I kind of questioned Graeber's thesis but I do think he was onto something. I think most management jobs are bullshit jobs in that they don't contribute very much but are easy and well paid. You then have a whole underclass who actually do the work. It's not too different from ancient Greece where the society depended on slavery to function. The pandemic showed that very few of our jobs are essential. A large proportion of the population in the west could be not working yet society still functioned. It's only when things slow down in the east (where things actually get made) that it causes problems.
I’ve noticed this attitude of “management is useless” and it tends to be people who don’t have a great view of the entire company that say this.
Having worked at some large companies, organization is a massive challenge. It’s not hard to get 10,000 smart people working hard. Getting them all working towards the same goal is not easy at all.
That perception comes from a fact that it's such a hard challenge that people usually fail at it. And despite failing at it hard, things tend to be sort of ok, at least in the short term.
So the perception forms that managers are bad and not that necessary.
“Management is useless” usually comes from people who have never tried it, don’t know what it means, or have had a bad manager once and hastily generalized from there.
"Government, family, and founder owned firms are usually poorly managed, while multinational, dispersed shareholder and private-equity owned firms are typically well managed."
I would say management is definitely not useless, but it's hard to evaluate manager's impact, so people who get promoted can be in fact awful managers. The only way to measure their performance seems to be the performance of the unit they manage, which is often achieved contrary to their personal impact rather than because of it.
