Chris Blanc: Play and Projects: Blog

I found this inspiring:

Business schools, he said, never really taught their students that, like doctors and lawyers, they were part of a profession. And in the 1970s, he said, the idea took hold that a company’s stock price was the primary barometer of success, which changed the schools’ concept of proper management techniques.

Instead of being viewed as long-term economic stewards, he said, managers came to be seen as mainly as the agents of the owners — the shareholders — and responsible for maximizing shareholder wealth.

“A kind of market fundamentalism took hold in business education,” Professor Khurana said. “The new logic of shareholder primacy absolved management of any responsibility for anything other than financial results.” ^{^}

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. – F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up” (1936)

Profit and doing right only make sense together if there’s a bigger goal than either one.

That is to say, if you just run a business viciously for profit, you exchange brand value for short-term profits.

If you only run a business to be ethical, you end up becoming the chump for others.

What you need to do is make a product that’s rewarding, and be willing to bleed off a little short-term profit for long-term value.

Until they ruined their rep recently, Mercedes-Benz was this way. They knew they could go hog wild any year and release some zippy plastic piece of junk that lots of people would buy because it said Mercedes on it; on the other hand, they also knew that doing so would lessen the value of their brand.

B-schools are starting to see the wisdom of this: if you run every business like a pump and dump, soon you wreck brand value, which is a bigger form of unmeasured capital than many people recognize.

A Class With Drucker
by William A. Cohen, PhD

As children, we believe in magic. As adults, we start believing in magic knowledge. Although management science is not universally accepted, and many consider it an excess of theory, I’ve seen how the difference between a studied approach to management and the norm can make a world of difference. As a result, I read Drucker, but in leafing through the volumes of material by and about Peter Drucker, I found William “Wild Bill” Cohen’s summary highly useful.

This is not Drucker for Dummies. It is recollections of classes taken with Drucker as run through the filter of the lessons Drucker taught that could be applied in Cohen’s business career. Cohen very carefully unites the principle to Drucker’s example to anecdotes from his own experience and research, and it makes for a convincing illustration of Druckerian ideas. Even more, it distills the complexity of Drucker’s body of work into a few powerful insights for newcomers which will help them see its usefulness and want to read more.

A format of this nature is essential for this topic since it is frequently heretical to “common sense” as repeated to us by others. Starting with “What Everybody Knows is Frequently Wrong,” Cohen walks us through a Drucker approach to deconstructing management, and then with the chapter “You Must Know Your People to Lead Them,” he starts building for us a vision of what a Drucker-informed corporation would look like, and why it would succeed. This approach yanks the reader from a mindset informed by preconceptions, reframes the question of management, and then rebuilds knowledge in an informative way.

Throughout my time as both a consultant and an employee, I have been repeatedly shocked by how smart people in management positions can be so lost on the basics of management science. Management science is both learning how to lead people, and knowing how to make business-sensible decisions, and joining the two is not necessarily as much complex as it can be delicate. It’s easy to get lost in tangents. As an introduction to Drucker, A Class With Drucker also teaches us why management theory can be essential and gives us a footpath to get started.

For these reasons, I’d recommend A Class With Drucker to any people newly in leadership positions, or leaders frustrated with lack of success. It reads easily because it uses simple language in sentences of varied length, giving the text a smoothly flowing, conversational rhythm. Every point in the book is well documented with examples and explanation. Cohen’s voice is reassuring when he deals with provocative ideas. You can read it like a novel but learn it like a textbook.

What I would not do is try to use this book as a summary of Drucker. It’s an introduction to the Druckerian principles most vital to a manager, but not a survey of his work. Summarizing all of his 40-plus books and many articles is a different kind of task entirely. However, as a pleasant read to get your feet wet and make you curious for more, A Class With Drucker is first-rate.

