Four Types of Managers

Management science owes a lot of its basic theory to military command theory, largely because up until the Industrial Revolution, the only institutions to attempt any form of large-scale, multi-level operations were governments and military units. One traditional lesson from command theory, which is still applicable to our discussions of management today, is the concept of the Four Types of Officers, which can be rendered as the Four Types of Managers for our purposes.

The origin of these classifications is uncertain; the late David H. Hackworth attributed these distinctions to Carl von Clausewitz, the 19th Century Prussian military theorist, but if this attribution is correct I haven’t yet found the reference in On War, Clausewitz’s primary work. In any case, regardless of where Colonel Hackworth got them from, these classifications are still just as useful as they were fifty years (or two hundred years) ago.

In any large organization, this line of thought goes, there are four basic kinds of officers: the intelligent and lazy, the intelligent and industrious, the stupid and lazy, and the stupid and industrious. Hackworth (and presumably Clausewitz) argue that the lazy and intelligent make the best commanders, since the lazy man will invariably find the easiest way to do anything, and on the battlefield, the easiest way is generally the one that gets the fewest people killed. In general, the side that loses the fewest soldiers will probably emerge the winner. By contrast, the intelligent and industrious will make the best staff officers, because they will throw themselves into getting all of the details right – again, saving lives and potentially winning the war. But if you try to make commanders of these officers, they are too likely to bog down in the details, and lose the larger picture.

The lazy and stupid are merely the natural by-product of any large organization, and can always be slotted in somewhere – give them any job that requires a commissioned officer’s authority but no actual work, and they will succeed brilliantly. It is the industrious and stupid who must be eliminated from the organization as quickly as possible, given their habit of working like bees – and screwing everything up.

In management terms, these same types apply. The lazy and intelligent make the best line managers (or executives) because they will find the easy way to do everything – provided higher management does not allow them to just make everyone else do the work (easy but not helpful). The intelligent and industrious make the best staff people, and are the ones you want running the staff departments, because they will always get it right. You can usually find something to do with the lazy and stupid – provided you can convince them to stay out of active management functions. Running a work group full of experienced professionals, for example – your lazy and stupid “manager” can sign the time sheets, approve the requisitions, write progress reports to higher management, and stay out of the way. Certainly a better arrangement than having one of your valuable professionals waste his or her time doing all of that.

It is important to note that when we speak of eliminating the industrious and stupid from the company, we are not referring to those individuals who can be taught to complete a task (or better still a number of tasks) without fouling them up. While these individuals may not be the most intellectually gifted of your subordinates, they can’t really be described as “stupid” in this context. Indeed, if we as managers have an employee who can be counted on to do even one useful task correctly, it is incumbent upon us to find the proper position for that individual, and we who have failed if he or she is assigned to do anything else.

Take another look at the management team reporting to you. Are you making proper use of each of them? It’s worth thinking about…