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Please note the past 100 years barely includes WWI.

Professionalization of management is not a phrase I've read before, but I'm assuming it means management as a profession. The benefit here is that managers are supposed to be interchangeable gears driving a company forward. The drawback is that the "interchangeable gears" idea really doesn't work in practice.




> The drawback is that the "interchangeable gears" idea really doesn't work in practice.

No, it's not just a part you can replace overnight, but interchangeability works like it does for software engineers. If a software engineer's career takes him from a bank to Google to an airline, nobody lift an eyebrow. A professional manager can take the same journey.


> but interchangeability works like it does for software engineers.

By which you mean, it does not? A lot of harm was done in the industry by trying to make programmers interchangable.


No, by which I mean exactly what I wrote. I even gave an example.


I believe you are working with a different concept than I meant. The concept of these "interchangeable gears" is that a person can walk out of one dev/manager/retail/teaching job and walk into another in a different industry, and be completely effective on day one.

This is a concept I learned from several professors across many classes in 2 separate colleges. I've read it in management blogs too -- it's a widely held incorrect concept.




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