The quintessential manager

A few weeks ago, The Economic Times carried a front-page news story saying that companies are now looking for people with specific skills rather than MBAs. The Mint writes that work experience and skills are more relevant than a fancy MBA (https://www.livemint.com/education/news/work-experience-more-crucial-than-ever-for-new-mba-graduates-india-s-top-b-schools-say-11707919248573.html). Skill is something that individuals possess which enables them to do something specific. In a certain modern language, you get your hands dirty.

This raises many questions chief of which is – why does the need for specific skills render an MBA, fancy or otherwise, irrelevant? Is this a rejection of only MBAs or managers too? The idiosyncratic Professor Henry Mintzberg, a life-long critic of MBA education, wrote a book titled ‘Managers, not MBAs’, emphasizing that we need managers, not people with MBA degrees (https://mintzberg.org/books/managers-not-mbas).

Oppenheimer

I consider Robert Oppenheimer the quintessential manager – someone with a substantive skill and with a vision of not just the whole but all its constituent parts and their relationships to one another and to the principal goal. Years ago, I had taught coordination as the key management trait interpreting it to mean bringing out the best in each to get the goal accomplished. Oppenheimer achieved this in the Manhattan Project.

The film Oppenheimer, which is Christopher Nolan’s tribute to an individual he considers the most important person of the 20^th century, is lured into the trap of hagiography, and misses the crux of Oppenheimer’s achievement, inappropriately calling him the man ‘who made the bomb’. Its one-dimensional focus on Oppenheimer ends up not appreciating the fundamental roles played by thousands of physicists, chemists, metallurgists and many other scientific and other specialists.

Oppenheimer had substantive domain knowledge in Physics & Mathematics and had sufficient understanding of other disciplines to appreciate their contributions to the making of the bomb, asking probing questions in each sub-field in the making of the bomb. This becomes clear in the book ‘Oppenheimer’ by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin. Oppenheimer had distinguished himself as a physicist early in his career with three papers and becoming the first physicist in the US to start teaching the ‘new physics’ as Quantum physics or mechanics was then called. If he had confined himself to physics, the Nobel Prize was within his reach, but he wasn’t made for a single domain, but for a larger canvas.

The conquering vision

No canvas could have been bigger than the Manhattan Project. Robert Oppenheimer ‘saw’ it even before he was chosen to lead it, as soon as someone mentioned the project, immediately beginning to describe rapidly all that would be required to accomplish the intended goal. Those who were in audience recalled the ease with which he outlined all the specific areas and skills that would have to be brought together to achieve the goal. We are talking of disciplines that challenged even the brightest of minds.

Physics, which was core to the making of the bomb, had gone through a tumultuous phase since early part of the 20^th century, with Quantum physics emerging as a distinct discipline (deeply dividing the physics community) together with the development of two areas – theoretical and experimental physics, with sharply divided views over their relative merits, with no certainty that nuclear fission would work. Every branch of science was undergoing fundamental changes partly as an organic phenomenon and also as a result of the war efforts. Ethical considerations apart, the Manhattan Project was unique because it combined extremely complex intellectual problems and practical dimensions.

It is within this environment that Oppenheimer became the Director of the Manhattan project. Many of the individuals working were exceedingly brilliant men and some were acknowledged geniuses. I doubt there has ever been a project that brought together such a constellation of minds. We talk now of people management but this was something else. Allowing each their space, ensuring ego clashes were within manageable limits, not letting discussions lead their own lives, adhering to deadlines, finding solutions to problem that kept cropping up, dealing with an exacting client (the US federal government) who did not understand and appreciate the complexities and intricacies of making the world’s first atomic bomb!

Green and Greenfield project

And Oppenheimer was green! He had no experience of leading even a sizeable project, let alone a vast and complex project such as the Manhattan project, which made many doubt he could pull it off. Fortunately for him, Major General Leslie Groves of the US Army Corps of Engineers had faith.

One of the fundamental lessons for any aspiring manager can imbibe from Oppenheimer is to find ways to overcome the lack of ‘relevant experience’, learning to hold your head high even as you ask views of other people who are experts in their field. That self-confidence was central to the making of the bomb.  

In 1993, when Lou Gerstner was made the CEO of IBM, he had no background in the IT industry and yet he created a new revenue stream – services, which changed not just IBM but created a new business for anyone in the IT industry. He also transformed the way research was being conducted at IBM. Steve Jobs had no background in making animation films but revolutionized it. Or Dhirubhai Ambani in petrochemicals.

The future

The future is often a function of how we respond to changes taking place. This true of life in general and business. A disturbing trend over the last few years has been to respond to changes, whatever the cause, in an unthinking manner, often in a herd-like mindset. Standing firm is not being stubborn and recognizing this basic truth is the mark of a good manager.

Takeaways

Managers, not MBAs

Why Oppenheimer is the quintessential manager

Coordination is not a low-level function – it is core to management

Substantive understanding begets self-confidence

How we respond shapes our future