A pathetic generation of managers

Companies are forever undergoing processes of change and reorganisation. Managers are expected to be on top form always and everywhere. The mobile, the internet and internal meetings gnaw relentlessly away at their time, and on top of this, they have their “own” work to do. I just have to think back to my former role as the manager of a correctional treatment centre for criminals and head of an authority with about 250 employees to remember how hard it can be to be a good, hands-on manager. After having filled my diary with “obligatory things”, approximately 30 per cent of my time remained for my own work, which involved being available to my employees, strategic thinking, building external and internal relations, handling the media, paying unannounced visits to “the chalk face” and dealing with emergencies. I don’t doubt that I was considered a manager with a distracted look, shackled to his mobile phone. But is this anything new?“Time is money,” as Benjamin Franklin said back in 1751. And since then, we’ve had the railway, airplane, car, phone, fax, computer, washing machine, dishwasher, vacuum cleaner and many other time-saving inventions. In his book The Power of Positive Thinking from 1952, Norman Vincent Peale wrote: “We do not realize how accelerated the rate of our lives has become, or the speed at which we are driving ourselves. Many people are destroying their physical bodies by this pace, but what is even more tragic, they are tearing their minds and souls to shreds as well…. The character of our thoughts determines pace. When the mind goes rushing on pell-mell from one feverish attitude to another it becomes feverish and the result is a state bordering on petulance. The pace of modern life must be reduced if we are not to suffer profoundly from its debilitating over-stimulation and super-excitement.”A little further on, he writes: “In a sense this is a pathetic generation, especially in the great cities because of the effect of nervous tension, synthetic excitement, and noise: but the malady extends into the country districts also, for the air waves transmit tension.”A pathetic generation?