A Class With Drucker: The Lost Lessons of the World’s Greatest Management Teacher, by William A. Cohen, PhD $16.47 on Amazon.com

As a third of Houston-area residents enter an 11th day without power, they face a slowing pace of recovery and what seems to many an inexplicable process that restores electricity to some homes while others nearby remain dark.

As summer-like temperatures returned, some customers’ lights and air conditioners came on while neighbors as close as next door were without power and without much information about why the power is still out and when it will come back.

Fueling the heat Monday were reports that unidentified elected officials have promised their constituents a better place in line, said a spokesman for CenterPoint Energy, the area’s largest power transmission company. – Tempers rising as outages drag on, Houston Chronicle, September 22, 2008

Houston’s experience in Hurricane Ike offers us a management lesson: when faced with product failure, how to handle the customer?

Like most of life’s more serious questions, this one does not have a magic solution that involves turning on people faster than the work can be done. But there may be an intermediate work-around that avoids the worst of the crisis. I’d summarize this answer in three steps: 1. Inform. 2. Research and offer substitute. 3. Expedite work process.

People want to know when they can plan to use this product again, because invariably other needs depend on it. Give them some form of reliable information, including the unexpected. “We came to fix your neighborhood, but there were thirteen trees breaking your power lines, and two downed towers, so we need a bigger team and we don’t have those people right now,” is more acceptable than silence. Let people know street-by-street what the status of their request is. You can divert administrative staff to this request since they aren’t able to do their normal job functions, and should sacrifice even traditional important customer communication tools like phone hotlines to do it.

When you asked a Houston power customer why he wants power back after Ike, he may give you all sorts of answers, but if you keep hammering, he’ll distill it to two essential functions: air conditioning and refrigeration. He needs to keep food ready for his family, since he won’t be out hunting and picking vegetables every day like our forebears did, and he needs to keep his family out of the 90-plus-degree heat that saps energy in the day and steals sleep at night. This is the actual need, as separate from the many needs people will list off when you ask them why electricity is important.

I am not a power company experts, but there may be alternatives here. Temporary wiring, while dangerous, could alleviate enough of the problem to keep people happy. So could rented generators on flat-beds, with a flat charge to the neighborhood on next month’s bill. How about discounts on hotels? All of these cost more money but keep the wave of negative public relations at bay and let you focus on solving the problem.

Any good leader coming into this situation knows that she or he will have to doubly motivate slightly depressed work crews. As these work crews were driving to work, or driving into town, they saw the devastation. They’re not pleased either. You need to convert that negative emotion into a positive one, like “Look at all the people you’re going to put back on track to happy survival.” One major reason to get the PR process correct in this instance is so that negative feedback does not filter down to your employees, making them disillusioned and less likely to give a job the extra 10% of mental focus and effort that is all too frequently the difference between FAIL and succeed.

Offering incentives for those who work weekends, nights, and the more difficult jobs is a priority. Normally, workers want regular shifts and try to avoid the more difficult tasks, because those are more likely to be screwed up and to cause their own careers a ding. Motivate them toward these difficult tasks instead, and take out the hardest problems first, and then as your crews are getting exhausted, they’ll have the easy stuff to tackle.

Finally, get your PR flaks out there to run interference. If people have questions, they need to get to talk, preferrably in person, with a representative who can find out what’s going on. Your customers will understand if their neighborhood was harder hit than others, but only if you tell them how, and show them if possible. They are more forgiving than you think, but they don’t like being left in the dark.

Another little tidbit: focus first on the customers who are going to be able to help others. Traditionally, companies focus on those most likely to complain, or those who seem to have the greatest number of obstacles facing them. Instead, I suggest focusing on the customers who have businesses and services themselves to run, as getting them back online will help everyone else with a trickle-down effect.

Never promise what you cannot deliver. After Ike hit, authorities in Houston offered vague statements when asked about power coming back on. They were counting on Ike being “Houston’s Katrina” to make most people think they were in such a disaster they shouldn’t expect power for another month, and so business can proceed as usual. As a result, they issued either apocalyptic statements predicting up to two months without power, or told us it would be done on Monday — two Mondays in a row.

