Manager Sandwich: The Middle Manager's Survival Blog

Everywhere you go, you will find people who are just dying to be in charge, that is until they have to do something with all that sought after responsibility.  Being a leader, for those of us slugging it out in the middle manager slit trenches, is all about making decisions; mostly the unpopular kind.  The easy decisions, are well, easy. As an old boss of mine would say, "That's easy, it's a no brainer!" Of course, that is assuming easily enough that I was a complete dumbass when I came to him for his infinite wisdom.  The simplicity of my challenge completely eluded my simpleton nature. I would always tell him that if it was easy, the guys doing the job would have already fixed it.  I was trying to get him to understand a much bigger problem that he was conveniently trivializing. So we all have had a boss, a middle manager who reigned over our even lower level of management, who thought our challenges and decisions were easy.  What is worse is when we are workin

During the past twelve years, I have had the fortune of working in a rural area as well as urban environments.  Each year, on my drive to work through rural areas, I notice the fields being turned over from one crop to another.  The corn is planted in the spring after the wheat harvest, and is knee-high by July.  It dries in the fall, harvested, with the long stalks used for silage to feed cattle.  During the next spring, the ground is plugged for soybeans which dry to a golden brown in the late summer.  After harvest, the fields are then planted for winter wheat, and the cycle begins again. Throughout many conversations with co-workers and prospective employees that I have met in interviews, I have learned so much about how people make their living.  They have been performing some of the most important and long standing tasks known to civilized human beings.  There is a special care that these family farmers take while they tend to the crop cycle.  The grain doesn't grow itsel

The concept of a flat Earth dates back to the Bronze Age.  Early Greek philosophers including Pythagoras and later Aristotle were able to empirically develop the concept of a spherical Earth.  Ptolemy, hundreds of years later also used a spherical Earth model in the development of maps and the constructs of latitude and longitude.  How was it that such a developed science could be so easily dismissed in the dark ages?  For hundreds of years, the knowledge and understanding of a spherical earth was documented, yet for over 500 years you were labeled a heretic for even suggesting it.  The crews of Columbus’s initial New World Journey were terrified of the evils of over-speculated sea monsters and the inevitable fall off the edge of the world.  If you are encountering a culture shift in your workplace, then you have nothing to worry about compared what good ole’ Chris endured. Not only did Columbus need to get funding, he needed to recruit a crew of men to man the ships necessary