Management is a practice, not a profession or science. To appreciate the true complexities of managing, we have to understand its intrinsic conundrums.

Management is learned largely through experience—which means that it’s primarily a craft—although some of the best managers make considerable use of art. They also use some science, in the form of analysis, but nowhere near as much as in the professions of, say, medicine or engineering. And that’s a good thing: The overuse of analysis, especially an obsessive reliance on measurement, gets in the way of effective managing.

Watch a manager at work, or step back from practicing management yourself, and you can begin to appreciate the wide variety of things that managers do. They champion change, join projects, handle disturbances, do deals. Managing is collaborating and controlling, doing and dealing, thinking and leading, and more—not added up, but blended together.

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