Instead, they should have launched an aggressive campaign to inform people and show them why some parts of town faced a different storm than others, and should have shown them the progress toward fixing it — and used that information to supercharge their own performance.

Many managers observe that some tasks happen quickly and effectively, while others (usually the least exciting) drag on into infinity. What’s most interesting is that these tasks are approached different ways, and that can make a huge difference in what work needs to be done. If there are 100 tasks needed to be done on a project, but ten of those tasks constitute 90% of its functionality, tackling those ten in a dynamic matter might liberate the rest to be done later or make them easier, since the framework will already be built.

Numerous studies have found 10:1 differences in productivity and quality among individuals and even among teams. The original study that found huge variations in individual programming productivity was conducted in the late 1960s by Sackman, Erikson, and Grant. They studied professional programmers with an average of 7 years’ experience and found that the ratio of initial coding time between the best and worst programmers was about 20 to 1; the ratio of debugging times over 25 to 1; of program size 5 to 1; and of program execution speed about 10 to 1. They found no relationship between a programmer’s amount of experience and code quality or productivity. ^{^}

It’s not just programming: the best workers in all fields know how to separate the consequential from the inconsequential.

Q: Do workaholics accomplish more than people who work fewer hours?

A: Often, they don’t. That is because, as perfectionists, they may become so fixated on inconsequential details that they find it hard to move on to the next task, [Psychiatrist Bryan] Robinson said.

As Gayle Porter [a professor who has studied workaholism] put it: “They’re not looking for ways to be more efficient; they’re just looking for ways to always have more work to do.

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The person may look like a hero, coming in to solve crisis after crisis, when in fact the crises could have been avoided. Sometimes, the workaholic may have unwittingly created the problems to provide the endless thrill of more work. ^{^}

The management science involved is knowing the design of the task you’re attempting to accomplish, and finding core tasks that are necessary, then postponing others so they don’t get in the way. This keeps people from inventing work, or from getting stalled on relatively inconsequential tasks when bigger tasks need doing.

Another view of the same:

Sarah and I just got back from a talk at Haas about “deliberate practice” as it relates to excellence. The idea is that how good (or expert) you become at a skill has a lot more to do with how you go about doing your work than it has to do with merely performing the skill a large number of times or over a long length of time.

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This all reminds me of an old study of what differentiated classes of swimmers, The Mundanity of Excellence (it seems to be readable through Google book search). The researchers found that swimmers who moved up in class did it almost entirely by how they went about performing their practice. It was the quality of their work, not the quantity of their work that mattered. Moving up in class could be as simple as changing the way you cupped your hand during your swim stroke, as long as you were willing to practice that improved stroke during every lap of every practice. ^{^}

And still another take from one of the great success stories of the last century:

But if Toyota doesn’t look like an innovative company it’s only because our definition of innovation — cool new products and technological breakthroughs, by Steve Jobs-like visionaries — is far too narrow. Toyota’s innovations, by contrast, have focussed on process rather than on product, on the factory floor rather than on the showroom. That has made those innovations hard to see. But it hasn’t made them any less powerful.

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So how has Toyota stayed ahead of the pack?

The answer has a lot to do with another distinctive element of Toyota’s approach: defining innovation as an incremental process, in which the goal is not to make huge, sudden leaps but, rather, to make things better on a daily basis. (The principle is often known by its Japanese name, kaizen — continuous improvement.) ^{^}

Clearly defining important tasks, focusing on what they are as actions and goals, and then streamlining to make those goals occur more reliably and efficiently is a cornerstone of good management. This applies whether you’re talking about programming, dog walking, rocket science or impressionistic painting. It’s good discipline — good psychology — for succeeding at anything. The core of it is filtering the fringe tasks from the core.

