On many occasions through my career I've heard people tell me that they have given up with planning, because external factors would always
intervene which would break the original plan.

This is a bit like saying that you won't plan out a route on a map before a car journey because there will probably be a road closed somewhere along the route, which means that the route planned will have to change, so what's the point? As long as we know the destination, we'll get there somehow...

Planning, particularly in projects, is a continuous activity, not some process of divining the future. If you think that your first cut of the plan will be the one that gets you through, you're either very lucky or rather naïve. But planning is only one element of the necessary skills of the project manager, and for most projects probably of lesser importance.

If we come back to the idea of route navigation, the idea of maps these days is an increasingly old fashioned one. SatNav has taken over the windscreen of so many people's cars that the complicated origami ritual of refolding an Ordnance Survey roadmap is a skill that's being lost. SatNav not only can plan your route, but many these days also have the intelligence, data and processing power to be constantly replanning based on current flows of traffic ahead. The perfect project planner?

Well, not really. Planning, as well as being a constant activity, also needs to be a collaborative activity. That's one of the early keys to another chest in the project manager's armoury - influence.

My wife hates SatNav. And the reason, I think, that she hates it is because it is in no way participative in it's planning process. The smooth voice barks orders, and the driver needs to blindly follow its automated commands. You have to give up complete control to the authoritarian master.

How many project managers have you worked with who've taken that approach? And how much, exactly, did you hate them?

I stumbled across an article from last year by Rob Gray at Google in the early hours of this morning (that's early as in "woken up by the eight month old" as opposed to "up all night" these days...). In it, Rob talks about seven tips that Michael Porter identified for new CEOs. It struck me that many of these rules, however, are just as applicable to new managers at any level in the company hierarchy.

One of the most rewarding pieces of my career to date was time that I spent in the middle of this decade working with first- and second-line managers at one of the UKs big telcos. Some of the people I worked with were relatively new to work generally; graduate scheme members thrown in at the deep end of management with call centre teams, or burly, surly gangs of field engineers. Some would swim, and some would quite obviously drown.

Alongside the youngsters, however, there were long-serving staff who, twenty or so years into their careers were making their first steps into management. It was with these (mostly male) management freshers that I coined the "my manager is a ****er theory." It goes something like this...

For my generation and before (and possibly after, too, but we'll come back to that), work tends to culturally be seen in terms of hierarchy, and of "us and them". I guess that this reached a politically sensitive peak in the industrial strife of the 1970s and 80s, but its legacy remains to this day. (Personally I blame the political indoctrination of 'Carry on at your Convenience", but that's another story).

Whilst political trade unionism is now the exception (if it ever really was the rule), the 'us and them' thinking tends to manifest itself in an unrealistic expectation of what management is capable of, and a crisis of confidence as a result when someone steps into a management position. In this cultural world view, managers tell us what to do, have ultimate authority, should always be right, and are therefore ultimately ****ers when they eventually show themselves to be fallible mere mortals.

When someone then steps up into a position of management, they are then confronted with the cold, hard reality of being nothing but human. For some this results in an extreme delivery of Theory X-style authority. But for most it just leads to a period of extreme self-doubt; "I am coming to realise that maybe I, too, have become a ****er".

Now this cultural positioning, whilst not unique to British work culture, is not ubiquitous across other employment markets. Australia, in particular, seems to just not really have the hierarchical expectations (as evidenced it would seem by the safety record of Qantas, for example). It will be interesting to see whether "Business 2.0" will lead to a dismantling of the British expectations of management, as democratisation and transparency of decision making could both happen in the workplace.

Underpinning all of this for me, though, is a basic challenge for managers. Good leadership tends to come from helping teams to achieve their potential. If you spend all your time just telling people what to do to try and achieve that, chances are you've turned into a ****er.