In the simplest form of business enterprise one person is responsible for all aspects of the life of the enterprise.  Selling lemonade from your front sidewalk involves all the aspects of business that are found in the largest corporations; the differences being in the scale of the enterprise and in its complexity.  One person, let's say his name is Peter, decides that there might be a market for lemonade; he uses his savings to buy the materials, borrows the equipment, produces the product, markets the product, and, after paying back any loans or expenses, uses whatever income remains to finance further operations.  The success or failure of his operation is dependent only on his imagination, skill, and energy; he doesn't have to share the profits or the glory with anyone else and has no one to blame if it fails.

Peter proceeds to put his profits back into the expansion of the business.  Eventually his business turns into the largest of it's kind with world wide sales of lemonade exceeding all others.  He no longer mixes the lemonade himself, or is solely responsible for the promotions, or the real estate, or the sales, or the financing, or for determining the markets or for any one part of the operation.  In fact the product may bear little resemblance to his original lemonade, what with government regulations and innovations that came in part from the many people he had to hire to accomplish the expansion.

Initially the help that Peter needed wasn't technical, he was pretty good at all aspects of his enterprise, he simply needed more people as extensions of his hands not for any additional expertise.  As his enterprise grew the demands of the operations exceeded his experience and additional technical help was necessary.  More importantly however, he needed help keeping track of all the schedules, conflicts, appointments, regulations, and technical help at his disposal.  His role became more conceptual and less hands-on practical, which, he discovered, was where he was actually most valuable after all.

Part of the people he had to hire were specialists; lemonade tasters, accountants, salesmen, and Architects, and part were people whose specialty was simply making the organization run, irrespective of whether the product was lemonade or hubcaps.  In other words to make the enterprise work efficiently Peter had to hire a certain number of people whose only mission was to facilitate the people who were actually accomplishing something measurable.

It's hard to imagine but Peter's ultimate success actually depended on a whole bunch of people who didn't know a damn thing about lemonade but were really good at finding and organizing people who did.  Some where between initial success and ultimate success managers became important.  Even more surprising is the realization that Peter probably didn't know exactly when that happened; one day he's struggling along with his technicians doing just fine and the next he needs to have someone to help him manage them.

Peter ended up with two broad categories of people; those who were involved directly in the production and sale of the lemonade and those involved in facilitating the production and sale of the lemonade.  Actually it wasn't quite this simple, there was another category of help; technical managers, specialists who managed whole groups of specialists.  Ah Ha, the birth of the professional manager, the facilitator, the person whose value lay in his ability to help other people to do the actual work, and to do it efficiently and effectively enough to almost pay the manager's salary.

It seems clear that you can't get to be the biggest lemonade maker in the world all by your self.  You have to trust people to help you and reward them for their efforts.  You also have to be willing to delegate at least some of the authority and responsibility to those whom you trust, and in the process to give up some of the glory that comes with success as well as (whew!) some of the responsibility for the possibility of failure.

What are the characteristics of a manager that make them so important in the scheme of things, and why would someone want to do something that wasn't directly productive?

One can only deduce that managers must like success just like the technical people and their job must require skill because the purely technical people weren't as good at managing as the managers.  The answers, it seems, have to come from looking at the enterprise from a broader perspective than just one person and his vision.  A vision is simply a vision until someone facilitates it....that must be the thing that managers do, facilitate!  Good management then would be doing a really good job facilitating things and bad management would be getting in the way of getting things done.  If you don't get much done you'll probably fail whereas if you get a lot done you have a pretty good chance at success.  At least in part then, success means good management and failure means bad management.

In many enterprises, like the lemonade business, growth or change is a part of the business.  Along with the growth or change the demand for management skills also changes; more management skills are needed as the business grows, just as innovation and technical skills must improve.  At the earlier stages of growth technical managers do quite well managing everything, but as the enterprise gets bigger the need for professional managers with a broader viewpoint than one specific aspect of the business, are needed.  The necessary viewpoint is one that encompasses all of the activities of the enterprise, keeping a balance between sales, production, and finance as well as all other activities of the enterprise.  The role of the manager then becomes to provide a mission and a strategy for the organization as a whole as well as all of the operations within the enterprise, and to facilitate the functioning of each of the organization's specialties.

