Freeing-up Information

Many leaders seem to act on the old assumption that information is power, sharing it unwillingly and trying to keep others in the dark as much as possible. I’ve noted before that subordinates copy whatever the leaders around them do. If you create an environment of secrecy and information hoarding, you’ll quickly build suspicion and a “silo” mentality. That’s why most organizations find internal cooperation difficult: their leaders have created a culture of mistrust between department and divisions by setting a tone of secrecy and withholding information from the majority.

It’s said that becoming an expert, or an executive, means never having to admit that you don’t know or were wrong . . . or to say that you are sorry either.

Of course, withholding information also saves time. You can simply bark orders and walk away to your next meeting, then blame your subordinates if they don’t do what you wanted, even if you failed to tell them clearly what that was. Cultivating a reputation for keeping important data to yourself also means you won’t be found out when you don’t know the answer yourself, either. It’s said that becoming an expert, or an executive, means never having to admit that you don’t know or were wrong . . . or to say that you are sorry either.

People who are kept in the dark, soon come to believe they aren’t seen as valuable members of the organization or team. Remember the old saying about “mushroom management?” How it’s based on keeping people in the dark and heaping sh*t on them? Even the owners of small businesses aren’t immune from this disease. Because it’s their business, they treat information about it—especially financial data—as private to them only.

Today’s “Hamburger Management” style contains the underlying assumption that subordinates are best kept away from any information that falls into one or more of these categories:

• Information that might lead them to question the decisions of those above them.


• Information that might make the bosses appear in a less than perfect light.


• Anything that could slow down their work by causing them to think or ask questions.


• Data that is judged too complex for their obviously limited mental capacities.


• Anything that the bosses don’t understand themselves (which is usually quite a lot).

Where speed and “near enough” attitudes to quality rule, and short-term profits are the only objectives worth considering, taking time out to think, question, discover new ideas, or ask whether the data says what everyone thinks it says, are all considered a waste of time. Of course, they are also the exact steps needed to stay ahead of the competition in the long term, but who gives a **** about the long term anyhow? By that time, today’s whiz-kid boss will be somewhere else, with even more share options and complete amnesia about the events of the past.

Good leaders have never fallen for such nonsense. They know that their subordinates are the best source of ideas to make the leader look good, and sharp eyes and ears to catch mistakes before they ruin the boss’s credibility.

I guess this sounds cynical, but it’s hard to stay away from such thoughts when faced with conventional management attitudes. Good leaders have never fallen for such nonsense. They know that their subordinates are the best source of ideas to make the leader look good, and sharp eyes and ears to catch mistakes before they ruin the boss’s credibility. You can’t get that kind of priceless support if you keep everyone around you in the dark. Nor will you keep it, if you don’t give the right people credit for those great ideas the board members thought were worth a bonus for you. Good leaders are worth every penny they get precisely because they produce good subordinates and teams. And all those subordinates are both the backbone of today’s business, and the breeding ground for tomorrow’s leaders. Never mind if the idea came from one of their team. They are the people who listened and recognized it for what it was.

Instead of the assumption that information should be handed out strictly on a “need to know” basis, try reversing this and share everything, except where there’s a “need not to know.”

You should view all information as available to everyone, unless there’s a clear reason for restricting its availability. Instead of the assumption that information should be handed out strictly on a “need to know” basis, try reversing this and share everything, except where there’s a “need not to know.” Nothing makes people feel devalued faster than being deliberately kept in the dark about things that affect them. And by preventing them from understanding events fully, you stop them from contributing any ideas at all. A boss who does that, no matter what short-term profits he or she conjures up, is not worth either their salary or their inflated job title.

Technorati tags: short-termism poor leadership mushroom management leadership slow leadership

Slowness and Quality

In most activities of any complexity, there is a stark choice: you can aim for speed or for quality—rarely, if ever, are both possible at the same time. If you choose speed, the corner-cutting and reliance on quick fixes and “near enough” outcomes limits the quality of the end result. If you choose quality, you must take as long as it takes to achieve the standard you have set.

