Many years ago, before the words “politically” and “correct” were conjoined to form a paradigm, I worked in open-outcry markets around the world.

These were brutish places where alpha males with all their aggressive malevolence ruled, or at least thought they did. Traders lived and died by their ability to make money: buying low, selling high, outwitting, outfoxing, and ultimately outliving their compatriots on the trading floor. Their ability in this regard was on constant public display.

The better traders were older and wiser. They knew what battles to fight and when to walk away from minor skirmishes that would claim more in capital than they would deliver in return.

These old dogs were eventually moved into managing other traders, teams or entire trading departments. Yet they still continued trading and oversaw their departments from the same seat they had always occupied. They remained in the thick of things, doing what they had done before, looking and listening in the same environment.

When traders overstepped the mark, took too much risk, or looked to do favours, the old dogs were there: watching, knowing, and applying the rule of law with the brutal authority which the trading floor demanded.

The rise of the professional managers, the fall of management

Times have changed. The old dogs have been euthanised – their skills deemed irrelevant – and “professional managers” have taken over. People who have passed through the business, learning the places where things could be parked, have been replaced.

Professional managers now occupy offices with permanently closed doors and blinds on the windows, where no one can see their Machiavellian politics, and crucially, they cannot see out. The compliance manager who implements management reports supposedly telling him exactly where problems exist – without ever talking to those he is determined to convict – is amazed when a rogue trader blows up his department.

When whole teams of traders are in collusion with each other and with other market-based practitioners, the professional managers throw their hands in the air and yell with their Harvard and Yale accents that these people are criminals and should be punished.

Such actions and reactions are now commonplace globally. But perhaps if the professional managers actually understood the role of the people they were managing – understood how the environment they operated in worked – we would not witness so many occurrences. If they left the ivory towers they have successfully created for themselves and tried to understand the language of the market their minions trade in, we may not have so many rogue traders on our hands.

“Experience Eye” is a candidate blogger in Australia. The views expressed are his, not those of eFinancialCareers.