Middle Management

NPR’s Marketplace recently aired an interview with Stanford University’s Professor Nicholas Bloom on the topic of middle management. It was ridiculously hilarious to me, a professional manager for the past many years, that someone even thought of studying this topic.

Companies big or small, Indian or America, pursue pretty much one thing: profit. (There are exceptions; but we can statistically ignore them.) At the end of the day, the owners and investors of the company care just about only the bottom line. What happens in-between are inconvenient business necessities. They therefore ask only one question at the end: which way generates more profit, given the constrains the society imposed on the business (laws, social contracts, environment, etc.).

And, for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, all businesses created the middle management layer for one compelling reason: it works.

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