In many ways, the slow movements, like Slow Food, have as much to do with improving quality as they have with slowing down to enjoy it, or creating a better lifestyle. The consequences of today’s obsession with speed typically include a steady lowering of quality. Fast food is not gourmet food. In many cases, it ceases to resemble human food very much at all.

Only good work is satisfying work: the kind that sends you home at the end of the day feeling you have accomplished something worthwhile.

Rushing your work, especially if, as a result, you do it less well than you know you could, leads to dissatisfaction and frustration. In my experience, the vast majority of people want to do the best they are capable of doing. Sure, there are some lazy bums out to skimp on effort, but they are a minority easily spotted and removed—if management is awake. Only good work is satisfying work: the kind that sends you home at the end of the day feeling you have accomplished something worthwhile. If you are prevented from feeling that satisfaction because the organization, or the boss, cares not a whit for anything better than an absolute minimum in quality, your job will not be one from which you can obtain much pleasure. If, in addition, you are constantly harried and rushed—expected to take every short-cut and compromise all your instincts for doing your job properly—merely to allow for a few dollars of extra profit you know won’t find its way into your pay packet, the result is going to be work that demeans you as well.

A good part of the extra work and long hours many people devote to employment comes precisely from this deep-seated need in most employees to feel they are doing a quality job. Their employers don’t allow enough time to produce a quality result, so they voluntarily stay on well past normal working hours to make sure what they do is something they can feel satisfied with afterwards. What that says about the ethics of bosses who rely on people putting in large amounts of unpaid time to create quality work I will leave to you to decide.

Slowing down, in one way or another, is often the only way to improve quality substantially, and quality is often the sole means of increasing competitiveness.

If everyone is going as fast as possible to produce “near enough” goods and services at the lowest possible cost, what you have is a commodity market. In commodity markets, consumers buy the cheapest because there’s no real difference between the different brands on offer, save the price. For suppliers, this means wafer-thin margins and extremely limited opportunities for profit. In contrast, where sales depend on quality—think Lexus, BMW, or Mercedes—profit margins are high, and consumers are willing to pay pretty much whatever it takes to buy the product. Successful companies know this. Lean manufacturing, for example, aims to save time by cutting out wasted effort, never by cutting corners and compromising quality in the process. Ford, Chrysler, and GMC cut corners to boost profits and developed a reputation for somewhat shoddy, unreliable vehicles. Toyota did not, and are now reaping the reward. Slowing down, in one way or another, is often the only way to improve quality substantially, and quality is often the sole means of increasing competitiveness.

I have written before about “Hamburger Management:” running a business by utilizing whatever is quickest and cheapest, not what is best. Hamburger managers speed up activity and cut costs, even if the first casualty is the quality of whatever they are doing. By doing so, they grab short-term profits, but risk throwing the whole operation onto a course that leads to a steady, long-term decline in quality. That’s why sometimes you go into a restaurant or store and encounter staff who are lazy, ignorant, and rude. The management is paying them as little as possible, saving money on training (they don’t give any), and accepting just about any vaguely-human applicant desperate enough to take the work. Staff given no possibility of doing good work won’t care what they do.

In a civilized world, any business where the staff regularly work long hours of unpaid time to ensure a quality output would be marked down, and the leaders of that operation fired on the spot for incompetence.

Quality is always a management responsibility. High quality points to good leadership. Poor quality and mediocre standards shows you clearly what kind of management is present. Places of work where employees constantly work in their own time to ensure the quality of what they do, demonstrate clearly that you have good staff and lousy executives, unworthy of the bloated salaries they take away.

In a civilized world, any business where the staff regularly work long hours of unpaid time to ensure a quality output would be marked down, and the leaders of that operation fired on the spot for incompetence. I mean that. If you regularly have to work on your own time to make sure your customer is getting the quality he or she is paying for, your bosses should not be in positions of leadership. There is no conceivable excuse for incompetence and short-sightedness of that order.