And then there’s this 1994 book: Office Biology or Why Tuesday Is Your Most Productive Day and Other Relevant Facts for Survival in the Workplace. There is a whole book about how Tuesdays are so productive. How could I have missed this incredibly important fact for all these years? ^{^}

It’s not that Tuesdays are magic, but the position Tuesday holds in the week. Monday is getting re-acquainted with what will get done that week, and getting a huge list of tasks as everyone meets. Tuesday is when you cut that list down to what can be reasonably accomplished and pick the most important parts.

Again, it’s defining task, by what is most important, in order to stay on task.

The conventional dogma goes this way: people need money, so they’ll take a job they really love, and then they’ll become team players and we’ll all be happy. The reality of the situation is that there are few good jobs, and endless menial clerk-like ones, especially in IT, and that most of us work to pay for our families and don’t really like what we do.

What we do like is being effective, which is a way of having power without having to control other people except as is natural in pursuit of a goal. Having cake, eating too: power without being a jerk. It’s a form of creative power. When we have a job, we either feel that power or have a nagging suspicion that we’re wasting our time and will eventually incur the displeasure of others.

There is an anti-pattern that I’ve seen in large organizations which I have come to call “the Dead Sea effect”. The Dead Sea, of course, is a large body of water between Israel and Jordan, located well below sea level. The Jordan River empties into it; water leaves only by evaporation, which means that over the eons, the Dead Sea has become very salty (e.g., 8x saltier than the ocean). As such, it is generally unable to support life, except when spring floods temporarily lower the salinity.

Many large corporate/government IT shops — and not a few small ones — work like the Dead Sea. New hires are brought in as management deems it necessary. Their qualifications (talent, education, professionalism, experience, skills — TEPES) will tend to vary quite a bit, depending upon current needs, employee departure, the personnel budget, and the general hiring ability of those doing the hiring. All things being equal, the general competency of the IT department should have roughly the same distribution as the incoming hires.
^{^}

What happens in this pattern is that people with skills and knowledge and intelligence keep moving on, and they leave the average people behind. This presents a huge problem to a corporate IT department, because it means that all of the knowledge capital built up goes out the door and what is left are the people who are everyman cases. They follow instructions. They are competent at a limited range of tasks. They are oblivious to how to make things better and will move at a microscopic, dead-end pace without achieving any great output. It’s questionable how valuable they are except as warm, trained bodies who run at the machine guns when the enemy is at the gates.

In contrast, there’s a new pattern: the skilled leave work (for various reasons, although maternity’s a good one) and will come back if they’re given a chance to jump into the action, feel that creative power, get things done quicker and better than others, and then go back home:

Lots of employers would like to be able to hire cheap, temporary teams of seasoned pros with experience managing $2 billion investment portfolios, running ad campaigns or earning Ph.D.s in neuroscience.

But few know the secret to finding temps of that caliber: Look on playgrounds and at PTA meetings.

The decision among some highly educated women to stay home with children is sparking a countertrend: The rise of the mommy “SWAT team.” The acronym, for “smart women with available time,” is one mother’s label for all-mom teams assembled quickly through networking and staffing firms to handle crash projects. Employers get lots of voltage, cheap, while the women get a skills update and a taste of the professional challenges they miss.
^{^}

As mentioned before on this site, it’s good to have people with interests outside of work, especially family. This keeps them from, like the Dead Sea people, hanging around at a job and making small tasks into ongoing, unending labor to justify their own position.

However, once an employee shares all of his external knowledge, learns all that there is to know about the business, and applies all of his past experiences, the growth stops. That employee, in that particular job, has become all that he can be. He has reached the value apex.

Skilled developers understand this. Crossing the value apex often triggers an innate “probably time for me to move on” feeling and, after a while, leads towards inevitable resentment and an overall dislike of the job. Nothing – not even a team of on-site masseuses – can assuage this loss.

