 About this time in the course, you might be asking yourself when we are going to get to the meat of the course. Here we are spending all this time on history lessons. When are we going to get to what we have to do? The answer is not the one that most would prefer. You do not build your house upon the sand or it comes down the first time it is seriously challenged. Look back over what we have covered and it is building vision. It is building an alternative understanding. It is setting a new foundation that will be solid. Before this course, you have been provided an alternative view, one based on personal potency and overcoming others. This study provides an understanding that the only people with power are those who are privileged. The certainty of the alternative of your being the source of all human power needs to become the foundation. I have little to say about administrative management. This is not because it is a simple subject but because our cultural orientation is to potency of authority and it is so intense and so focused for us that my address will be more towards seeing it in a new light. It will be learning to approach it other than through its own visual distortions that make it so difficult to see alternatives. So what do you have to do to survive in our world? The answer in business is different for different people. For workers it is employment. It is accepting direction of those in authority in order to earn a living. It is working for a living. The answer in administrative leadership is not really so much like this. The leader has an established business role to play and failure to go along with it will mean loss of position. There are norms that are stricter than any experienced in working environment. For me as a working professional, it is delivery of what someone else values. It is meeting the needs and wants of other people who are willing and able to pay to receive what I offer. We have to return to that most challenging understanding of administrative authority granted as a privilege. It had its origins in delivery of value in terms of protection of the public from threat. It was an effective way to gather and to see to the needs through leader directed structured efforts. Like ships at sea, the early ruler assured that the efforts of many came together in cooperative ways. It was authority directing the actions of many. In a sense, it was like the kids of a family keeping an eye out for each other in the schoolyard. When together, the bully would have to find someone else to pick on. It came with structure, with regulation of behavior to cooperative purposes. It came with the discovery of power in bringing people together for what people valued. Feudal leadership grew from this seed, seeking the strength of larger gatherings and structuring the environment for peasants to prosper in peace among each other with some security against intrusion of outsiders. It provided both a predictable environment for them to live and work, and it provided stability. Some might call it stability, others might term it the dark ages. There was little reason to change or improve things. There was great resistance to change. It also structured a division of sorts, a social division of privileged and common families. And with the coming of the business corporation, it provided a privilege based way to bring the efforts of employees, the new commoners, into leader directed coordination. Once again, the administrative approach was able to bring order out of chaos. This time, the chaos left by the loss of central family purpose in the larger business. Administrative management developed, but came with baggage. It came with structure and with comfort of assigned purpose. But it also came with the social class distinctions. It came with a structured way to order the efforts of commoners. But it also came with inherent effect of stagnation. It came with potency with the way of the privileged leaders to enter into effective rule over the resources of many. But it also came with denial of any counter purpose of commoners. It came into this new commercial chaos with great promise of potentials that can be reached when people's efforts are gathered and directed to corporate projects. It came with the promise that those in charge would provide order and protection to those who provided their time and effort to the directed corporate efforts. What it obviously lacked was guidance of the human family. The new corporate business was not really a family endeavor, not some expansion of what family leaders used for taking care of their own members. There was a new and inherently impersonal economic purpose. It was profit. It was simply earning more from operating the business than it took to run the business. This new focus was an opportunity for those who were oriented to administration. It was a place where they could use their expertise in running things to direct large masses of people into structured and purposeful corporate efforts. The disconnect with historical purpose was almost immediate. These new leaders were human beings. They valued the same things as others, including the value of trust relations. That was always the heart of the family. They came to form their own leader family, people who shared their purpose and could be trusted to share the work of running the corporation to good effect. The challenge is that family has its own purpose and it is not profit. It is caring for others of the family. It is trust relations that is valued. And in the case of corporate leader family, it was a new direction of confusion and chaos. There was family purpose and there was profit. They were not always aligned. The solution followed naturally, even as had their formation of the administrative family of leaders. The purpose of having this new family was getting people in the corporation to work in a structured