To become successful Peter had to select his help carefully.  He chose only those people who complemented his abilities and extended his reach, allowing him to better utilize his time; facilitating his productivity.  He certainly would have avoided hiring people whose efforts might have been redundant and people whose ideas about what lemonade is were different from his.

I think I'm finally getting close to being able to define what a manager is and determine whether he's good or not.  First and foremost a manager must be a facilitator; someone who is able to help other people do their jobs.   He must share the goals and aspirations of his employer.  He must be willing to accept only a part of the responsibility for the outcome and that only indirectly.  He must have a general knowledge of all aspects of the portion of the business with which he is involved and be interested in the outcome of the whole as well as his segment.  He must be willing to not only accept change, but to introduce it if the results would better meet the mission and strategy of the total enterprise, even if the change seems to  reduce his influence.  The environment of the enterprise should, as a matter of course, encourage and reward people to attempt to work themselves out of their jobs.

A good manager must be willing and able to personally grow and change with the enterprise.  That doesn't mean that he can't know how to make lemonade (so much the better) but he must be willing to delegate expertise in a particular area so that his energies can be more productively spent on facilitating the outcome of the total product.   A good manager is one who can change from being a good lemonade maker to becoming a facilitator of good lemonade makers.

The higher the position in the organizational hierarchy the less the necessity for occupational specific management skills and the more important the general administrative and  motivational skills of the manager.  Technical people with management skills are better suited to managing technical operations than administrative managers; a lemonade taster is probably not very well suited to becoming the CEO of a lemonade company, and the CEO should probably stay away from lemonade tasting.

1.  In a growth business there will be an increasing need to delegate; as the size and complexity of an enterprise increase the amount of effort necessary to maintain the enterprise also increases.  If everyone in the enterprise was a lemonade taster working one 8 hour shift you probably wouldn't need more than one manager, but with tasters, mixers, buyers, sellers, and all the other skills the enterprise needs to be the best you need a lot of managers.  The more complex the enterprise the more managers you need to coordinate the various activities within the enterprise.  You can either make the organization less complex or pretty much count on needing more managers to keep the whole operation functioning anywhere near peak efficiency and effectiveness.

2.  Part of the purpose of management in high growth organizations is to develop and implement the systems necessary to deal with the increasing complexity of the organization and to minimize the perceived necessity by individual managers to create their own, usually conflicting, sub environments.  An organization's growth must be carefully programmed to avoid having more managers than are actually needed; there's something about large organizations that encourages managers who are left to their own devices to reproduce at an appalling rate, and too many managers just get in the way.

3.  In a growth environment or in a large organization the management role can increasingly involve planning organization wide issues; coordinating many different disciplines, encouraging and enabling positive (mission consistent) performance, defining roles with a clarity of purpose, and encouraging and facilitating more appropriate market responses.  The problem is that it's hard to put an absolute value on planning because planning involves tomorrow and we always feel like we really need to spend our time feeding the alligators today.  On top of that we might get hit by a truck so why plan at all?  Without being able to plan managers couldn't really be managers, and since we agree that we need managers, we have to let them plan, I guess that's better than waiting to get hit by a truck.

4.  Management style is largely determined by the individual manager's need to shape his environment to facilitate his own capabilities or objectives.  We as human beings tend to judge our environment by what we feel are our own abilities and expectations and seek out or create the environment that we as expect to be the most sympathetic to our own needs.  The problem comes when you have a bunch of managers all creating their own environments.

5.  A good manager will maintain the vision of the organization as a whole and he will acknowledge that his individual success is dependent on the success of the organization. So how do we avoid the problems associated with a bunch of managers creating their own independent environments?  One way is to limit their roles and another is to facilitate the managers activities, and that's probably going to be a manager of some type, conceivably even a manager of the managers.

6. The vision of an enterprise must be relayed down through all levels of an enterprise and consistently implemented or the possibility of the failure of the whole organization will be increased.  

7. Change and growth are normal and healthy for all organizations.  Managers should encourage change and growth, facilitate the activities of the organizations mission, and they should have as a goal working themselves out of their jobs.