Imagination is Important Than Knowledge - Discover Why Einstein Was Right

A favourite story at management meetings is that of the three stone cutters who were asked what they were doing.  The first replied: “I am making a living”.  The second kept on hammering while he said: “I’m doing the best job of stone cutting in the entire country”.  The third one looked up with a visionary gleam in his eyes and said: “I am building a cathedral”.

The third man is, of course, the true manager.  The first man knows what he wants to get out of the work and manages to do so.  He is likely to give a “fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay.”  But he is not a manager and will never be one.

It is the second man who is a problem. Workmanship is essential, without it no work can flourish, in fact, an organization demoralizes as if it does not demand of its members the most scrupulous workmanship they are capable of. But there is always a danger that the true workers, the true professionals, will believe that they are accomplishing something when in effect they are just polishing stones or collecting footnotes. Workmanship must be encouraged in the business enterprise.  But it must always be related to the needs of the whole.

The majority of managers in any business enterprise are, like the second man, concerned with specialized work. But this striving for professional workmanship in functional and specialized work is also a danger.  It tends to direct managers vision and efforts away from the goals of the business. The functional work becomes an end in itself.  In far too many instances the functional manager no longer measures his or her performance by its contribution to the enterprise, but only by his or her own professional criteria of workmanship. The functional manager tends to appraise subordinate by their craftsmanship, to reward and to promote them accordingly. Such managers resent demands made on them for the sake of business performance as interference with “good engineering”, “smooth production”, or “hard-hitting selling”.

The functional managers legitimate desire for workmanship becomes, unless counterbalanced, the centrifugal force which tears the enterprise apart and converts it into a loose confederation of functional empires, each concerned only with its own craft, each jealously guarding its own “secrets”, each bent on enlarging its own domain rather than on building the business as a whole. (Drucker, 1996)