The first Myth of Management in South Africa is that it exists. The second Myth of Management is that Success equals Skill. One will also find that talent in sales and marketing, or even an upswing in the economy, have been traditionally been interpreted as Managerial Ability.

Corporations are Hierarchical Organizations. One tends to find that they behave very much like septic tanks and the really big chunks find their way to the top. But, as in all human enterprises, work seeks the lowest hierarchical level.

What is sad is that the more that managers are promoted beyond their level of competence the greater they are confused. The manager that is both incompetent and confused has a tendency to assign jobs to those least able to do them. Inevitably, all the work in the corporation flows towards the competent person until the competent person is submerged. The competent and overworked person will then fail. The competent person will then either be fired for incompetence or will resign out of frustration. Either way, the competent person is seen as a failure. 

The incompetent person who remains in the corporation then gets promoted to fill the vacuum left by the competent person. This is the formula to becoming a manager. Hang around long enough and you will get promoted.

Advice for would-be managers :

1.Never be first to do anything. In fact, don't do anything. That way you can never fail. If you have something to do, and you put it off long enough, the chances are someone else will do it for you.

2.The more time you spend in reporting on what you are doing, the less time you have to do anything. Stability is achieved when you spend all your time reporting on the nothing you are doing.

3.If a thing is done wrong often enough, it becomes right.

4.No executive devotes effort to proving himself wrong.

The real art of living comes with a fuller understanding of how corporations work. Then make it work for you. One has to recognise the irrefutable logic of managerial style. 

For example ;  Managers cannot recognise a true crisis, so they tend to arbitrarily select events and convert them into crises. They then over-react.

This is how they justify the space they occupy. What one needs to do is to let them feel wanted. The enlightened worker will create the illusion of a crisis in the hope that it will be acted on. To beat the corporation, make your problem their problem.

The squeaky hinge gets the oil.

But the archetypal manager has never gone out on a limb to, God forbid, make a decision. He will, therefore, call a meeting. It is a fairly sound proposition that one man's brain plus one other will produce about one half as many ideas as one man would have produced alone. This is an exponential progression that leads us to an inevitable : The Creative Meeting with four or more people. Which will achieve precisely Nothing.

Creativity varies inversely with the number of cooks involved with the broth.

This problem is brought about by the aforementioned managers' fear of doing Anything and the fact that corporations can't hold more than one idea at a time....thus even complementary ideas are seen as competitive. Big corporations are always guided by Mottos. This would be one overriding Simple Idea. This Motto stops all further thinking, and ideas will then endure and prosper in inverse proportion to their soundness and validity.

Internal consistency is valued more highly than efficiency.

Nobody really knows what is going on anywhere in the corporation. In spite of all the reporting done by managers. In triplicate. This would be because bad news encounters a high impedance in flowing upwards and strategically important information travels most surely towards those with a lesser need to know.

Most importantly, remember that a memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer.

The Meeting that was called will result in the issuing of another Memorandum. This Memorandum will be the fruits of a conflict that lead to a Compromise. A Compromise will always be more expensive than either of the suggestions it is compromising. In this case the Compromise was to set in motion a Project. The Project being a Committee to study the rescheduling of Meetings. It is a truism of business that carelessly planned Projects take three times as long to complete than was expected. A carefully planned Project will take twice as long. The cost and effort required to alter the course of a Project increases geometrically with time. Regardless of whether the Project expands or contracts, the administrative overheads will continue to grow at a steady rate. In this system, useless work drives out useful work.

One man's red tape is another man's system.

SURVIVAL GUIDE for those who have to survive the Corporation ;

1. If you can't convince them, confuse them.

2. When you don't know what to do, walk fast and look worried.

PEARLS OF WISDOM for those who wish create better Corporations ;

A. If you want a track team to win the high jump, you find one person who can jump seven feet, not seven people who can jump one foot.

B. A chicken doesn't stop scratching just because the worms are scarce.