In the simplest form of business enterprise one person is responsible for all aspects of the life of the enterprise.  Selling lemonade from your front sidewalk involves all the aspects of business that are found in the largest corporations; the differences being in the scale of the enterprise and in its complexity.  One person, let's say his name is Peter, decides that there might be a market for lemonade; he uses his savings to buy the materials, borrows the equipment, produces the product, markets the product, and, after paying back any loans or expenses, uses whatever income remains to finance further operations.  The success or failure of his operation is dependent only on his imagination, skill, and energy; he doesn't have to share the profits or the glory with anyone else and has no one to blame if it fails.

Peter proceeds to put his profits back into the expansion of the business.  Eventually his business turns into the largest of it's kind with world wide sales of lemonade exceeding all others.  He no longer mixes the lemonade himself, or is solely responsible for the promotions, or the real estate, or the sales, or the financing, or for determining the markets or for any one part of the operation.  In fact the product may bear little resemblance to his original lemonade, what with government regulations and innovations that came in part from the many people he had to hire to accomplish the expansion.

Initially the help that Peter needed wasn't technical, he was pretty good at all aspects of his enterprise, he simply needed more people as extensions of his hands not for any additional expertise.  As his enterprise grew the demands of the operations exceeded his experience and additional technical help was necessary.  More importantly however, he needed help keeping track of all the schedules, conflicts, appointments, regulations, and technical help at his disposal.  His role became more conceptual and less hands-on practical, which, he discovered, was where he was actually most valuable after all.

Part of the people he had to hire were specialists; lemonade tasters, accountants, salesmen, and Architects, and part were people whose specialty was simply making the organization run, irrespective of whether the product was lemonade or hubcaps.  In other words to make the enterprise work efficiently Peter had to hire a certain number of people whose only mission was to facilitate the people who were actually accomplishing something measurable.

It's hard to imagine but Peter's ultimate success actually depended on a whole bunch of people who didn't know a damn thing about lemonade but were really good at finding and organizing people who did.  Some where between initial success and ultimate success managers became important.  Even more surprising is the realization that Peter probably didn't know exactly when that happened; one day he's struggling along with his technicians doing just fine and the next he needs to have someone to help him manage them.

Peter ended up with two broad categories of people; those who were involved directly in the production and sale of the lemonade and those involved in facilitating the production and sale of the lemonade.  Actually it wasn't quite this simple, there was another category of help; technical managers, specialists who managed whole groups of specialists.  Ah Ha, the birth of the manager, the professional facilitator, the person whose value lay in his ability to get other people to do the actual work and to do it efficiently and effectively enough to almost pay the manager's salary.

It seems clear that you can't get to be the biggest lemonade maker in the world all by your self.  You have to trust people to help you and reward them for their efforts.  You also have to be willing to delegate at least some of the authority and responsibility to those whom you trust, and in the process to give up some of the glory that comes with success as well as (whew!) some of the responsibility for the possibility of failure.

What are the characteristics of a manager that make them so important in the scheme of things, and why would someone want to do something that wasn't directly productive?

One can only deduce that managers must like success just like the technical people and their job must require skill because the purely technical people weren't as good at managing as the managers.  The answers, it seems, have to come from looking at the enterprise from a broader perspective than just one person and his vision.  A vision is simply a vision until someone facilitates it....that must be the thing that managers do, facilitate!  Good management then would be doing a really good job facilitating things and bad management would be getting in the way of getting things done.  If you don't get much done you'll probably fail whereas if you get a lot done you have a pretty good chance at success.  At least in part then, success means good management and failure means bad management.

In many enterprises, like the lemonade business, growth or change is a part of the business.  Along with the growth or change the demand for management skills also changes; more is needed as the business grows.  At the earlier stages of growth technical managers do quite well, but as the enterprise gets bigger the need for professional managers with a broader viewpoint, than one specific aspect of the business, are needed.  The necessary viewpoint is one that encompasses all of the activities of the enterprise, keeping a balance between sales, production, and finance as well as all other activities of the enterprise.  The role of the manager becomes to provide a mission and a strategy for all of the operations within the enterprise, and to facilitate the functioning of each of the organizations specialties.

To become successful Peter had to select his help carefully.  He chose only those people who complemented his abilities and extended his reach, allowing him to better utilize his time; facilitating his productivity.  He certainly would have avoided hiring people whose efforts might have been redundant and people whose ideas about what lemonade is were different from his.

I think I'm finally getting close to being able to define what a manager is and determine whether he's good or not.  First and foremost a manager must be a facilitator; someone who is able to get other people to work towards the ends he chooses.  He must share the goals and aspirations of his employer.  He must be willing to accept only a part of the responsibility for the outcome and that only indirectly.  He must have a general knowledge of all aspects of the portion of the business with which he is involved and be interested primarily in the outcome of the whole rather than his segment.  He must be willing to not only accept change, but to introduce it if the result better meets the mission and strategy of the total enterprise, even if the change seems to  reduce his influence.  The environment of the enterprise should as a matter of course encourage and reward people to attempt to work themselves out of their jobs.

A good manager must be willing and able to personally grow and change with the enterprise.  That doesn't mean that he can't know how to make lemonade (so much the better) but he must be willing to delegate expertise in a particular area so that his energies can be more productively spent on facilitating the outcome of the total product.   A good manager is one who can change from being a good lemonade maker to becoming a facilitator of good lemonade makers.

