The great myth is the manager as orchestra conductor.

Peter Drucker said the manager is both composer and conductor. It's very grand and

glorious, but Henry Mintzberg thinks it's a myth. It's this idea of standing on a pedestal and you wave your baton and accounting comes in, and you wave it somewhere else and marketing chimes in with accounting, and they all sound very glorious. But management is more like orchestra conducting during rehearsals, when everything is going wrong. Mintzberg researched the manager in his latest book and says:

Then there are all these lists of the qualities of the effective manager. So I said, well, for the sake of a better world, here's a comprehensive list of the qualities of an effective manager, combined from all the lists—and there are 50 or so items on it! Put kryptonite on the list, and even Superman wouldn't succeed as a manager.

So I talk about what I call "the inevitably flawed manager." We're all flawed, but basically, effective managers are people whose flaws are not fatal under the circumstances. 

Maybe the best managers are simply ordinary, healthy people who aren't too screwed up.