Technorati tags: quality leadership slow leadership lean manufacturing

Fads, Fashions, and Work/Life Balance

Cornwall is a rural county in the far southwest of England. It has craggy cliffs, prehistoric megaliths, abandoned tin mines, and medieval villages. It is also about as remote from London and the normal haunts of business people as you can get in a very small island. Now the county is trying to attract more professional firms and high-tech industry to relocate, and it’s doing so, in part, by trading on the idea that creating work/life balance will be so much easier in a quiet, rural environment. It has even commissioned an on-line questionnaire to allow you to check out how balanced or unbalanced your current lifestyle is.

Life never stands still, so achieving any kind of balance between competing aspects of living is like walking a tightrope: you need to keep working at it or you’ll fall off.

This may seem an innocent piece of advertising, but it’s an example of how the concept of work/life balance is in danger from two fronts: from being turned into a fashionable marketing gimmick for everything from corporate relocation to dubious “get rich working from home” schemes; and from those organizations who treat it as a pure compliance issue. Don’t get me wrong. I’m all in favor of creating a level playing field for women who want to have a career and a family, but that isn’t only what work/life balance is about. It isn’t a once-for-all choice, it’s an activity, and one that usually demands hard choices.

Life never stands still, so achieving any kind of balance between competing aspects of living is like walking a tightrope: you need to keep working at it or you’ll fall off. Work/life balance is not a state you can enter, once and for all, whether by relocating your business to a rural area, or making sure people aren't penalized for wanting a normal family life. So I’m less than enchanted by all the “do these six things to create work/life balance” articles that are springing up. There aren’t six things to do, nor sixty. There’s just one, and it’s damned difficult: to focus on your true values and express them in your life at work and at home, every single day, pretty much regardless of the short-term consequences.

There aren’t six things to do, nor sixty. There’s just one, and it’s damned difficult: to focus on your true values and express them in your life at work and at home, every single day, pretty much regardless of the short-term consequences.

Work will almost always claim more and more of your time, if you let it. That’s the nature of working life. There is no obvious limit to the things that need to be done; no shortage of people who want results yesterday. There are deadlines to be met, and there is money to be made. Work can be fascinating and exciting. A big win on a project can give you a major buzz. It draws you in. In contrast, the demands of home and family—or even sensible health precautions, like getting enough sleep and taking time off to relax and unwind—tend to appear commonplace, even dull. It’s tempting to put them off; to reason that you can always spend time with the children next week, or make it up to your partner some other time, or catch up on rest after that major client’s presentation is over.

It would be tragic if something as important as how people live their lives—and we, as a society, place our collective values—is rendered trivial by a combination of marketing hype and the dead hand of corporate compliance and legalism.

Creating a work/life balance is all about values: deciding what truly matters in your life or organization—what comes first, even if it isn’t convenient and someone else is yelling blue murder about a deadline to be met or the risk of missing this quarter’s target. The compliance issues—having sensible arrangements for people who need to work part-time or have extra time off at certain stages in their life—should be commonsense expressions of those values in action. Something everyone wants to do because it’s right, not guidelines to be publicly espoused so long as they make the organization look good in PR terms—and quietly ignored later, if they get in the way of increased profits.

I’m sure you could have a really nice life in Cornwall, if that suited you (my sister lives there), but relocating yourself physically without changing anything else about the business, or the culture, or your personal life choices, won’t make the slightest bit of difference to your work/life balance, or anything else. It would be tragic if something as important as how people live their lives—and we, as a society, place our collective values—is rendered trivial by a combination of marketing hype and the dead hand of corporate compliance and legalism.