and generally cooperative effort. If the family had something else, then it made sense to hire subordinates to see the profitable operation while the family saw to its own purposes. The division between family leadership and the hired help was set. The division from profit generation was also initiated as the family was set in place to bring structure and general purpose to the operating parts of the corporation. The us and them relationship between hired leadership and hired help was established. One of the greater benefits of administrative approach is in its ability to bring people to coordinate their efforts. It provides central purpose that is able to redirect people from their personal preferences to efforts that are based on a central direction. This is the heart of potency and administrative management. Even those with dissimilar purposes can be brought together to gain a result. One source for administrative approach is seen in the operation of the army. It is gathering people for some corporate purpose that is so intensely valued that people surrender their time and effort to direction of skilled military leaders. It is more than just pay. It is even more than that wonderful sense of togetherness that military members can experience. It is a general purpose so valued that people will allow themselves to be directed into harm's way to see to their purpose. As in the army, the source of structure is a core of officers with internal leadership structure. The general leads the officer core and generally works through colonels. The colonels work through junior officers. It is highly structured in its approach to organization. Flag pole management is one term for the result. The general holds the flag, the symbol of authority. The nearer an officer is to the flag, the closer he is to dealing with that most senior officer and the more important he is seen to be and the greater his effect on the actions of what the military organization does. Access to powerful leaders is a measure of influence on both leadership and the larger organization. It is common to find the same sort of arrangement being honored in large commercial efforts with the leader family holding the flag. Ex-military officers are often brought into the business leadership families. The training and experience military officers receive in their positions is generally valued in civilian structures. There is also the familiarity with the government as a potential customer. I bring this up due to another aspect of the anomaly encountered in modern corporate organizations. Senior corporate officers often deal directly with chief accountants and personnel managers. They work directly with auditors and other internal management authorities where we will come to see the profitable work of the commercial corporation is completing a value cycle with customers. These administrative support people are often given greater influence in administration than those who direct profit-generating responsibilities. The result is in personnel or accounting goals that are compete for priority against efforts that accomplish profitable operation. Consider the position of the Office of Automation Management. We commonly have a fairly senior and influential employee answering directly to senior leadership even though their efforts are only supportive of efforts of others. Their common activities have little effect on the performance cycle with customers that even could earn income. Yet their projects often get greater support than performance improvement in the production area. Consider that the importance of a person to a corporation is often reflected in what they are paid and that the commoner workers are nowhere near the top in pay. It is not that there is anything inherently wrong in this but that the focus is not on what the organization accomplishes not on profitable operation but upon its internal efforts that may not have good effect on profit. Fly-Po Management is an element in most corporate management structures. In its operation it promotes a competition among officers to gain personal influence. It includes that common challenge that competition kills performance. It leads to waste instead of accomplishment. It involves officer time and effort that produces nothing for the larger corporation and adds cost instead of supporting profitable operations. In a curious negative application we can see the isolation of the production area as a way to minimize the influence of performance-oriented people on the larger operation of the corporate business. It is valuable to see how performance efforts differ from the operation of the larger corporation. This is not just to see how it works but to see how modern corporate structure can interfere with its own operation and how its operations can challenge its structure. In this, the personnel effort of management people seeking influence is just one minor challenge. Influence is personal, not corporate. It is an attempt to gain effective personal power at the expense of both other employees and of the corporation. On the performance side, influence is the denial of teaming. It is one person's effort without involvement of the team or the team leader. It is distraction. The larger effect is by employee actions taken as part of the paid employee efforts that have nothing to do with either the leader family purpose or the organization's performance purpose. With this orientation provided by Taylor's demonstrated effects the search for influence is among the efforts that can be eliminated without loss to either leader family purposes or organizational preferences. Our common approach to administrative management structure is by responsibility for some area of expertise. The officer in charge divides his or her area of responsibility into subordinate areas and delegates responsibilities to subordinates. This requires