KA-CHING! • If there is any one proof of a man's incompetence,...

KA-CHING! • If there is any one proof of a man's incompetence,...

"If there is any one proof of a man's incompetence, it is the stagnant mentality of a worker (or a professor) who doing some small, routine job in a vast undertaking, does not care to look beyond the lever of a machine (or the lectern of a classroom), does not choose to know how the machine (or the classroom) got there or what makes his job possible, and proclaims that the management of the undertaking is parasitical and unnecessary. Managerial work--the organization and integration of human effort into purposeful, large-scale, long-range activities--is, in the realm of action, what man's conceptual faculty is in the realm of cognition. It is beyond the grasp and, therefore, is the first target of the self-arrested, sensory-perceptual mentality."

-- Ayn Rand, "The Cashing-In: The Student 'Rebellion'" in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

(For an approach to organization and management grounded in similar insights, look into "Requisite Organization," as developed by Elliot Jaques (the man who coined "mid-life crisis" and the first to use the term "culture" in a management context) and Wilfred Brown, among others.