Managers: A Thermodynamic Need for Complexity?

Since getting into academic administration, I have tried to learn more about how to be a better leader and manager (and no, the two are not synonymous, although they are equally important). As an academic, I’ve mostly learned by reading so that’s what I started to do. The most important thing I’ve learned from my reading is the importance of good and careful observational skills. Not just observing by watching body language, but carefully listening and reading of e-mails/memos. This past week I stumbled upon randsinrepose.com, the musings of a manager in the tech world, himself a former software engineer. It’s funny and entertaining, but also contains great observations and nuggets from his practical experience.

Since I’m also preparing for classes this upcoming semester, where I will be teaching statistical thermodynamics (P-Chem 2 for my students) and second semester General Chemistry (covering introductory thermodynamics), the article that caught my eye was Entropy Crushers. In this article, the author (Rands) explains why project managers are crucial and important when an organization grows in complexity. You don’t need them in a small start-up, but as the organization grows so does the chaos. Thus, a good and capable project manager acts as an “Entropy Crusher” to keep production moving along as efficiently as possible. There are of course bad project managers and pointy-haired bosses.

Rands’ definition of a good manager: “A good project manager is one who elegantly and deftly handles information. They know what structured meetings need to exist to gather information; they artfully understand how to gather additional essential information in the hallways; and they instinctively manage to move that gathered information to the right people and the right teams at the right time.” He goes on to address the main concerns of software engineers with the introduction of project managers or their equivalent, since engineers are often suspicious (often with good reason) with these middle-men. Do they actually do any work? The author pulls no punches: “The irony of the arrival of crap project managers is that you’re effectively punishing inefficiency with useless bureaucracy, which, wait for it, creates more inefficiency.”

In some ways university faculty resemble engineers in tech companies. (In other ways they are not.) You’ve got a group of highly skilled people with cutting-edge expertise (at least research-wise) in their area of specialty. They are independent-minded, sometimes lacking in social graces, and have beat out significant competition to land a coveted faculty position, so sometimes they come with an ego. To run a department consisting of these folks smoothly, so they can get their best work done, requires good leadership and management skills. Otherwise you end up with dysfunctional departments, where time and energy is sucked up into some black hole, and you will have trouble hiring capable people who will happily go somewhere else.

There are many qualities one can list in a good manager, and some are listed in Rands’ definition. I’d like to point out one more before I launch into some thermodynamics. In my experience, one of the most important elements is trust. If you’re a designated leader or manager in a department who is not trusted by its members, there will be trouble aplenty (to put it mildly). Hence, building trust is key for a new manager, especially if coming from the outside. In my current department, where I’m a known quantity, the trust was built up over the years before I became chair. When I worked in a new start-up institution for a short stint, trust was built by meeting regularly with people both within and outside my area, listening very carefully, and figuring out how the organization really functioned.

But since I’m a science geek, let’s briefly discuss entropy. First, it is not chaos. It has to do with counting and chunking. But for the purposes of today’s post, a useful working definition is that entropy is what drives chemistry by allowing the dissipation of heat. Here’s my geeky allusion to being a good manager. You avoid getting into a situation where pent-up energy, built over time, leads to the explosion blowing everything apart. This is chemistry – just not the type you desire, if you’re trying to run a complex organization. It’s a great way to get to thermodynamic equilibrium or chemistry death where nothing useful will happen subsequently.

There’s another way that you can utilize entropy to drive chemistry – through a series of steps that dissipates the heat proportionately over time. Our cells do this by (geek alert!) coupling endergonic and exergonic reactions. That’s how biomass and complexity can be built up while taking advantage of the second law of thermodynamics. Proteins, acting as catalysts, allow our cells to take this route and avoid the pent-up energy approach. I suspect that the solution to the puzzle of the origin of life lies in how molecules in an appropriate environment start to take different roles. Some will act as catalysts, and in doing so will build up complexity so as to better dissipate heat according to the second law. Entropy, far from leading to chaos, can drive the evolution to complexity. (It can also lead to explosive death.) But those catalysts are needed! That perhaps is the role of the good manager. The role of catalysts sounds very much like the definition Rands provided. I’d say they are not so much entropy crushers but entropy leakers!