the initiating officer to assure sufficient resources to do the work in the subordinate areas and includes a responsibility to coordinate their efforts to best assure the senior level assignment. A facility management responsibility is set upon a manager to assure the continuation and usefulness of the physical plant. This manager is set into authority over civil engineers and maintenance efforts appropriate to maintain and improve the facilities that support the larger corporate effort. A supply management responsibility is set upon a manager to assure the availability of supplies and equipment for direction to the wide-ranging needs of corporate effort. Authority is granted over equipment maintenance specialists, order clerks, and others who can take part in assuring the corporation has needed supplies and equipment. The operations manager is given responsibility for assuring the productive operation and given authority over all those who work within that area, over all those workers and supporting staff and managers. It provides a workable structure. It provides a means to hold the individual leaders to task based on an area of responsibility set upon their individual offices. And just that quickly, we can also see one of the major shortcomings of this approach to structure. The individual offices have isolated duties. Each has its own operating area to address. This provides little support for teaming. If these areas are to team, it will be a personal action by those leaders to see two purposes that are outside their areas of expertise and beyond the duties assigned to their area. Again, these are usually intelligent human beings. They will do what they can to coordinate with and perhaps team with other areas of assigned responsibilities. They will do so in spite of their boss having assumed responsibility for their coordination. Demonstrating your interest by doing your senior officer's job for him or her can be either received as a personal support or as a challenge. That is someone else's opinion. It can be an encouragement for advancement or for dismissal. Voluntary teaming with managers responsible for other areas can be punished. That encourages isolation of responsible officers based on established areas of responsibility. And then we can add goals and objectives, special purpose altering assignments from senior leadership that are distracts us from performance. One previously mentioned example in my experience came as a civilian employee working for the Army. It was during a political concern that people with AIDS were being discriminated against for something they could not control. The administrative implementation was a program to prevent that discrimination by federal employees and was implemented by taking supervisors away from our productive efforts to receive special training. We were informed that AIDS was a set of symptoms, not a true disease. And we were to keep any knowledge we had concerning any employee with AIDS to ourselves, not informing other workers who might otherwise discriminate against them. That, of course, was simple waste. It was already common knowledge that AIDS resulted from a virus that was somewhat contagious. Exposing workers without their knowledge and permission to a potentially contagious person with an incurable disease was criminal behavior. Addressing that administrative goal and its waste, that potentially threatened employees was driven by an administrative objective. The lesson, the welfare of the common employees is not a high priority for administrative leadership. And then there is the isolation of performance process for each area-based assignment. Those who are made responsible are the accepted experts and the processes they use to meet the duties and responsibilities assigned. Again, working for the Army as a low-level supervisor, I took a quick look at the property tracking system. It had an annual reporting of trackable property by those who were responsible for each item and paperwork for recording and tracking any transfers that did occur. The organization where I was employed had three workers and a supervisor involved in operating their tracking system with tracking property as a higher headquarters goal. As an efficiency specialist, I noted that the three workers could physically visit and observe the condition of all the track property once a month, both assuring effective care and maintenance, and doing so with an order of magnitude increase and assurance. Not only that, it would support the group doing the transfer of property, creating their own records instead of requiring others to do it for them. Still further, it would be a service provided to those responsible for property, instead of giving them non-productive work to do. There was no response. At that time, only silence. It was an unwanted improvement in operating the organization under the administrative concept. Workers were still being hired as performance units, and it was not the leader's job to tell them how to do their work. They already had a management system in place, and it worked. In a modern administrative structure, efficiency of operation may be a concern, but not one that leads easily to action. The very idea that management might be in charge of what operating people would do was just unthinkable. The administrative purpose is running the organization. It hires people to do the productive work of the organization, and they do. Efficiency of operation only becomes a concern when there is a competitive challenge from outside the organization. Administrative leadership treats performance more as a responsibility than as a purpose. Performance management is generally approached as just one more skill area that can be delegated responsibility and provided with appropriate resources to be successful in its operation. Administration will provide such coordination with