The higher the position in the organizational hierarchy the less the necessity for occupational specific management skills and the more important the general administrative and human motivational skills of the manager.  Technical people with management skills are better suited to managing technical operations than administrative managers; a lemonade taster is probably not very well suited to becoming the CEO of a lemonade company, and the CEO should probably stay away from lemonade tasting.

In a growth business there will be an increasing need to delegate; as the size and complexity of an enterprise increase the amount of effort necessary to maintain the enterprise also increases.  If everyone in the enterprise was a lemonade taster working one 8 hour shift you probably wouldn't need more than one manager, but with tasters, mixers, buyers, sellers, and all the other skills the enterprise needs to be the best you need a lot of managers.  The more complex the enterprise the more managers you need to coordinate the various activities within the enterprise.  You can either make the organization less complex or pretty much count on needing more managers to keep the whole operation functioning anywhere near peak efficiency and effectiveness.

Part of the purpose of management in high growth organizations is to develop and implement the systems necessary to deal with the increasing complexity of the organization and to minimize the perceived necessity by individual managers to create their own, usually conflicting, sub-environments.  An organization's growth must be carefully programmed to avoid having more managers than are actually needed; there's something about large organizations that encourages managers who are left to their own devices to reproduce at an appalling rate, and too many managers just get in the way.

In a growth environment or in a large organization the management role can increasingly involve organization wide issues; coordinating various disciplines, encouraging and enabling positive (mission consistent) performance, defining roles with a clarity of purpose, and encouraging and facilitating more appropriate market responses.  The problem is that it's hard to put an absolute value on planning because planning involves tomorrow and we always feel like we really need to spend our time feeding the alligators today.  On top of that we might get hit by a truck so why plan at all?  Without being able to plan managers couldn't really be managers, and since we agree that we need managers, we have to let them plan, I guess that's better than waiting to get hit by a truck.

Management style is largely determined by the individual manager's need to shape his environment to facilitate his own capabilities or objectives.  We as human beings tend to judge our environment by what we feel are our own abilities and expectations and seek out or create the environment that we as expect to be the most sympathetic to our own needs.  The problem comes when you have a bunch of managers all creating their own environments.

A good manager will maintain the vision of the organization as a whole and his end objective will acknowledge that his success is dependent on the success of the organization. So how do we avoid problems?  One way is to limit the number of managers to the minimum needed for the work at hand, so they don't have enough time to create their own environments.  Another way is to carefully create the operating environment for them, (accommodating all the good things from each of the individual managers), and another; to define roles and procedures for them in advance so they don't have any justification for fretting about what they are supposed to be doing.   So... to be sure everything works to the advantage of the Enterprise you have a manager to manage the managers.  His job is to thoroughly describe the mission, establish the strategies, and write the rule book for the enterprise as a whole (with help of course), as well as to facilitate.

Enterprises start with the vision of one (or at least a very few) and are successful to the degree that they accommodate the growth and metamorphosis of the vision and are successful utilizing the skills and talents of the less visionary.  The good manager will operate from the basis of extending the vision through growth and change as well as keeping the sense of the vision alive.  To start to make Fords in the middle of a batch of lemonade seems to be a bit out of step with what you'd expect the vision of a lemonade maker to be.

Peter didn't choose to be a manager although that's what he ultimately turned into.  He started out as a sole proprietor... A Lone Wolf Entrepreneur.  That's what he chose to be simply because it was the only way to get started and because he preferred his own vision to the visions of others, it wasn't an accident.  He had a vision and he was able to organize his vision into a viable enterprise.  He started out an organizer of things defining his own goals with concrete outcomes and ended up hiring people to facilitate his dreams.

Part of the reason Peter was successful initially was that he knew how to make and market good lemonade, and he had complete control of the operation with a clear description of authority and responsibility (himself).   It's interesting to note that his success was almost his undoing.  Because he was used to doing it all himself (and was actually very good at all of it) he had difficulty learning to delegate.  Fortunately, Peter realized that he could be even more successful if he could learn to use his help effectively; to manage and to learn to work with managers...to facilitate.
 

To summarize the ideas about managers without being dogmatic or attempting to be all inclusive, I've come up with the following general observations:

1. As an enterprise grows the organization itself needs tending to, apart from the product or service it produces.

2. In the early stages of growth (when it's small) the enterprise works quite well with primarily technical people and no managers (specialists in management).

3. At some mid-point in it's growth an enterprise needs someone to coordinate the whole show and make everything come out on time and operate smoothly and efficiently ....a facilitator ...a manager.

4. Managers can be very good for and important to the operations of an enterprise provided there aren't too many of them and provided that they are bound together by the common good of the enterprise.

5. Someone has to describe the mission and strategies of an enterprise and ensure that the whole enterprise is going in the same direction and that's probably going to be a manager of some type, conceivably even a manager of the managers.

6. The vision of an enterprise must be relayed down through all levels of an enterprise and consistently implemented or a lot of energy may be wasted and the possibility of failure will be increased.

7. Change and growth are normal and healthy within an organization and should be facilitated not discouraged by the managers.