On the other hand, the unskilled tend to have a slightly different curve: Value Convergence. They eventually settle into a position of mediocrity and stay there indefinitely. The only reason their value does not decrease is because the vast amount of institutional knowledge they hoard and create.
^{^}

If you are unskilled in a job, you take the negative aspects of the job in exchange for it being there as a source of income. One group that appears unskilled but is not are The Unmotivated, which seems to be most of the bright liberal arts graduates in America who take slacker jobs and do poorly at them but not poorly enough to get fired. They recognize this system is slanted toward the unskilled, because although they are mediocre, in any industry that is not aiming for radical growth they are tractable, obedient employees.

As a manager, your job is to get the unskilled into clerkship positions and to get the skilled into positions where they can exercise creative power, or you’ll have the worst of both worlds: clerks in middle management and skilled people long gone and now seated in positions of more power at your competitors.

Sloan based this on management principles. But of course it is the first lesson of political theory and political history. Authority without responsibility is illegitimate; but so is responsibility without authority. Both lead to tyranny. Sloan wanted a great deal of authority for his professional manager, and was ready to take high responsibility. But for that reason he insisted on limiting authority to the areas of professional competence, and refused to assert or admit responsibility in areas outside them. Peter F Drucker, Adventures of a Bystander

I’ve worked in a number of roles from development to copyrighter to documentation to glorified administrative assistant. I’ve been on the creative side, the technical side, and the demi-management side a project manager inhabits. I’ve done everything from sweep floors to define department policy.

One constant has been that people who are closest to directly performing work, such as art directors and developers, often complain about management. A frequent sentiment: executives don’t do anything, project managers are glorified clerks, and upper management has no idea what we’re actually doing.

All of these are true.

Just like most corporate IT departments hire randomly, retain people haphazardly, are managed badly and end up as IT ghettoes where anyone with a better option has moved on, most managers are either on their way to something good or stranded in a job that’s above their ability and for that reason, they can’t give it up and become defensive.

An enduring truth of life and business is that most things are done badly and most roles are poorly performed. Is the solution to curse the role, and say all executives are bicycles for fish?

Whether you work as a developer, or an art director, or any other role, you try to do a good job. That’s great until you run into a command from above that limits how effective you can be. Maybe it’s a simple request that you spend more time on the TPS reports than on writing code, or worse, it’s a silly direction to take the product or a command that contradicts all sense and knowledge.

This is why the study of management, and finding and keeping good managers, is essential. Someone competent in that role can make all the difference, while someone below that role can’t fix the damages of incompetent demands from that role.

Drucker’s statement reflects this truth. Authority without responsibility is illegitimate; but so is responsibility without authority. Both lead to tyranny. In this case, the developer has responsibility without authority, and if management is making bad decisions, they’re acting as if they have authority without responsibility.

Here’s a small, silent plea to managers of managers: know your people. Invest in their education not just in their job, but in the jobs of those that they manage. You don’t expect executives to be C++ programmers in their spare time, but if the product is written in C++, how horrible is it to insist they know something about the topic? A community college class at night is cheap and effective in this regard, and will help them understand those who they must manage.

When people have other obligations outside of work that they actually care more about than your probably-not-so-world-changing idea, the crutches are not available as an easy way out, and you’ll have to walk by the power of your good ideas and execution or you’ll fall fast and early. ^{^}

The hardest part of any project is knowing the mountains from the molehills. When we calm down, and stop trying to act like management or look like we’re heroes working late into the night, we can see what actually needs to get done, which is often a very small subset of what people belabor. Do the minimum, but make sure it’s the minimum required to achieve the end goal. You wouldn’t break out a slide rule to sweep a floor, so don’t make mountains out of molehills.

At the same time, good managers need to know how not to go into denial and make molehills out of mountains. Too often the big task is so daunting, and everyone so unprepared, that they spend their time doing everything but what actually completes the job. This process happens organically, so a manager without much control over the situation wakes up to it happening around them, but it doesn’t need to.

