The Power of Management Styles

The rigid requirements of management style are not without their helpful purposes, however. Therein lies the awful dilemma of modern leadership. The chief executive helps set the management style. If he does not for his own decisions insist on the requirement f completed staff work, neither will his subordinates. The result would certainly be catastrophic. The large, complex organization cannot effectively execute its day-to-day tasks without constant, careful study of its operations, without carefully systematic and documented inputs to its operating decisions. The Henry Ford Fashion of hunch is not enough.

Yet at the apex of the organization the central decisions about the future cannot be effectively facilitated with the kinds of materials that the method of "completed staff work" provides. Top decisions of certain limited kinds, of course, can be facilitated by this kind of staff work- decisions rearing legitimate extrapolations about the required size of future plan facilities  location of certain distributions  international markets to enter with existing products and the capital requirements for such ventures.