With few exceptions, management theorists suffer from having too much experience in a limited spectrum of organizations. This ailment is almost universal and its victims includes Hamming, so in the vernacular, take his – and my – pronouncements cum grano.

Bell Labs is not a common laboratory environment although it does have the management goodness of being a mixture of academic (at least pseudo,) and most of the time, corporate. As such it is representative of neither type and is, in many ways, unique.

What Hamming is talking about, not incorrectly but limitedly, is a technique of long recognition called ‘Management By Walking Around’. The aspect he is dealing with is management of self as opposed to the more common aspects of management of organization and membership. To condense things into a short story, the way I would ask you to think about the door metaphor is to learn when you close the door, when you leave the door open, and when you go out the door and seek other people. (The latter is part of what is missing in the quotations and probably in the treatise.) Consider the difference in the situation of people who call on you and people you call upon. Both interactions are important but the differences need be understood.

As example, I would mention Albert Einstein. He learned this early and enough so that he could compensate for the shortage of people visiting him in later years. But he was famous for standing up in the middle of a discussion and saying “I have to work now” and even if he was in his own home, leaving and “‘shutting the door’.

Message, learn how to balance among the three states, and learn what balance is right for what you do and who you are. That’s the heart of any form of management. Its dealing with the exceptions that get managers their pay, not dealing with the regularities. And this goes for self-management as well.