Rebekah Brooks & modern management

At risk of sounding monomanic, one issue raised by the News of the World’s hacking into Milly Dowler’s phone is: what is the function of management?
We can think of the relationship between managers and the production process as lying across a spectrum*.
At one extreme, there are bosses who try to know everything - for example, the early factory owners who invented the processes they controlled and needed only unskilled labour and minimal administration by others, or Taylorite scientific managers. Among today’s prominent bosses, perhaps Jamie Dimon comes close to this extreme.
At the other extreme there is the management described by Robert Protherough and John Pick:

Maintaining a distance from that which is being managed is a key component of the modern managerial process. The achievement of modern managerial goals generally involves a high degree of mental abstraction, but little direct contact with the organization’s workers, with the production of its goods or services, or with its customers and users. (Managing Britannia p 32)

Many bosses, says Henry Mintzberg, “try to manage by remote control, disconnected from everything except the ‘big picture’” (Managing, p9)
In this context, I can believe Rebekah Brooks’ claim not to have known about Glen Mulcaire’s criminal behaviour. Such ignorance is the result of a remote control management that spends all its time on “strategy” and none on the production process; any modern boss can spend weeks in meetings solely about futile efforts to redesign a website.
In this sense, she has something in common with her friend David Cameron, as described by Philip Stephens:

Part of Mr Cameron’s problem is inattentiveness. He does not like to be burdened by paperwork.

This too is remote-control management.
And there is something to be said for this. No-one wants a control freak breathing down their neck - it’s just demotivating. And when knowledge of complex organizations is bounded, it’s entirely sensible for bosses to delegate: Cameron and Brooks’ problem is that they delegated to oafs and criminals. 
 This, though, raises the question. If remote control management doesn’t directly** monitor its workforce, what function does it serve?
Old-fashioned scientific management had an obvious rationale. It could claim to move firms closer to the production possibility frontier and so increase efficiency - a claim consistent with simple exploitation of workers.
But remote control management doesn’t bother with the production process. Yes, it’s obsessed with brand-building. But for the economy as a whole, this is a zero-sum game; Coca-Cola’s brand is a liability for Pepsi. All that obsession with strategy and growth has not led to any observable rise in aggregate trend economic growth since the heyday of more hands-on management. And studies of firm growth find that the process is largely random, suggesting that a lot of managerial effort to pursue growth is wasted. 
Which raises a possibility. Could it be that remote control managers function much as the gods did in ancient times. They get blame when things go wrong and praise when they go right, but in fact have no power at all, except that which ignorant people impute to them? They are, technically, redundant and are sustained in their lucrative positions only by superstition and ideology.
* I stress spectrum. Many management structures, such as the M-form, lie somewhere in between.
** I stress directly. Like Mafia bosses, senior managers leaves the dirty work to their underlings.

Comments

[Chris Bertram]

Usually they claim the credit when things go right and dodge the blame when things go wrong,as Rebekah Brooks is trying in this case.

[Grace]

I totally agree with the previous comment. I wonder what Rebekah would be saying if things were different.

[Alex]

Is there any evidence that News International management is particularly hands-off? Anecdotally it seems to be quite the opposite.

[chris]

Of course, there's a hypocrisy in Brooks' position of trying to take the credit when things go right and duck the blame when they go wrong.
But isn't there the opposite inconsistency among her lefty critics. I mean, if you hold her responsible for things going wrong then shouldn't you also give credit to bosses when things go right. And this leads to the standard defence of inequality: "This just shows how difficult a job management is, which is why they must be paid so much."

[Chris E]

Why is that necessarily hypocrisy? There may be many reasons why it is easier to affect things negatively than positively.

There are even studies that purport to show just this effect.

[Charles Wheeler]

"In this context, I can believe Rebekah Brooks’ claim not to have known about Glen Mulcaire’s criminal behaviour."

Is it conceivable that an 'Editor' could have read these stories and not once wondered 'how do we know this?'. If so, it takes 'remote control' management to the outer limits.

[Mil]

"Is it conceivable that an 'Editor' could have read these stories and not once wondered 'how do we know this?'"

I wonder if the same couldn't be said of colleagues in the business - or, indeed, any moderately attentive reader ...

[Churm Rincewind]

Actually, Rebekah Brooks does not claim today that she didn't know about "Glen Mulcaire's criminal behaviour". In her strangely ambiguous email to staff, she merely denies that she "knew...or sanctioned these appalling allegations" - a statement that reads (to me, at least) as carefully non-specific.

[Paul Ralley]

Are brands really a zero sum game? Many people get a security from a brand that means wants could otherwise go unfulfilled. For example, I can get second hand books from amazon (with some trust), that otherwise I perhaps would not buy.

When is your book going to come out in paperback by the way?

[Keith]

Well if leading the tory party and gutter newspapers( news is an elastic term for tits, bums, and salacious gossip and Libel ) requires you to employ criminals and oafs then a style of management that allows you to deny responsibility for the crimes, lies and bad policy is a good idea. Cameron and co are like a gangster who lives on extortion in a big mansion, you don't want to admit you know about the legs being broken do you?

[MJW]

I agree completely, working for a big multinational, most of the senior execs I come into contact with on a regular basis (not because I'm important but because I actually understand of some stuff that periodically crosses their scattergun brains) basically offer generic "insight" into the running of the business at a very high level. This is convenient because by not doing "details" they can be as contrarian and inconsistent as they like, it's somebody else's job to reconcile mutually exclusive nuggets of "genius" they hand down. It's not that they're stupid, they're highly intelligent, well educated and operate with ruthless efficiency within the confines of the bureaucracy, they just don't have much of an insight into how things actually work because that's not what they do.

[Mercy]

"I mean, if you hold her responsible for things going wrong then shouldn't you also give credit to bosses when things go right."

What's going right here? Are there leftist critics who don't think bosses can increase the surplus value extracted from workers? To a socialist, both the decreasing costs and the ethical failure are part of the same dysfunctional relationship, surely.

[Eric]

Is "lying across a spectrum" a deliberate double-entendre?

[Midlands Mike]

you could say that part of the work of the manager is precisely to ensure that the firm does not hire oafs or criminals.

[Peppone]

yes Alex Kershaw has the concept of "working towards the Fhurer" to explain how the german people cooperated (in the main) towards the final solution.

[Matthew Steeples]

Is it really right to pile all the blame on RB? I think this goes much higher and she's just being used as a convenient scapegoat. Read more in my piece at http://dasteepsspeaks.blogspot.com/2011/07/news-is-screwed.html

[Chris]

I am not sure whether you kid yourself you know something about management theory or are just dumb. R Brooks is responsible for the share price. That means she would not have any oversight of staff doing functions of producing a paper unless the share price was impacted. Between her and the printing press are middle managers who will be calling the shots. Organisations that size will delegate material decisions as close to the action as it can. The issue here seems to be internal audit which looks after both the financial and reputational wellbeing of the company.