You don't have to know how to do the job to (successfully) manage it.
I guess
my definition of "manage" is to be directly responsible for supervising the day-to-day operations of the job, and the employees who do it.
Obviously, to use your hypothetical comparison, Jerry Jones ( or any other successful sports franchise owner) does not need to have the ability to kick or throw a football in order to own a football franchise since he is not the one on the field "managing" the plays and the personell. That job falls to a
coach, who
does in fact need to have actual experience with the game of football in order to succeed at his job.
Carrying this analogy over to UPS...all to often we see examples in our workplace of operational decisions being made by people who are not qualified to make them. We see equipment that is designed and ordered by people who will never have to operate it. We see facilities designed by people who will never have to work in them. UPS is, unfortunately, run by a collection of paranoid, metrics-obsessed "absentee landlords" who micromanage from afar and who are unwilling to
delegate important operational decisions to subordinates who are qualified by virtue of experience to make them.
Jerry Jones
succeeds as an owner of a football franchice because he
is smart enough to delegate the important play-calling and personell decisions to his subordinates who are qualified by virtue of experience to make them.