Management Time: Who's Got the Monkey? [pdf]

I always enjoy rereading this every few years.

Similar, and even older, is the Doctrine of Completed Staff Work. It runs along the same lines, and it's advice that I've valued for many years.

https://govleaders.org//completed-staff-work.php

I keep coming back to this article in the context of agents -essentially we are bottlenecked by agents passing the next actions (the 'monkeys') back to us. This prevents us from actually delegating tasks effectively to agents.

The article outlines the following process: 1. Describe the monkey. The dialogue between a manager and a staff member must not end until appropriate next moves have been identified and clearly specified.

2. Assign the monkey. All monkeys shall be owned and handled at the lowest organizational level possible.

3. Insure the monkey. Every monkey leaving you on the back of one of your people must be covered by one of two insurance policies: (1) recommend, then act, or (2) act, then advise.

4. Check on the monkey. Proper follow-up means healthier monkeys. Every monkey should have a checkup appointment.

When combined with Karpathy's verifiability criteria to assess whether a task actually is a good candidate to hand off (perhaps step 0), this process becomes very suggestive in the context of (Claude code) agents.

Gonna spend the morning giving this a read. I'd also like to also recommend, in case any one is dreading the "ugh boss talk", the book "The Fred Factor" by Mark Sanborn [1].

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Fred-Factor-Passion-Ordinary-Extraord...

"WHY IS IT THAT MANAGERS ARE typically running out of time while their subordinates are typically running out of work?"

This was written in 1974 and times have surely changed because I never wonder this.

Instead I wonder why subordinates are typically running out of time whilst the managers seem to be typically running out of any useful work to do and instead are found doing something else.