P.S. I gather the MBA students of Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, are walking the equivalent of the distance across Canada as part of the school’s commitment to instilling ideas of work/life balance. Bill Blake, Associate Dean of MBA Programs, is quoted as saying: "Success in the boardroom requires mental, physical, spiritual and emotional balance, and the Walk Across Canada, quite literally, puts Queen's MBA students many steps ahead of the competition." This is exactly what I mean by reducing work/life balance to something obvious that you think that you can do. It’s a great way to get fit, I’m sure, and everything Mr. Blake says is praiseworthy in itself, but is it work/life balance? Is it wrestling with expressing your true values and priorities on a day-by-day, month-by-month, year-by-year basis for the rest of your working life? I don’t think so.

Technorati tags: work/life balance life values lifestyle slow leadership

The Freedom to Choose . . . and the Time to Do It

Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19th century French political thinker and early observer of American democracy in action, considered that the most important aspect of individual freedom was the the authority to make daily choices:

For my own part, I should be inclined to think freedom less necessary in great things than in little ones. . . . Subjection in minor affairs . . . is felt by the whole community indiscriminately. It does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till . . .their spirit is gradually broken.

Today, “subjection in minor affairs” is nowhere more apparent than in the world of work. Not only are many professional people no longer free to choose how to spend their time during working hours—which used to be the distinguishing characteristic of being a professional: a person trusted to produce results without set working methods and close supervision—they are forced to work whatever hours the organization decides are necessary to accomplish its immediate profit objectives.

Freedom is based on trust, and trust is becoming a rare commodity in organizations today.

Along with the technological ability to supervise people more closely than ever before, executives seem to have lost the willingness to grant people true authority to do their jobs. For all the talk of empowerment, the reality is that pressure to produce more results with less time and fewer resources is causing many leaders to try to hold on to authority wherever they can. Freedom is based on trust, and trust is becoming a rare commodity in organizations today.

As a result, people are finding themselves ever more constrained by expectations and norms that they never chose; while the constant threat of layoffs hangs over them as an effective means of enforcing organizational discipline. As Philip K. Howard writes in The Collapse of the Common Good: How America's Lawsuit Culture Undermines Our Freedom:

Throughout America’s offices, hospitals, schools, courts, and public agencies, in roughly ascending order, people have been deprived of the authority to do their jobs as they believe is right and reasonable, and to judge and be judged on that basis. We’ve lost the ingredient Tocqueville considered essential to our national character; the freedom of spirit that comes from the authority to act on our beliefs.

The more organizations fail us and oppress us in the small things of life, the more we come to distrust them generally. It is as if those we trust to repay loyalty and effort with similar commitment in return have turned out to be cheating us at every turn. First comes anger, then a sense of needing a payback. What is apparently fair in the way we are treated by those above us—putting their self-interest above our needs and dues—becomes the norm for how we respond to them.

Unless people have the freedom to choose the small things in their lives, any larger freedoms have little meaning.

Thus begins a downward spiral of mistrust and selfishness that comes to infect business dealings generally. Unless people have the freedom to choose the small things in their lives, any larger freedoms have little meaning. You may have freedom to vote, freedom of conscience, and freedom of speech, but if you aren’t free to take some time off occasionally, or decide how you want to balance work with the rest of your life, you will still feel like a slave. Living your life in the best and most enjoyable way you believe you can is the purpose for which work is the means, not the other way around. If you cannot be yourself or live as you wish, what other freedoms are there?

There can be no trust without freedom, and no true satisfaction from working life without both.

Slowing down is not, as I have often said, merely about resting or taking more time off. It is essential to living a meaningful life—a life in which you choose your purpose and lifestyle, not one in which other people impose them on you for their benefit. Action can never produce meaning on its own. Meaning leads to action whenever people are allowed to turn their beliefs and desires into free choices in the world. There have always been those who want to impose their will on the majority, and there always will be. That is why taking the time to exercise freedom of choice, and making the effort to defend that freedom against all comers, is one of the hallmarks of a civilized society.