other parts of the organization as is required for proper operation. Teaming with other areas is not the preferred administrative method of operation. The result of effective delegation is responsibility for an area of employee efforts and authority over sufficient resource assets to reasonably assure that the desired result is attained. Delegation does not have any inherent product, nothing that has to be accomplished or delivered as a result of actions taken. Delegation is how performance matters have been traditionally addressed within an administrative area where it comes to specific results. The administrative tool is assignment. I have to pause here to honor administrative management for the refinement and quality of our knowledge of assignment. Assignment served an obvious need in administrative management. It was how specifically valued results could be set into the responsibility of some specific officer or employee. For us, the working rule is that assignments are only made effectively to one who has authority over sufficient assets to complete the assignment. It begins with delegation of authority over sufficient assets to support a performance success. The classic assignment begins with something to be gained through the efforts of those who receive the assignment. Assignment is a performance result to accomplish. It involves a joint effort, a negotiation sufficient to assure the assigning authority that there is performance approach that will use the delegated resources to achieve what is assigned. It also assures the one who receives the assignment that performance is possible and accordingly to be his or her responsibility. Negotiation often involves agreement on a performance approach or process that will be employed in that performance, again assuring potential for accomplishment. The assignment then goes to setting responsibility for a result upon the one receiving the assignment. That usually includes some indication that the success has been accomplished and can include any number of internal requirements to show completion of planned steps or progress reporting so that the work effort can be tracked to completion. Meaning these management support requirements is part of the assignment. Completion is noted when the final product is delivered. It may be the product itself. It may be some indication that the product has been delivered elsewhere. It may be some indirect evidence of completion. It may be a report from someone who receives the product or service. The one who received the assignment is accountable for generating the planned result. While the need to do effective assignments is universally recognized and the management skills for setting effective assignments are universally valued, there are challenges to using this tool in administrative structures. The most immediate is delegation. The setting of authority over subordinates. Assignments are only normally made to those in authority over resources sufficient to see to accomplishment. The challenge is that this authorized person who receives the assignment may have to work through subordinates who are delegated their own local authority over the necessary resources. It is not uncommon to have three or four managers accountable for some work that is being performed by just a few employees. It is one of the reasons there is an Eiffel Tower effect in administrative organizations. The more the effort is given through assignments, the more work it makes for higher level managers. The other challenge is the need to assign some performance results to multiple authorities that are otherwise independent and with specific responsibilities already set as a basis for their resources teaming tends to be inhibited. Administration has effectively reacted to this need by attempting to initiate more complex efforts through reallocation of resources to projects limiting the authority of delegation recipients over the resources used in the projects. We even have program management as a separated administrative expertise. It is hiring additional managers to gain performance using the resources delegated to other areas of authority. Using these special management resources generally involves additional cost without contribution to any increase in organizational performance. It is also important to see that an assignment is the appropriate technique for administrative leadership to gain performance in production areas. Simply directing the efforts to make the worker get poor results. Poor performance threatens the continuation of the corporation. Delegation is used to provide production area with adequate resources, but productive results are assigned. A balance has been reached, but it does include considerable waste. For another way to understand delegation, consider the general approach used in feudal governance. The king owned the land and parceled it out to Barons. They were delegated authority over their feudal lands and the people upon them with responsibility to the king for so operating their area that the king received the ability to lay taxes and conscript the common people into public service efforts. Fuedal delegation was granted over the resources of the kingdom, the land as its commercial base, and the people who were on the land. It was the duty of the baron to maintain the land and the people for the benefit of the king's rule. Our corporation feud is over the resources of the business. It is authority over the working assets, both physical and human, that effectively belong to the corporation. It has physical ownership of the physical plant, supplies and materials, and it has effective ownership of the human resources purchased through employment contracts. It is the duty of the subordinate corporate officer to maintain the corporate assets for the benefit of the corporate family's rule. Where the king might have the people support