Bare Minimum.

Bare Minimum.

It is just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up. — Muhammad Ali

Ask AI what remains of management without leadership, and you can almost hear a digitized sigh of exasperation. This machine for disseminating polished triteness ‘believes’ that stripping leadership away would leave only the uninspiring ‘mechanical or procedural’ side of management.

It claims managers would rely solely on position, hierarchy, or coercion. They would lose the tools needed to shape culture, drive change, or define values. A bleak picture. Perhaps less bleak if we did not burden a manager’s job with leadership theories in the first place. They offer language and aspiration, but they overshadow sense and balance.

What if it were only about beating people up? Metaphorically, of course. What exactly is this mocked ‘mechanical and procedural’ side of management? While leadership theorists reinforce our inadequacy and tell us to excel at everything, we are entitled to do the bare minimum to get by. It’s just a job, after all.

So what is the bare minimum in a manager’s job? What is its irreducible scope?

Quite simply, it is about making choices in two areas: what’s on the agenda and who does what. Everything else is ornamentation. And, in the words of Bruce Lee, ‘The height of cultivation runs to simplicity; halfway cultivation runs to ornamentation.’

At this height, it becomes clear that you are not really taking decisions but making choices. We use these terms interchangeably, but they are not identical. A choice is an option available to you — what you select from. There is a menu, and it is limited. Managers make choices rather than take decisions — often with strings attached.

On agenda matters, someone has already set the stage. Your hand has been dealt. Options are constrained. Resources are committed. Projects are halfway complete, already behind schedule and over budget. Many paths are closed. To maintain some agency, it is better to speak of making choices. Re-reading Blue Ocean Strategy will not help — you are swimming deep in the red ocean.

On people matters, the distinction is sharper. Like ‘blue ocean,’ the allure of a clean slate is reinforced by the ‘right people on the bus’ metaphor from Jim Collins, who claims ‘first the people, then the direction.’

In reality, the bus is not standing still. It is already rolling down a winding road: people are screaming, some want off, others are in the wrong seats, and some are holding tight. Your choices about what happens on that bus are limited while you are driving. You cannot even see what is happening behind you.

There are no unconstrained best answers — only imperfect choices. It is restrained navigation in murky waters rather than free sailing in emerald seas.