Some will say I’m a dreamer, but I think as our belts tighten, the concept of intelligent management is finding full flower. It’s time to be more efficient in what we do, and to eliminate the politics and infighting and confusion that take good people, with good intentions, and have them make bad products. If you want to know one ultimate way to “go green,” it’s to not make unnecessary activity, to not produce reams of unwanted and irrelevant reports, and to make products that are good and long-lasting so they don’t get discarded so quickly.

More Druckerisms:

Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.

Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.

Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes.

The most efficient way to produce anything is to bring together under one management as many as possible of the activities needed to turn out the product.

Executives owe it to the organization and to their fellow workers not to tolerate nonperforming individuals in important jobs.

It’s this kind of thinking that keeps us all from being trapped on dead-end projects with frustration vibrating through our nerves.

Neuroscience is confirming what we all suspect: Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy. One man’s odyssey through the nightmare of infinite connectivity. ^{^}

It tears us up, how we rush. Someone we recognize as an authority, or as representing our target audience, tells us something is important, so we add it to the list and mechanically run through each item every day if we can.

I think this comes from the feeling of unpredictability to a modern world. We don’t know what the right thing to do is, as pagans “suckled in a creed outworn” were able to do. There’s no real unifying principle to the modern world. We earn money to live, and we find a place to live, and food, and insurance, and a car, and then what?

Back to the usual agenda: live, breed, die. But in this modern world, we find it hard to have a center. It’s not like being in the Army, where there’s a clear goal, or in prison, where the lack of goal substitutes for a goal. What’s the point? People often ask. They want a Lord of the Rings style quest.

Multitasking is not the latest of the many fads that attempt to convince us we can handle this overload. About two years ago it hit required buzzword status on the job application boards. Few stopped to question whether it wasn’t better to make more choices about what is important, and so have fewer things to do, and to do them better.

It’s like we’re trying to do everything because we lack a singular goal and so we’re trying to cover all our bases. From a psychological standpoint, it’s silliness.

Individuals, like businesses, benefit from having mission statements. These mission statements are summaries of a series of related goals, and so you don’t have to make them laundry lists. “Be a good person,” for example, might include being a moral citizen, having a family, being well-rounded, earning a good living for that family, recycling.

Too often, managers are skittish and scared, and so become neurotic like housewives in movies from the 80s, and so can’t make a decision so end up trying to do everything at top speed. The result is chaos.

In your average office, you can see this mentality most clearly in the refrigerator. Almost all of them have signs that say “We throw out everything on Friday,” but in reality, this never happens until someone complains there’s a stinker in back. They are like a geological record of who went to eat where, who was too busy for the sandwich she bought, what excess soft drinks are floating around, the condiments left over from one or more all-nighters.

In the office fridge, as in life, people haven’t slowed down to figure out what they’re actually doing. They throw stuff onto the pile, and move on, because something else has distracted them. They are distracted because they are overloaded and so everything that comes to them is newly a crisis. Other people are also in this crisis mode and hand things along without thinking. Soon we’re just shifting piles of junk around from one desk to another.

But now, thanks to widespread incompetence, American management is on its way to becoming an international laughingstock. Faith in American financial sobriety has been widely undermined by the subprime mess. The very mention of the strong-dollar policy now elicits raucous bouts of knee-slapping in even the most sober Swiss banks.

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Carl Icahn, the 1980s corporate raider, has reinvented himself as a borscht-belt comedian/activist investor, who delights conferences and reporters with jokes at CEOs’ expense. On a recent 60 Minutes, Icahn complained to Lesley Stahl about the incompetence of American management. “I see our country going off a cliff, and I feel bad about it.” ^{^}

A good manager fixes this by cutting responsibilities and projects, if even arbitrarily. You might end up axing something necessary and having to rebuild, but then you can do so in a focused, non-neurotic environment. For a long time, managers were afraid to make these cuts because of the myth of multi-tasking, which supposed that the most productive employee was simultaneously on the phone, taking notes, updating the company web site and sending out meeting alerts on his or her BlackBerry.