a royal guard service which does nothing for the people. The corporate leadership might have a corporate vehicle for leader transport that serves neither production nor supportive purposes. Establishing administrative management for corporate business raised some new challenges. The most interesting of these was the effective ownership of people. It was in such stark and open conflict with the personal understandings and leaning of the American workers as to threaten loss of corporate family privilege. In even greater challenge, people owned the United States. Citizens were potent and rights and privileges that challenged the very concept of feudal delegation. They were only brought into the corporate effort by contract, not by exercise of privilege. Their contracts by the nature of the law of master and service, servant, were limited. There was an effective legal tug award to put conditions and limits on these employment contracts. Citizens and their corporate unions limited the authority of corporate leadership over employees and corporate leadership worked with political leadership to expand it. This resulted in a rather amazing relationship that at once was rich and complicated. It also simple enough for the uneducated worker to understand it. It addressed the authority of an employer to reasonably direct the paid time and effort of workers to business purposes. And now we leap over that fence and look at the performance aspects of this arrangement. The feudal rule approach contained a basic teaming of the peasants and barons for the purpose of their joint betterment. There was a vague teaming inherent in the feudal rule. The baron had to take care of his peasants if they were to be productive and serve the rule of the king. The king had to take care of his barons to assure that they were able to direct the efforts and harvest the productivity of the peasants. They were in it together, even if for different purposes. This was not the case in the corporate organization. Their link was limited to the limits of employment. It was a worker who did not show sufficient zeal for their work that was released. Their bond relation was only based on what they did. If the worker found employment elsewhere to be preferable, they picked up and left. That sense of teaming was almost gone. The welfare of the one no longer required seek to the welfare of the other. That shared sense of purpose was missing. But teaming is a human value where corporate leadership was continuously backing out of direct management, distancing itself from the direct relationship to workers. They teamed with each other for their own purposes. They teamed to protect one another from the acts of privilege that might otherwise threaten their employment. Impersonal management does not support personal loyalty. But then, administrator does not answer to the needs and wants of the performance people. It runs things. That lack of loyalty in workers has been a continuing challenge for those in administrative management authority. And they have responded with goals and objectives. This predictably included rewarding those who showed loyalty more than those who did not. Attempting to arrange competitive rewards. Purges of loyalty has not worked well. Setting workers in competition has not worked well. The challenge of worker loyalty has continued. The most successful strategy is not corporate at all. It isn't showing loyalty to employees. It is leaders personally or corporately teaming with them, which has remained a source of chaos for administrative leadership. Individual leaders have been successful in establishing loyalty by giving it personal support. It is a human effect that is not well supported by most corporate leader efforts. After all, what does it say if leadership has to direct subordinate managers by policy statements to show personal consideration for workers? The building of privilege in operating a corporate entity also creates some anomalies. The most important, of course, is indicated by the long-standing split between management and labor. The very purpose of management, its first and most important reason to exist, is not to establish privilege. It is to bring the resources of the organization together to gain a value of result. The immediate challenge of this purpose-based division addresses in competence in management a rather harsh word of judgment. The obvious answer does not resolve this. It is that leadership is there to run the organization, not to manage it. They hire subordinates to do the management, and it does seem that they failed in hiring the right people into positions of authority. That is the nature of privilege. It is holding other people accountable. If you have a problem with the way things are being run, take it up with the hired subordinate managers. Another administrative approach is to blame it on those recalcitrant employees who refuse to get with the program. Of course, that one is not used much, as it again points out to someone else, workers, being corporately in charge. That also denies privilege. Performance thinking has not simply been rejected, but actively and intentionally pushed out. It is an offense to those who have privilege, as it would try to measure what corporate leaders accomplish as if they were also commoners. We have conflicting conceptual bases for corporate activity, and conflict always limits performance. The delegation approach which authorizes managers to control assets based on duties rather than performance requirements has given a structural anomalies such as a group effort to address information security. There are most assuredly people who are trained and skilled in promoting information security, and larger corporate efforts can further enhance their effectiveness by drawing them together under appropriate supervision. The problem? They have no product. There is nothing