Management and Labor

The Business World can be divided in to two main classes.  Management and Labor.  The purpose of this post is to explore the Super Class called Business World or just Business for a shorter term but it is certainly one of the super classes that populate the Super Duper class called World.  The bigger purpose is to define what Business is and what Business does because it is one of the big players in the problem domain of Money.

Looking at it from my object oriented approach, Management focuses on the object structure of Business.  Labor is the functioning, heavily process oriented class that does the heavy lifting.  That is different than the more common view of Management as people in white collars in offices and workers wearing blue collars making something on the production line.  Collar color may be a way to distinguish classes of people but it does not suit my purpose although it will be a subject of future analysis.  My intent is to classify what people focus on and how they do that in order to establish a class type.  It is a slow process tho get there but this all works toward that end.

I will say one thing about the collar color division of Management and Labor.  It is not a binary thing anymore.  It is really more like collars of different primary colors of Red, Blue and Green and within each collar there are many different combinations to produce what we perceive as distinct colors.   Humans can distinguish roughly 10 million different colors.  That is an interesting thing to think about later.

Management Class tends to be educated.  The Worker Class tends to be trained.  That is less true over time.  That is due to increased specialization of things and their functions.  The nature of things that make up the business world is also changing to become more conceptual than physical.  We have outsourced our production lines to foreign countries.  We have also outsourced the performance of conceptual thing processes to foreign countries at the lowest information worker level like call centers. 

Management tends to focus on things called resources.  It structures them and their relationships in a design called a business model at the high level in order to  manipulate everything to produce outcomes called products.  Labor tends to be the workers that focus on doing actions or processes in the production of the outcome.

Workers in the business system have increasingly become educated more than trained.  This is especially true in the information business.  The role of information is growing in all business regardless if the product is information itself or and infromation guided tool like a robot on an assembly line, if we have any of those left.

Educated workers are more capable of knowing and choosing intelligently more methods of performing their own functions and processes in a business.  They do this by using their heads and choosing among the methods available to them to integrate their functions with other workers that operate within their domain of methods to produce outcome processes and functions.  To the extent that workers are now managing a range of resource things at their disposal called methods to produce their worker actions they are more like managers with independence and responsibility to operate within their assigned domain.  They are even as enabled as managers to initiate proposed changes to their own domain in which they manage or even the domain of operations a class above them to improve overall efficiency in the managerial rat race.

Both trained and educated workers are now unemployed.  Even more are under-employed not only in terms of making less money in a job below their education or trained worker skill level but in being under utilized in their current well paying job.  This segues neatly to a class of person in the Business class called Unemployed.  Perhaps they should be in the class Resources Unemployed.   Within the Employed class an underutilized person would be kind of an peson in a sub class called Employed Underutilized.  On the other hand the view of a manager that is the Employer of People might view all of those that are under their management as Underemployed.  The goal is always to get more out of them.

A well structured, integrated management system offers greater opportunity for control at the level of top management.  They pull the strings remotely that are connected by the system to all things in their business.  This is a concentration of power at the top.  It also reduces the lag time of power to have effect on anything that needs to be changed.  Everything moves faster.  The system itself presents a clarity of view regarding opportunities or actual output of opportunity statements as a function of the knowledge base of the system business.

Some persons operating in the system can see the total system structure and operations inherent in that structure because they are educated and smart.    Some of those people advance inside or outside the business.  Others become dissatisfied but what else can they do?  They can use their knowledge to change the system that should or must change but have no power within the structure to change it.  They might become whistle blowers to call attention to a serious problem or anonymous actors.  Those are the rebels with a cause.  I like those kind of people