Management by Aphorisms

Let’s face it, unless you have been unusually lucky, you’ve probably had at least one boss in your career who made all of their decisions (and probably issued most of their directions) by quoting proverbs, aphorisms, and outright old wives’ tales – many of which had no bearing on the situation at hand. Or, worse yet, they miss-quote those old sayings, resulting in a regular feature for Scot Adams’ “Dilbert Newsletter.” This leads a lot of managers to dismiss all such quips as belonging to those who lack the wit to craft their own gems of wisdom. Unfortunately, some of these old saws actually have a kernel of truth in them, and I thought it might be fun to take a look at some of them.

Let’s begin by considering the saying that might actually apply to this topic itself, a meta-aphorism, if you will: “If it’s stupid, but it works, then it’s not really stupid.” Any large organization will have one or more entrenched procedures, methods, or operating styles that make no sense to someone viewing them from the outside. Some of these may, in fact, be adaptations to long-forgotten market or operating conditions, and no longer applicable or even useful to today’s company. Others may simply be counterintuitive to the observer’s experience in other industries, other locations, or even other business models. The key point here is that no matter how poorly conceived you may find a given procedure to be, if it works acceptably – if it generates profits, prevents losses, promotes the company, makes the customers happy, or whatever – then it serves its purpose. You may be able to design a superior method – and as a manager it is you duty to try – but you should not assume that the existing method is without merit.

One that comes up a lot in large organizations is: “No one is a villain in their own mind.” It’s important to remember that, outside of bad movies and even worse literature, very few people actually go around attempting to do bad things and cause harm just for the fun of it. No matter how heinous the act, it is highly probable that person who is doing it is convinced that it is all for the greater good – of the company, of the country, or in extreme cases, even for the good of the people he or she is screwing over in the first place. At the very least, the villain you are dealing with will believe that they have a right to do what they are doing, that they are entitled to whatever they are taking, or that you should be grateful to them for their leadership, no matter how badly they are screwing everything up. It helps to remember that as you consider your strategy for how you are going to get them to do what you want/need them to do, instead…

One of my personal favorites is a quote from American author David Drake: “Never second-guess the man on the ground – especially when that’s you.” In any management position, you will eventually have to deal with a situation where someone has made a decision with which you do not agree. If you were present at the time, voiced your objections to that decision, and were overruled, you may still have grounds for complaint – particularly if you are being expected to clean up the fallout from that decision. But if someone else was the manager on the spot, the person who had to make the decision right then and there, without support or input (from you or anyone else), then criticizing their decision is nothing more than Monday-morning quarterbacking. It is, in other words, crap, and pretentious, self-important crap, at that. Maybe you could have made a better decision if you had been the person called upon to make it, and maybe you would have made the same one, but we’ll never know, because you weren’t there.

That goes double for questioning your own decisions after the fact. You were the man (person) on the ground when the decision had to be made; never second-guess yourself now that you’ve had time to think it over. This saying is also a subtle comment on the futility of complaining about things that have already happened, rather like “crying over spilled milk.” Or like another of my favorites: “The three most useless things to a pilot are the sky above him, the runway behind him, and whatever happened a tenth of a second ago!”

But that’s a post for another day…

Tactical Offense

Almost any discussion of tactics and tactical operations is probably going to start with a bad analogy, so let me offer the reader one of mine. Consider, if you will, the blade of a saw. It can be a huge lumberjack saw, or a tiny diamond-toothed saw, but it will almost by definition have a number of small, sharp extensions (teeth) that do the actual cutting. By the same token, any military formation, whether it’s a division of thousands or a squad of ten, is made up of individual soldiers who do the actual fighting. This is a key concept to the American Airborne divisions, for example, who refer to it as “Little Groups of Paratroopers” or the rule of LGOPS.

After the D-Day invasion, most of the paratroopers who had been dumped into Normandy were scattered, cut off from their battalions and often even from their squads. Most military units would have been utterly disrupted, unable to function, and would have spent all of their time trying to find their officers and re-form their units. What the Airborne troops did was to form ad hoc groups of whoever they encountered, regardless of their comrades’ unit of origin, engage the enemy, and fight. It drove the Germans to distraction, and the very fact that no one ever knew where or when a little group of American paratroopers might suddenly appear and attack definitely contributed to the success of the landings.

What sometimes gets overlooked in these historical discussions is that all human endeavors come down to the same factor. A company may consist of a dozen different divisions, employ hundreds of thousands of people on five continents, and own more property than some developing countries, but ultimately all of the work is going to be accomplished by individual workers, and the key directives that will accomplish that work will come from the team leaders, foremen, supervisors and group managers on the spot, not from the Executive Offices in some other time zone. If we consider that the function of Army corps, divisions, brigades and so on is to get the individual troops into the position where they can do the fighting, then by logical extension, the purpose of the Management team, the Forward Planning shop, the Human Resources department, the Marketing personnel and the entire Finance section is to get the organization’s line personnel into the right position to do what they do.

Of course, by the same token, the line manager’s job is to determine the requirements of the actual tasks at hand, and direct his or her people to do them (just as the unit commander’s traditional “first duty” is to engage the enemy and fight). In viewing our company operations, it is critical that we as managers remember that for all of our grand strategic planning for the missions we wish to accomplish, the goals we intend to fulfill, and the objectives we want to meet, our “offense” is also inherently tactical in nature, and all of the work will eventually be accomplished by those individual workers on the line…

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…