that they produce that is an input to other elements of the organization. There is no measurable difference between the successful and failed operation of their independent function. It is unmanageable on the performance side, as there is nothing to be gained by its operation. No deliverable goods or services to be valued by others. Where performance thinking eliminates the group distributing its resources to where they could be valued, administration has no problem with it. But then the same leadership has no problem with itself, and it has nothing to deliver to be a success. Consider again the performance of a human resource office and how the office is to be managed by higher authorities. What does it produce? What does it deliver to other elements of the organization and how do they value it? It is clear that the basic need is for human resources. The challenge is that this is neither a good or a service delivered from the personnel effort, instead of delivering what other groups can value. It provides a way to get the right people. It sets work requirements upon internal customers, adding internal customer costs to the effort for gaining employees. It regulates the process on behalf of administration, working to assure that only the right people are employed, people who fill the requirements of the position of worker or of the offices and specialty areas they will occupy. But then we have a second large human resource purpose. It is supporting the employees as business resources an internal support effort that serves employees who are not the direct responsibility of the HR office. Does this involve teaming with the workers? Perhaps it is teaming with the supervisors. It is sort of hard to say how it interacts with the ability of workers to apply their time and effort to the tasks before them. It is very difficult to find something here that has to be accomplished as a benefit to the workers in their efforts. The supervisors in their efforts or the group effort and what it has to accomplish. The entire function is built on doing the right things and doing them correctly. A failure in human resource efforts is likely to end in a threat to the business. But it is unclear what has to be accomplished to prevent that result. There is almost certain to be wasted in just doing what we have learned to do. But there is little way to define it so that it might be eliminated. We do have one hard witness to an anomaly and that is payroll. We have basic authority to direct workers to their tasks and payroll by personnel is responsible to pay them for their service without supervisory consideration. The separation of work requirement from pay requirement is a basic trashing of the concept of the contract relationship. The separation of authority and responsibility is a well known and well documented bad management practice. It is universally avoided unless you are in the administrative environment. Of course, there is also the observation that earning pay by performance is not even a consideration above the glass wall. Administrative privileges running things and this is not based on delivering nothing to subordinates that they get to value. As a third witness we have budget and accounting given the purpose of receiving income from the sale of corporate products and services. With performance orientation we can address this as an element of performance one of the three necessary operational functions that assure the interrelation with external customers. And that is the life blood of the corporate business. With administrative orientation the basis for delegation of authority is the type of work being performed and the expertise required of employees to see to accomplishment of that work. This comes to focus on financial management with the recognized expertise centering in the highest level organizational officer. The delegation goes to a managing accountant and financial analyst whose personal expertise is tapped in support of administrative decisions. This is an area where flagpole management does not serve the operation of the larger organization. It puts primary duty on the office to focus on serving the needs of senior leadership both above and below the glass wall. Receipt of incoming resources is a lesser and included function within the administrative office. The obvious importance of the function is not denied but it is not the central purpose or orientation of the larger financial office. It is likely to be over resourced to assure performance and then left to its own devices. The financial needs of the performance area and its cycle with customers is not the primary purpose for the office nor its product that gets delivered to administration. In all likelihood, they receive distribution of personnel as a line item without separation of personnel who do performance work. Supplies that become the product of the organization will likely be separated but equipment expenditures in management and operation areas are less likely to be separated out than divisions of authority area expenditures. In short finance and accounting will serve as support for performance as a secondary matter to serving administration of the business. If the performance area has needs to be met it will have to compete for corporate resources with other areas. The final anomaly is a general one the right person for the job. With performance perspective the result of an effort does not increase in value or is done by the right person nor is it decreased if they are the wrong person. The product delivered to the customer is not worth more if it is manufactured by the right people. On the performance side this is the sort of detail that gets put into the black box where it will not distract from the generation of valued results. Our next lesson will be on that contentious subject of measuring performance and what we can learn from it.