Who is he? The CEO of the world’s largest enterprise, but just before taking office he was told that for security reasons he can’t bring his Blackberry with him! Well he fought and won, his security advisors had to find a way to accommodate his love for the Blackberry.

Yes you guessed it right; he is President Obama, practically the chief executive of the United States of America, the world’s largest enterprise. But let us scratch beneath the surface, does he really love his Blackberry device per se or what the device can do for him? I’d venture to say that it is not the device but what it enables him to do... talk, exchange text messages, send the receive email messages, and browse the web while on the road.

Did you ask yourself why? Why would such a busy executive want to be connected or reachable and hence be potentially interrupted? Surely he has a very busy schedule. After all we still see many corporate managers that prefer to hide behind closed office doors guarded by several personal assistants who patrol the area to stop ordinary people from bugging and interrupting the boss.

The answer is simple, he [President Obama] is a connected manager, he wants to be in touch and he wants his staff to be able to reach him on an ad hoc basis as situations arise. He recognizes that a great executive cannot only rely on scheduled meetings, beautified and/or politicized presentations and reports but must talk, connect and be in touch with his business around him.

Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart (which today employs some 2 million people) always made a point of asking every worker he met how things were going, what problems they saw and how their store could be better. He kept his home phone number listed in the directory, and it wasn’t unusual for employees with problems to phone him directly. If he was unable to sleep at night, he would bring boxes of donuts to the loading dock at the nearby Walmart distribution center and use the opportunity to chat with the workers. Hey if you are a big shot manager, ask yourself, how many times you took the risk of talking to the ‘foot soldiers’ in your company without the protection of your entourage.

In the 1940s, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard the legendary founders of Hewlett Packard (now HP), created a management technique — eventually dubbed "management by walking around or MBWA" — which is marked by personal involvement, good listening skills and the recognition that "everyone in an organization wants to do a good job."

Tom Peters, the guru of excellence says “In 1980, while doing some generic "excellence" research that later became In Search of Excellence, Bob Waterman and I interviewed then HP president John Young. (HP was a $1B company at the time, with marginal interest in computers). John explained that HP's hallmark "MBWA" was "more important than ever as we experience explosive growth." Well, Bob and I had no idea what "MBWA" was—though we'd both had a belly-full of strained acronyms. MBWA ... Managing By Wandering Around ... quickly became our favorite "excellence" idea! Technically, it meant staying in direct touch (damn the bureaucracy!) with the folks who do the work. Metaphorically, it stood for all/much of what was wrong with American management—McKinsey & Harvard Business School-style”.

Well isn’t MBWA another form of management staying connected? And I would say that staying connected is as important in today’s recessionary conditions as it was when HP was just a $1B company facing explosive growth some 30 years ago.

You and I still know and see many managers who prefer formal big monthly meetings over frequent chats, who don’t read their email but prefer to receive thick professionally produced reports printed in color, who prefer management by Excel and PowerPoint than MBWA, who won’t talk to the direct reports of their direct reports, and who opt to preserve, protect and glorify the chain of command at the expense being informed. I certainly hope that they will all be gone by the time the recession is over as they fail to learn from the people who do the work on the ground, and fail miserably in capturing the opportunities presented by the current economic conditions, they will be left behind as the financial crises fades away and their competitors start growing again.

There is a reason why Walmart and HP are prominently featured in the Fortune 500 today while many of their competitors like Digital Equipment, Data General, Kmart, Circuit City and Mervyn’s are faltering, lost their independence or are completely gone.  Or maybe there is a reason the capital of IT informality [Oracle] is thriving today while its very formal rival [SAP] is cutting headcount. Comparing the market performance of the two companies may tell you something.

Managers, do make an effort to get connected, open your door, put on your hard hat, walk about, meet the people in the trenches, listen to their ‘war’ stories, extract the lessons, answer your phone calls, read/answer your emails and fight to keep your Blackberry! Formal companies often talk about the need for managers to ‘manage upwards’ while informal companies exercise openness, transparency and teaming.

Think about it!