It is with sadness that I announce the passing of one of the most significant and relevant leadership blogs – this message received yesterday:

GOODBYE

After long deliberation, I have decided to close down Slow Leadership and retire from blogging. I think I have written almost all I want to write and the extensive demands of a regular publishing schedule no longer work for me. I am also more and more conscious that I retired from active business nearly four years ago and am becoming increasingly out of touch with how things are today.

My last word is this: the very best leadership, I am convinced, is engaging in as few “managerial” activities as possible. By this I mean creating plans and budgets, setting strategies, setting up mergers and acquisitions, discussing policies, holding meetings, marketing, branding, analyzing data and the like. Nearly all such actions get in the way of real business and lie at the heart of most problems that leaders face. If you must do something, encourage and train your staff, talk with customers, monitor quality and spend as much time as you can with “non-managerial” actions like inventing new products and services and improving old ones.

Management has become a self-replicating and self-justifying process we would be better off without. People do managerial things, not because they are useful or even necessary, but because that is what they think managers are expected to do. When corporations cut payrolls to save money, they start at the bottom. That’s wrong. Begin at the top, where there are now large numbers of expensive people doing nothing useful or important to the real business, just managerial “stuff” that no one would notice missing if it went away.

Business schools need a belief in the vital importance of management to justify their own existence, so it’s no wonder they teach nothing else — although even their own data shows nearly all “managerial” activities like mergers, marketing initiatives and fancy financial engineering destroy value on a massive scale. Management today is more of a religion, based on unquestioning belief in semi-sacred texts and dead prophets, than a useful and practical way of spending time.

I think the Tao Te Ching had it right: “Doing nothing, everything gets done.” My ideal for each of you, as a manager and a leader, is that you never waste your time and talent again on any conventional “management” tasks.

Thanks to everyone for your support and interest over the past five years. I wish you all the best for the future.

Carmine Coyote.

P.S. I will leave the existing site in place until the end of the year, then take it down. If there’s anything you want to read again, now is the time! http://www.slowleadership.org/blog/

JF: Farewell Carmine, thank you for your insights, we will miss you.

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