Before anyone can say what an AI boss should be allowed to do, the book needs a precise account of what a manager does. This chapter reads the classical and empirical literature of management, from Fayol and Drucker to Mintzberg's observation studies, and the research on job design, stress and psychological safety. From that literature and from the legal duties of an employer it derives the five management functions that the rest of the book uses as its unit of analysis: M1 Direction, M2 Evaluation, M3 Consequence, M4 Development and M5 Care. It shows who performs each function today in a hospital ward, a home-care unit and a claims team, explains why the split follows differences in reversibility, law and the person's stake, and ends with the book's first artefact: a function map.
Henri Fayol, writing in 1916 from his experience running a French coal and steel company, separated management from a firm's other activities and divided it into five elements: to plan, to organise, to command, to co-ordinate and to control (83, Fayol, 1949). His contribution was the claim that management is a function that can be described and separated from the work it manages; without that claim there would be nothing to delegate to a machine.
Peter Drucker moved the account to the person who manages, describing five operations: setting objectives, organising, motivating and communicating, establishing yardsticks of measurement, and developing people (86, Drucker, 1954). Measurement and development thus became tasks of their own. However, this prescriptive tradition describes what the organisation gets from management, not what the person managed receives or risks; neither the duty of care for health nor the person's voice appears among Fayol's elements. The book's split must cover both perspectives.
Primary topics explored
- What managers were said to do
- What managers were observed to do
- Five management functions
- Why the split matters
- Where the functions overlap
- Who performs each function today
About AI Boss
AI Boss is Book 7 of The Transformed Architecture. It examines what happens when artificial intelligence takes the manager's chair: algorithmic management of direction, evaluation, consequence, development and care, the effects on people, the management of AI agents, Europe's legal answer, and how to design an accountable AI boss, for European enterprises and public authorities.
It builds on the conclusions of Architecture as Code, AI Governance, AI Platform and Security, AI Red Team, AI Threat and The Transformed Security Architect.
Executives, line managers, HR and people leaders, works councils and trade unions, public employers, architects and AI governance leads, data protection and legal officers, procurement and programme leaders, and risk, compliance and audit.
Gunnar Nordqvist
Conceived, directed and published the books of The Transformed Architecture.
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Chapter 2: What a Manager Does: Five Management Functions and Who Performs Them in AI Boss gives the detailed explanations, practical examples and implementation patterns behind this summary.
This whitepaper belongs to “The Question” and is one of 37 drawn from the manuscript.