Manager Sandwich: The Middle Manager's Survival Blog

I lived in the dorm during my first year at The University of Michigan.  It wasn't so new to me since I had started college the previous summer just after high school.  During that summer semester I lived in West Quad, and had a pretty decent introduction to college life and communal living.  I also had the privilege of having an older brother and sister who both attend U of M and lived in the same dorms. College dorm living is an experience all in its own, especially if you choose to room "blind" and live with a total stranger that the University pairs you up with.  Back then, most universities didn't use personality dimensions to pair up compatible roommates, and from the look of things, didn't really pair up people with any semblance of consideration at all.  Not only do you have to learn to live with someone that you normally wouldn't be friends with or hang out with otherwise, you also share a hallway and in my case, a communal bathroom with another f...

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 ...

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 c...