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Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

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Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#231

Post by ygaf »

arjie wrote: post #107
wpietri wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a worrying trend of treating staff as equally capable but untrusted cogs in a wheel, and metricising performance. That's a great way of summing up what I've heard called "managerialism". There's a theory behind, e.g., the MBA that a competent manager can manage anything. That what one manages makes no difference as long as you're a real manager. One of the corollaries of that theory is that all one has to…

This may not be true. Let's take the case of Stephen Smale. An incredibly smart man who would go on to win a Fields Medal. And yet, without someone providing the structure within which to work and without an external motivation, a mildly mediocre graduate student. All the credit for his work goes to him, of course. But one can easily imagine him completely flaming out with a different department head and advisor. It…

Some of the most interesting posts happen by accident.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#232

Post by willhslade »

rattray wrote: post #196
sevensor wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From ground level, though, it's really easy to see the dysfunctional cultures growing up around metrics. At the factory where I used to work, we'd zig-zag from metric to metric. Yield one quarter, Cpk the next, scrap rate the quarter after that. Special cross-departmental teams to manage the metric. Regardless of which metric was chosen, people would do really dumb things to try to meet it. If scrap rate was the metr…

> The better managers translated the quantitative metrics into qualitative guidance for their teams. The worse managers provided no such buffer and instead made their teams achieve metrics by any means necessary. This seems like a key insight. Metrics are key to good management – but metrics are for the managers, not for the teams. Managers that pass metrics directly down to their teams as goals aren't doing their jo…

Guys, this one is self aware!

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#233

Post by sqeaky »

codys wrote: post #227
rattray wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The better managers translated the quantitative metrics into qualitative guidance for their teams. The worse managers provided no such buffer and instead made their teams achieve metrics by any means necessary. This seems like a key insight. Metrics are key to good management – but metrics are for the managers, not for the teams. Managers that pass metrics directly down to their teams as goals aren't doing their jo…

> Metrics are key to good management This doesn't follow from the GP's comment. All we know from that comment is that Metrics + some managers = bad.

Parachutes are key to survival when jumping from airplanes. Doesn't mean they always work or are always used correctly.

Maybe this is a matter of necessary but not sufficient? I have no strong opinion, I am just pointing at a grey area.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#234

Post by randcraw »

adrianN wrote: post #39
randcraw wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have the teachers rate each other anonymously. The cream and dross will emerge, as will hard workers and shirkers.

If you define "the cream" as those who play the politics game best, then yes.

You must rate teachers. Using explicit external criteria, which as the article indicates, is inherently manipulative and biased, and thus counterproductive. Or you can use implicit internal criteria -- feedback from the participants who were hired to embody the objective function, to walk the walk. Given the tradeoffs, what better way is there to judge than anonymous peer review?

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#235

Post by tnecniv »

dagw wrote: post #73
pdimitar wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really though, what is there in an university that justifies a dedicated team of managers? One person in power (say, the dean) is enough to make sure grants are coming on time, and negotiate those beforehand. They need one accountant to make sure salaries, taxes etc. are in the legal bounds and people receive what they were promised. Honest question: what else is needed? Most of the managerial work I've witnessed in…

Really though, what is there in an university that justifies a dedicated team of managers? The same thing there is in any company with several thousand employees (let's not even start to consider the administrative hassle of dealing with several thousand students). Probably a lot more actually, since very few companies are doing research in oriental languages, nano technology, abstract algebra and contemporary music…

Not to mention some of these places have billion dollar annual budgets.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#236

Post by sevensor »

rattray wrote: post #196
sevensor wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From ground level, though, it's really easy to see the dysfunctional cultures growing up around metrics. At the factory where I used to work, we'd zig-zag from metric to metric. Yield one quarter, Cpk the next, scrap rate the quarter after that. Special cross-departmental teams to manage the metric. Regardless of which metric was chosen, people would do really dumb things to try to meet it. If scrap rate was the metr…

> The better managers translated the quantitative metrics into qualitative guidance for their teams. The worse managers provided no such buffer and instead made their teams achieve metrics by any means necessary. This seems like a key insight. Metrics are key to good management – but metrics are for the managers, not for the teams. Managers that pass metrics directly down to their teams as goals aren't doing their jo…

Agreed. What I left out is that being a good manager can be really hard. If this quarter, the metric is scrap, and you've already exceeded your scrap budget, you have to be willing to tell your people to scrap bad material anyway. You have to do that, knowing that you're going to get raked over the coals in the managers' meeting. Knowing that it's going to count against you at review time. Knowing that the people you manage mostly don't understand that you're all that stands between them and the torrent of abuse. Middle management is a hard job.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#237

Post by undersuit »

mathperson wrote: post #230
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think this theory makes much sense when you examine it. But it's excellent at justifying a caste system, one where all workers are controlled by wise managers, and where there's a stable hierarchy of executives above that. I note that the hierarchy established is basically equivalent to those of feudalism. It also has the handy property of justifying high compensation for managers and executives; since work…

What is an IC? I think it should mean something like senior engineer but I've only seen this acronym in the context of intelligent community

Internal Consultant?

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#238

Post by Azkar »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #51
dasmoth wrote: post #22

“If you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however, results do not come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible result being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to…

It shouldn't be a surprise given the fact that physics was revolutionized by a patent clerk. Additionally, having a relaxing job with lots of free time doesn't just free you to explore hard problems, it also promotes creativity. This is because stress is the ultimate creativity killer. Thus these sorts of jobs are really a recipe for deep thinking.

Solutions usually come from people who see in the problem only an interesting puzzle, and whose qualifications would never satisfy a select committee. -- John Gall in Systemantics[1]

A very short read, and quite interesting. It touches on a lot of the same points already made in this thread (people will game metrics, etc). The biggest argument that the book makes that is trying to set up a system to accomplish something will cause the system to do everything but accomplish its goal, which leads to the above quote. You can't set up a system to achieve a goal, only set up an environment that allows the goal to be achieved.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#239

Post by mdturnerphys »

mathperson wrote: post #230
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think this theory makes much sense when you examine it. But it's excellent at justifying a caste system, one where all workers are controlled by wise managers, and where there's a stable hierarchy of executives above that. I note that the hierarchy established is basically equivalent to those of feudalism. It also has the handy property of justifying high compensation for managers and executives; since work…

What is an IC? I think it should mean something like senior engineer but I've only seen this acronym in the context of intelligent community

Individual Contributor (i.e. not a manager). It's a standard term at Microsoft, but I don't know how widely it's used elsewhere.
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