Making vs Managing

I began the first part of my career as a manager. I was trained to look at graphs and discern patterns and find flaws and optimize systems. “Take a thing and make it better (alternatively: make it suck less)” was the general mandate.

Then I built a dog training business and taught myself to code to build an app. The dog training business is gone but the lessons remain and ever since I’m tinkering and building and hacking.

I’ve transitioned from the perspective of a manager to that of a maker. I’ve realized that these perspectives are night and day of one another. I suspect that managing is incompatible with making.

As a manager I would be trying to zoom out and look further out into the future. I was trained to look for problems. I should think ahead, predict what could go wrong, strategize about competitors. My bias is to think about what could go wrong and how to mitigate downside.

Managing rewards talking. Managing rewards clarity and sounding smart. Managing rewards ideas.

Success for a manager is measured in convincing others - specifically, others on your own side. Convincing employees to be motivated and focused. Convincing investors you have it all figured out. Convincing executives the problems are someone else’s fault.

As a maker I abstract away complexity. I know I don’t have it all figured out, but I know that I need to get to the next step. I don’t need to have steps 1-100 figured out because my focus is on this problem right in front of my face. Narrowing and scoping down the problem is rewarded because it makes goals achievable and hastens the pace of moving to the next problem.

My bias is to think about what could go right. I don’t need to have steps 3-5 figured out to make hacking on step 1 valid. There’s multiple ways to solve a problem and engineer a solution. “That’s a tomorrow problem” has become a mantra.

Validation as a maker does not come from the consensus but rather from having found the narrow niche who resonates. Sometimes the niche is myself and me alone, though I will admit I hold this value in visceral tension inside of me.

Making is a path of optimism and branching possibilities. Managing is a path of determinism and do nots.

I’m not sure that it’s possible for a manager to make. I don’t mean the weak version of the statement - “exhibiting the principles of managing is not conducive to making” - but rather strong one - “the person who embodies a manager may not be capable of making.” Managers freeze and tense when presented with the opportunity to make. Understandably so, for it may be their intuition signaling what their conscious mind does not know: that all of their instincts are backwards when it comes to creating.