Tyranny—be it religious, political, economic, or military—always begins with oppression in the small, seemingly insignificant things of life, before growing to envelope everything else. There can be no trust without freedom, and no true satisfaction from working life without both.

Technorati tags: choice freedom civilized work leadership slow leadership

The Common Good

One of the marks of any civilized community is a willingness to work together for the common good: to put the benefit of all above the interests of individuals. At one time, to say this would be to speak the obvious. It is the basis of democracy and the foundation of any society that aspires to be civilized and free from tyranny and injustice.

We’re told that organizations should be “customer centric,” but is this really anything more than the latest piece of manipulative chicanery, aimed at increasing sales in a strongly competitive market?

Today, I’m not so sure that people still understand the vital importance of setting the common good above all other collective goals. In organizations, in particular, it often seems as if the interests of a small clique are preferred to choices that might work more for the collective benefits of everyone involved in the enterprise. Take the people who raped Adelphia and WorldCom, stealing from investors and employees alike, or those who ran Enron as a private machine to accumulate personal wealth. None of these looked to the common good as their objective. We’re told that organizations should be “customer centric,” but is this really anything more than the latest piece of manipulative chicanery, aimed at increasing sales in a strongly competitive market?

Organizations are communities with at least four main groups of participants: those who invest money in them, those who work for them and draw wages and benefits, those who depend on them for their own business success (their suppliers), and those who make the whole enterprise possible by buying the goods or services the organization produces. How many organizations are run for the benefit of this wider community? Some may be, but usually only in the tenuous sense that what all of us need to live is supplied by organizations of one type or another. For the rest, consumers are treated more as prey: people whose gullibility and emotions can be manipulated to make them buy more and more. Employees are treated as regrettable “costs,” whose pay and benefits must be minimized in the cause of reporting ever higher profits. Many large organizations also have an unenviable reputation for trying to manipulate and exploit their suppliers when they can. It seems none of these groups get much attention as “interested parties” in the success of the organization, at least in conventional management thinking.

With “ownership” spread between huge financial institutions, large corporations no longer face any really effective external control.

Shareholders come at the other end of the spectrum. They tend to get too much attention, probably because they provide the money that managers need to start and continue the business. Some theorists see the interests of the shareholders as more important than anything else. Reality suggests that is only a theory. While some shareholders (at least the major financial institutions) come near the front of the line for goodies, the small investor quickly finds that being an “owner” of the corporation confers almost no tangible benefits beyond shrinking dividends. It’s most often the managers of the enterprise who gain the lion’s share of the rewards. With “ownership” spread between huge financial institutions, large corporations no longer face any really effective external control. So long as they make profits for these institutional shareholders, thereby meeting their self-interest, the executives in charge are free to do pretty much as they wish. Labor unions are mostly weak and ineffective, undermined by their own partisan politics and the idea that “professional” employees are individuals (there’s that word again) who do not need to take part in collective bargaining. And while traditional economic theory sees consumers as motivated wholly by individual self-interest, the reality is that increasingly sophisticated means exist to manipulate huge groups of consumers in the self-interest of those who sell to them.

In our individualistic, capitalist society, we have unintentionally handed over many of our freedoms to groups who are driven largely—maybe totally—by self-interest.

Organizations are communities, and they are not so different from most similar human groupings. Those in positions of power are tempted to use their situation mostly to further their own advantage, with little regard for anyone else. In our individualistic, capitalist society, we have unintentionally handed over many of our freedoms to groups who are driven largely—maybe totally—by self-interest.

Somewhere in this nexus of money and politics, we have lost sight of the common good. We do not feel free to act on our beliefs, or hold those to account who twist the laws and institutions of the state to meet their personal interests. With so many individuals and interest groups eager to use laws meant to protect individual freedom to enforce their wishes on everyone else, ordinary, daily decisions are often burdened with the fear of legal consequences. Somehow, all this rampant individualism has restricted the freedom of individuals to work together to understand and strive for the common good.

