A few mates & I were discussing what an IT manager should really do, and we came up with this - to put it in a context that tech people will appreciate - they are there to provide an abstraction layer - call it the MAL (Management Abstraction Layer) - insulating the IT people from the unintelligible instructions at the management layer and translating them into something that will work at the IT tech layer. They arent there to create new problems for the techs (which is our experience). Face it, tech people's brains are not wired up to deal with management nonsense - this is why they are good techs. And its why good tech managers are such a scarce breed.