Newsletter No. 453

453 • 19.2.2015 5 一封家書 Letters to a Young Executive Letter 7: In Praise of the Middle Manager 9 February 2015 Dear K., One of the pleasures of reading your letters is seeing your wonderment at the new tasks and challenges you encounter in your office, which never fails to flag up a distant first experience in my memory. In your last letter you told of suddenly finding yourself managing people, endorsing leave applications and writing appraisals. Yes, you are a manager, even if your immediately prior role is that of a graduand. Management is a travail, an art, and its entry point fits the classical billing: in media res (in the middle of things). Many young men and women are hired as management trainees each year, and many of them go on to become veteran administrators who would in turn mentor their own trainees. But the word management in the job title is adjectival at best. Once you start off, you are manager. No apology. But a middle manager can be a misnomer. She doesn’t manage the middle. She’s in the middle, sandwiched between people under her and above. In the words of the freelance journalist Michael Kinsley who found himself employed as a manager in a software company in the late ’90s: ‘There are superiors to impress and subordinates to maneuver (or the other way around). Being a middle manager is performance art. And the show must go on.’ Like other forms of performance art, middle management is rewarding in itself, though not always thankful. You might have to do a nasty job once in a very long while, but never invited to ribbon-cutting. You would be asked to draft a speech, as you were last month, but never to give one. You wondered if, since your disposition is not of the control-freak type, you might perhaps do better as a manager by erring on the hands-on or micromanaging side. Well, there are as many management styles as the glasses people wear. Don’t take your tutorials from books like The Zen of Management or The Tao of Leadership . (There is a Zen or a Tao in everything, isn’t there?) Use your common sense, lest it become uncommon, and develop it into good sense. Look at the people around you. Hear what they say and, more importantly, see how they say it. The last things a middle manager needs are a low-decibel ear and a muddled head. All things in the midst or middle of a system ensure the system run, and run well too. The cogs and wheels cohere and direct, without seeming to be doing it. They are the commas, periods and semi-colons in a cogently argued essay. Readers normally don’t pay attention to them, but should any segment be mis-punctuated or unconventionally punctuated, the road to comprehension, to Knowledge and Truth, becomes bumpy. Pico Iyer likens punctuation to ‘a civic prop, a pillar that holds society upright. (A run-on sentence, its phrases piling up without division, is as unsightly as a sink piled high with dirty dishes.)’ Our job is of course not to wash dishes, but to run an office smoothly is actually not much different from keeping a kitchen going and in order. The career span of a middle manager is enormous. Theoretically, from the new suit on the block to the second-in-command in an organization, all fall within the class of middle managers. One never gets out of it unless one gets to the top—president, CEO, vice-chancellor. Loyalty and egalitarianism define membership in this class. I have had the pleasure of managing and being managed by some very interesting and genial persons in my university days. The pleasure is yours now. Yours sincerely, H. 博文貫珍 The Galleria 中大校園廣闊，建築物林立，對校外訪客甚至不少中大師生來說，中大就是個迷宮。1982年 6月，香港域多利獅子會捐贈大學校園模型一座，安放於大學正門出入閘口旁，位置醒目；另 捐訪客指南四幅，曾為不少人「指點迷津」。 這個長135厘米、闊110厘米、高80厘米的立體模型，利用不同顏色標示中大各區域，例如紅 色為大學本部；綠色代表崇基學院；黃色是新亞書院；藍色是聯合書院等，而每座建築物亦 有代號。 新建築物相繼落成，模型上的「小建築物」亦有所增加，例如1990年落成啟用的逸夫書 院、1991年的梁球琚樓、1994年落成的信和樓、王福元樓等。可是到了1990年代後期，模型 上的資料似乎停止更新；與此同時，校園到處新設不少地圖板及路標。時至今日，人們都使 用電子地圖查閱位置，校園模型失去了它的功用，成為一座見證校園發展的歷史文物。 To visitors and even some CUHK members, the campus with its hundreds of buildings is definitely a maze. In June 1982, the Lions Club of Victoria, Hong Kong donated a campus model, placed at an eye-catching location right beside the gate of the University’s main entrance. The club also donated four location maps. The model and the maps both had helped many visitors to locate the buildings. The campus model is 135cm in length, 110cm in width, and 80cm in height, using different colours to indicate different regions of the campus. For example, red is the Central Campus, green is Chung Chi George Silk/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images College, yellow is New Asia College, and blue is United College. Besides, each building is given its own alphabet code. Smaller objects were added in the model with the completion of new buildings, like Shaw College in 1990, Leung Kau Kui Building in 1991, Sino Building, and Wong Foo Yuan Building in 1994. Since the late 1990s, it seems there has been no more update. Instead, maps and road signs were set up all over the campus. Today, people prefer searching locations on electronic map. Therefore, the campus model has lost its function and became a witness of the infrastructural development of CUHK. Photo by ISO staff