When people are rushing through life as fast as they can, burdened with stress and anxiety about tomorrow’s smallest tasks, there’s no time or space to consider such long-term, broadly-based concepts as the common good of all. Instead, attention is riveted on purely parochial needs and desires; and if that means limiting benefits to others, so be it.

Our ancestors fought and died to restrict the individualistic, dictatorial powers of kings and nobles in favor of people at large. It would be ironic if we gave back those freedoms—this time to boards of directors and executives whose faces and names we may not even know.

Technorati tags: common good community leadership slow leadership

Leisure Is the Meaning of Work

I don’t often agree with the English philosopher Roger Scruton. His views are too right wing for my taste. But I found myself nodding in vigorous agreement at this passage in his introduction to Leisure The Basis Of Culture by Josef Pieper:

We mistake leisure for idleness, and work for creativity. Of course, work may be creative. But only when informed by leisure. Work is the means of life; leisure the end. Without the end, work is meaningless—a means to a means to a means . . . and so on forever, like Wall Street or Capitol Hill. Leisure is not the cessation of work, but work of another kind, work restored to its human meaning, as a celebration and a festival.

We work to reach somewhere, to achieve something. If that somewhere and something is merely more work, we find ourselves stuck in a cycle without end. Work ends only in more work, for ever. That renders any work meaningless, just as eating purely for the sake of eating makes a nonsense of sitting down for a meal (and is the cause of most of the obesity in the developed world).

In many organizations, the reward for achievements at work is to be given more and harder work. You may call it promotion or advancement if you wish, but that is what it is: the reward for working hard is to be called upon to work harder. It comes, usually, with more money attached, but money is of little use if you have no leisure to enjoy spending it. Of course, your family may greatly enjoy spending your money, and have ample leisure to do so, courtesy of the effort you put in at work. I leave it to you to decide whether seeing them enjoying life while you labor is sufficient reward in itself.

When you think about it, even those who work selflessly to ensure their children have the finest education and the best chances in life are sometimes guilty of bringing about “work for ever and ever. Amen.” What future opportunities are they seeking to ensure for their children? Usually, they are working and hoping for a situation where each child gets a “good job;” which, of course, means condemning that child to working on and on throughout a lifetime to provide the same for his or her children . . . and so on, for ever and ever.

The meaning and end of work should not be more work. It should be some goal that transcends the means used to achieve it. Leisure, properly understood, is the freedom to enjoy life and the results of your labor: time not just to relax but to engage in all those humanizing and civilizing activities that make life work living. Without leisure, there can be no learning beyond the basic skills needed to work. No enjoyment of art, music, conversation, friendship, or love. None of the higher aspects of human life.

The restlessness of today’s work-for-working’s-sake culture has more to do with an inability to relax into the leisure we need to be fully human than any innate desire to get more money and possessions. We strive and strive because we cannot accept reality and our place within it. Instead, we toil to impose our will on the universe, to bend it to obey our wishes and demands. Of course, since we must inevitably fail in such an arrogant endeavor, all we get for our efforts is the opportunity to waste still more time and energy on trying to achieve the impossible . . . over and over again.

Leisure is the goal for which work is the means, not some unfortunate interruption in the tasks before us. Many people fail to take all their allotted vacation time, probably out of fear that “out of sight means out of mind,” and they will miss out on something while they are away. What will they miss? Mostly likely the chance to work still more. Time for leisure is the only true reward of work. Like everything else available to us, we may use that leisure well or poorly, to celebrate our humanity or reduce ourselves to brain-dead couch potatoes. Yet even the most limited use of leisure does not destroy its importance. It’s what life is for, after all.

I will leave the last word to Josef Pieper:

One the other hand, work itself, when deprived of its counterparts genuine festivity and true leisure, becomes inhuman: it may, whether endured silently or “heroically,” become a bare, hopeless, effort, resembl[ing] the labor of Sisyphus, who in fact is the mythical paradigm of the “Worker” chained to his labor without rest, and without inner satisfaction.

