Capability and Management

"The best strategy for managing a business, or any enterprise, is to find the most capable people and give them as much authority as possible."

Discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the opinion stated above. Support your views with reasons and/or examples from your own experience, observations, or reading.

Perhaps, it may seem advisable that one should give the most capable person the maximum amount of authority. After all, merit should decide reward. I would have agreed if it was only about the reward and not management. 

My opinion is that management needs more than just being capable in some discipline. Although it is true that the best way of getting a thing done is to give it to the most capable person, it is also true that management skills and capability are not directly related. For example, a company may have a very capable programmer, but that does not make him the ideal candidate to manage the engineering division. Even if a person is the best talent on board, it is not necessary that the person will be a good manager. 

Capability may be one of the key requirements to become a manager, but it is certainly not the only one. In fact, a manager's leadership qualities, communication skills, the ability to network and vision are equally, if not more, important.

A good example that demonstrated this point is the famous technical company, Google. The company has been founded by technical people and lives on technology. Nevertheless, it demands more than technical capability from its managers. The focus is more on a broad-based personality than on capability in any one single discipline.

Another thing that needs to be taken care of is interest. Even if a person is deemed capable and has a broad-based personality, it is not necessary that the person will be interested in management. Forcing more authority on an unwilling employee can have disastrous results, to say the least. The company may even end up loosing a capable resource who would have been much better being left to do what he does best. 

Concluding, a capable person is a valuable resource for the company. Many time people with capability in a discipline want to focus on their own area and are not concerned with the management (as long as it does not interfere too much in their work!). On the other hand, some of them may be actually interested in management and may be actually good at it too. Nevertheless, to assume that every capable person will be interested in management and will be successful at it is faulty at best.