Cobb

Executives get their direction from the desires around money, and the patience of principals. As my new fearless leader has told me, it's damn near impossible to get 50,000 cash. That's living money. That's gangster money. That is too fungible and too theivable a sum. But 10 million? That's easy. 10 million is nobody's money, it works in abstract terms and it mostly sits. But 50k is anybody's money. It flies. 10M can be risked, it connotes a professional operation in the hands of exectives. 50k cannot be risked, it connotes a precise action under strict control. When a 10M venture fails, there are a thousand reasons and plenty of blame to spread around. When a 50k venture fails there can only be a few reasons and suspects; an ass-kicking is just around the corner.

So in retrospect I realize that my fears as a professional of having to deal with shenanigans and nasty politics was precisely the thing that should indeed have kept me as a professional and not a manager. I didn't want the job of kicking ass and taking names. My own children were still babies, I hadn't yet learned to speak openly of bullshit and what somebody had better do if they wanted to keep the number of holes in their ass to one. In middle management you can do this on the force of personality, but ultimately authority devolves from the top - from the people with budget authority - the people who presumeably know how much it costs to get things done.

How expensive is money? It all depends upon how willing people are to expose it to risk, in other words what excuses they will accept when it's gone. What recourse is allowable to the funder? What does the investor need to see to make him happy? These are the reigns on executives. They need to know, or so it seems to me, how much they can get away with and for how long a period of time. How many professionals they can corral for what price and duration in order to create that fungible something for the principals. Execs put up with the petty brain spew of professionals and the petty politics of managers. The exec has to keep the ball rolling despite all of its flaws because in the end, the exec works for even harsher taskmasters; the people he talked out of their money.

Like parents among our children, we would like them to handle about as much as they can handle, but not too much. We've seen it, whatever it is, and we hope that they can deal with harsh reality at least as well as we did. The difference is of course, there is love. As parents we assume the risks - we are always sensitive to the fact that anything could happen and yet we establish to the best of our abilities the stability and illusion of control necessary for our children's growth.

I see the parallel.