Technorati tags: Leisure purpose of work ends and means leadership slow leadership

Integrity Versus Manipulation

Doing the right thing from the wrong motives generally renders it useless. People judge motives as well as actions. If they suspect an ulterior motive, or some hidden agenda, they’re immediately on their guard. You will not be trusted if people suspect your praiseworthy words or actions stem from the wish to pull the wool over their eyes or sell them something.

Most employees have learned to suspect the motives of management precisely because they’ve been fooled before.

Suppose an organization decides to create a slower-paced, more humane working environment. If the people who work there suspect the true motive is to extract extra work by encouraging them to volunteer more input than management can persuade them to offer by open requests, the action will fail. The same will happen if the fine words about having more time to think and become creative aren’t matched by actions when things begin to get tough. No one likes to feel duped. Most employees have learned to suspect the motives of management precisely because they’ve been fooled before.

Here’s what Mark Goulston wrote in a recent ChangeThis manifesto:

Taking the time to learn the right thing to do in various circumstances—and then do it—is a matter of values more than anything else. If you value winning at any cost, how you play the game wonʼt matter. But putting value on being the best you can be, testing your mettle against the best opponents, and then becoming even better because of it results in your having a winning life.

Manipulation is rampant in management decisions and office politics. People just about always interpret it as dishonesty and react accordingly.

It’s said there are three statements in this world that are never true. They are:

• My check is in the mail.
• Of course I’m not simply trying to get you into bed with me.
• As your manager, I’m here to help you.

Many of the management fads and fashionable techniques around today are thinly-disguised ways of manipulating people to do what you want, when it is probably not in their own best interests to do so. Manipulation is rampant in management decisions and office politics. People just about always interpret it as dishonesty and react accordingly.

A key role of leadership is to create meaning: to give everyone involved in the organization a sense of purpose and direction.

Macho management is highly manipulative. It may be sometimes brutal and bullying, at other times full of appeals to heroic sentiments, but it is always about getting people to work harder and faster to benefit others—mostly the executives of the business and the shareholders: those who main source of income comes either directly from returns on share capital, or indirectly from the same source via incentives linked to increases in share valuation. Many leaders and managers have built their careers on acting tough, critical, and intimidating. Such inappropriate behavior is often reinforced because it offers a quick way to get others to do what the manager wants. When a manager threatens people, acts in menacing ways, or makes it clear they will suffer if they don't do this or that, employees usually do what is asked—even if it isn’t anything they believe in, or it makes no business sense.

A key role of leadership is to create meaning: to give everyone involved in the organization a sense of purpose and direction. But it isn’t the case that any meaning will do. Meaning needs to be based on values that people can trust and believe in; on stories that inspire, not tales of trickery and deceit, or examples of bullying. Some of today’s organizations are such horrible places to work that brute force is probably the only way to get anything done.

Take the findings, published in the British Medical Journal, from a study of nearly 3000 medical students from 16 medical schools (via Bob Sutton). It seems that 42 percent of seniors reported being harassed by fellow students, professors, physicians, or patients; 84 percent reported they had been belittled and 40 percent reported being both harassed and belittled. As Bob Sutton writes:

An earlier study of 594 “junior physicians” (similar to “residents” in the U.S.) in the United Kingdom found that 37% had been bullied in the prior year (especially by more senior physicians) and 84% indicated they had witnessed bullying that was aimed at fellow junior physicians. Nurses appear to have it especially bad, and unlike these medical students or residents, they don’t graduate to positions as doctors where they are relatively free from getting abuse, and apparently, also relatively free to dish it out.