It’s good to see the press attack this fallacy.

Image from MethCola

In all of my years of management, the best thing I ever did was give my teams more room to breathe. I’d put my hours worked in my career against anyone and I can assure you that I’ve lost a lot of great chances with great people because of putting work first always. Jason should consider it as well if he wants his team to stay on. Short term his strategy works, but won’t in the long run. Burnout comes quick and with all of the current opportunities out there, people will leave when they are burned out. And when they leave, it will be at the worst time. ^{^}

Let me tell you a tale of two offices.

In the first office, the new manager has just been promoted from his previous role as a developer. Knowing like most of us that those without money suffer, he is glad for his new salary. He is also determined to make some changes and be a success. He is also determined to be well-liked.

As a result this new manager is very gentle and deferential. He always asks the employees for their input. He is understanding about re-arranging their schedules to avoid personal life needs. He is always accessible, and answers any question. He tries to show an interest in their lives.

Knowing that he’s so easy-going, he puts into place controls and metrics to make sure he knows what’s happening. He offers suggestions right from the start of any job. He creates spreadsheets, processes, and formalized meetings to keep track of what each worker is doing, and makes sure strict time accounting is in place.

This manager is far from inaccessible. Every day, he checks in with each employee and makes sure they have the proper amount of censures and kudos. He gets everyone together for face time. He uses his charts to predict how much time is required for any project, and if it overruns as it often does, he is there late at night along with the team.

When end of the year reviews come, he explains to each employee what they have done right and what they have not done well at all. He shows them all of his statistics. He explains metrics. And if they have any critique, he counts on them to know without being reminded that he has worked more hours than any of them, spending up to twelve hours a day in the office and another six on the weekends.

In the second office, the manager has a little more experience because she has worked her way through multiple roles and not just one. She has been a developer, a copywriter, and an accountant. She is fairly cynical about the business world, and while she likes her job when she compares it to others, she knows that no one wants to be at work. They have to be there.

As a result, she does not make radical changes when she comes to a new job. Everything works as it is, albeit at what she estimates is 40% efficiency for a reasonable expectation of the time and resources which can be committed, which is not unusual for an office. Instead, she starts dropping requirements which serve no function.

She replaces metrics with her own arbitrary personal assessment. She begins to delegate more tasks. She deliberately pads these tasks with extra hours, but makes it clear that she expects a higher quality of work. She does not attempt to be accessible. Instead, she tasks one person with writing her department’s documentation and dictates to him for an hour a day for her first three months.

When the end of the year reviews come, the first manager is rated more highly than the second — by the people above him. He runs a tight ship, they think. His employees mention how friendly he is. The second manager, on the other hand, has no mention of friendliness in her review. She’s more like a boss than a friend. However, her department retained more of its talented people than the other manger’s did.

We, as those who see management structures everywhere we shop or work, are accustomed to think of managers in two modes: lazy freeloaders, or tight-minded fascists. The truth is more complex and it crosses over both roles. A manager is not a manager until he or she takes charge of the work process, adjusts it to its maximum reasonable efficiency, and then takes care of the many day-to-day questions and tasks only a manager, who centralizes the knowledge of his or her department, can do. But in order to do so, he or she is going to have to motivate people and even order them around.

The first manager in our study tried to use a measurement of the job as the way he would make it succeed. He worked on his public image. He worked on his statistics. He made sure that he was buzzword-compliant, “approachable” and responsible. It fooled the people above him, but that’s not too hard to do, for the first year. His employees knew a different story: he was nice, but almost mincingly so, and not much fun to work for.

