fads masquerading as scholarship and the related dilettantes that true scholars excessively tolerated during the last half of the twentieth century. However, the continued dearth of solid academic scholarship in business ethics and the continued wandering of its herd animals onto extrinsic pastures suggests that we will have to wait a while longer for the decadence of the twentieth century to finally die out.  There are of course exceptions to the rule.  Dr. William C. Frederick, for example, who was one of my professors when I was in graduate school, did some diving of his own. He transcended the superficial fad of corporate social responsibility by swimming down to the more solid rock of Ecology in order to apply principles of that science to human organization.  I am proud to think of Bill as one of my teachers.  We both began our dives in the early 1990s—perhaps we were both tacitly rendering a “verdict by direction” on the extant field of business ethics that had become preoccupied with corporate social responsibility (as if it constituted an ethical principle).  As scholars, both Bill and I wanted something more substantive intellectually.  As human beings, we don’t often know completely why we make changes of direction; we tend not to dive deep enough to question what we are doing and what changes we plan to make.  Yet from hindsight the reasons can be plain as day.

The practice of managers presiding and presiders managing demonstrates the innane tyranny of the status quo wherein doing simply follows doing.  That is: too many people not thinking about what they are doing (or not doing). Too many small-time American managers are like cows, chewing their cud while “lower” herd animals do the heavy lifting.  In true, such managers are herd animals themselves. There is no reason why someone who has a manager title can’t lift too…it comes down to laziness and presumptuousness utilizing “presiding” as a subterfuge.  Furthermore, there is no reason why people in authentic presider offices need to run around like rabbits in order to impose (or reproduce) themselves on others.