Since he is a workaholic, the only behavior he will reward is workaholism, which means that those who work more efficiently get dinged for not spending as much time slaving away on problems. Worse, because this manager decided that control mechanisms like metrics and incentivization were necessary, he misdirected people from their actual jobs into an endless cycle of working on boring support tasks. He tried to soften the blow, but with his hands-off school of management, he can only reward more work because he is averse to efficiency. Although he’s a nice guy, he’s a management tyrant.

The second manager in our study is a management realist. She knows that the only way to do the job was to engage with the job, not try to control it with statistics or personality. So she discarded all the useless face time and the metrics, and instead concentrated on delegation and accumulation of knowledge. She is less fun, and more fascist, but because she is more realistic, the job gets done quickly and better. She is both a tyrant, in her powerdrive toward the end goal, and a reformer, because she recognizes the reality of being an employee and accomodates it.

Management realists know that human beings do not fit machine profiles, and neither for that matter do machines. Reality does not conform to the rigid categorical logic that would like to be able to divide time algebraically, make people that are interchangeable parts, or have every task be as straightforward as the “to do” list for it would seem to be. Things come up. People have stuff they have to deal with. A management realist plans for this, and gives people more individual flexibility at the cost of having firmer deadlines and higher expectations. A management realist also knows that talent beats out subservience.

When I was a consultant, and I went into many companies as an observer of brief time frame, I saw a lot of this dichotomy between people who try to use the appearance of work (metrics, face time, hours in the office) to make work happen, versus those who simply got in and organized the process by dealing with the realistic constraints of people and offices. The former approach was far more prevalent, and leant itself to a kind of “fake work.”

Fake work takes different forms:

* Managers who dally over writing and re-writing emails that are of dubious quality, or where the time spent on their edits produces dubious reward.

* Workers immersing themselves in metrics, meetings, training, desk organization, phone calls and other busywork.

* Teams overstating how deeply in trouble their project is, then working several weeks of pointless overtime.

* Individuals who claim they’re “swamped” and “busy” every day of the year and can’t take on new work, but are producing existing work slowly.

All of these in my experience are signs of bad management and bad individual work ethic. Eight hours a day is a lot of time. If you’re doing more than that, you need more people or it’s bunk, but either way, the signs of burnout will soon appear. An intelligent manager steers away from potential burnout by avoiding any kind of late work unless a radical, unexpected, and unforseeable change to the project arrived in the last third of the production schedule.

Most people try to do what is expected of them. If that is defined as spending extra hours there, doing low-impact tasks that do not achieve any steps to the goal of the company, they will do that and if they’re judged on it, will do it in preference to effective work. The sad thing is that most commonly this situation arises from employers trying to place nice, but also trying to babysit. Like the cube farm, it’s an idea that looks good but causes secondary effects which make it negative.

The management realist alternative is to delegate as much as possible, and to keep an eye on the quality of output from each person. When quality flags, you can tell apathy or confusion is reigning in that particular chair, and you need to intervene. Realists work both harder and smarter in preference to working longer. They move quickly and aggressively, get incidentals out of the way, and return to slamming away at what tasks either bring in ROI or support it one level removed.

Just like an overzealous micromanager will cow employees into tacit submission and acceptance of whatever they say, and so will create a prevailing sense of apathy in the employee pool, a manager who slips into tyranny will get what he or she asked for — mediocre work that expands to fill the time required per day. It’s the path of least resistance.

When I go into a new restaurant, the first thing I do is try to get a look into the kitchen. If I see giant piles of plates and pans waiting around, and people moving in a disorganized way, my faith in that restaurant goes down. Someone is cracking the whip without bothering to think. If I see less frenetic motion, but it is more coordinated, I’m probably about to sit down and order the lasagna.

It’s the same way with offices. If when you walk in, everyone is smiling and happy but moving with urgency toward no particular goal, back up and run. They’ve been seduced by a management tyrant. On the other hand, if people are more serious but less frivolous, consider overcoming your initial objections and working with these people. They won’t waste your time.