I doubt that hospitals are any worse in this regard than many other types of organization. Bad behavior is often rewarded or tolerated, so, over time, it comes to corrupt the culture. Getting your own way in the short-term is often easier through using manipulative or autocratic means than any other way. That’s why today’s short-term, quick-results-obsessed businesses are so prone to falling into manipulative ways. They get quicker results—so long as you ignore the long-term effect on trust and corporate culture.

You must do the right thing for one reason only: because it’s the right thing to do.

The cure for manipulative management is simple to state, but harder to achieve. You must do the right thing for one reason only: because it’s the right thing to do. Leaders have ethical duties as well as all the others, and many management decisions are as much moral as economic. Many managers ignore this and try to absolve themselves from their ethical responsibilities by portraying every business decision as merely pragmatic. This cannot be done honestly. Life is a series of ethical choices, no less in business than anywhere else.

Technorati tags: business ethics manipulative management leadership slow leadership

Occam's Razor

Browsing around the Internet, I came across a succinct description of Occam’s Razor on the site SkepticReport.com. Here’s part of what it said:

Skeptics frequently talk about Occam's Razor. They use it to choose between alternative explanations for something, especially where no one alternative has been either proven or disproven. . . . Many people will tell you it says, "Choose the simplest solution". But it doesn't say choose the simplest solution. Opponents of Occam complain that it will not necessarily help you choose the correct solution. But Occam's Razor does not pretend to choose the correct solution. So what is it and what is its point?

Occam's Razor actually says: "Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate", which is [literally] translated as "plurality should not be posited without necessity." The words are those of the medieval English philosopher and Franciscan monk William of Ockham (ca. 1285-1349). The archaic English needs to be interpreted for modern times. What it means is this: Do not invent unnecessary entities to explain something.

I’d like to suggest an updating of William of Ockham’s idea to apply to business and leaders. Let’s call it Carmine Coyote’s Cutthroat:

“Do not invent unnecessary measurements and statistics to manage anything.”

I’ll start with setting objectives by statistical means: something that is so common as to go virtually unchallenged. Let’s challenge it, shall we?

Take an imaginary company whose sales for one product last quarter were $50 million. Their objective for the next quarter is a 5% increase to $52.5 million. So far so good. Another quarter passes, and the powers that be decide to be “kind” and keep their target the same (a 5% increase). No one considers that the base figure has increased (to $52.5 million). Five percent of that is $2.625 million, not the $2.5 million of the previous quarter. Now that product’s sales people have to find an extra $0.125 million in sales over and above the last quarter’s increase. They haven’t stood still. Their target has increased. If this continues, the next quarter’s target will be $2.756 (5% of $55.125 million). After one year of “standing still,” the quarterly target will be $3.04 million, compared to $2.5 million at the start. From there, the laws of compounding will quickly raise each new quarter’s target to stratospheric levels.

Many years ago, I discovered that the questions in math tests for college graduates most likely to produce wrong answers were any that included percentages. That still holds good.

Too often, those in charge look only at the percentage figure. Their reasoning is typically that if you made a 5% increase last quarter, you should increase that percentage this time around—maybe to 6% or more. You can imagine the effect on actual target amounts. But here is the kicker: those in charge, looking just at percentages and ignoring the effect of compounding, see such targets as wholly realistic. What’s a measly increase from 5 to 6? (For a start, it’s 20%, but don’t let reality or mathematical accuracy bother you.) Many years ago, I discovered that the questions in math tests for college graduates most likely to produce wrong answers were any that included percentages. That still holds good.

As a result of this kind of statistical idiocy, people find themselves facing impossible goals, even as their organizations raise market expectations that they are wholly incapable of fulfilling, however hard they drive their people forward. What’s even worse is that people truly do try their hardest to meet the objectives set for them. As W. Edwards Deming said, people with sharp enough targets will probably meet them even if they have to destroy the company to do so. He could also have added that they will likely destroy their own health and well-being at the same time.

A good part of the overwork and pressure that infects business today comes from people either collecting data to satisfy the organizational mania for measurement, or facing objectives that have been produced by the statistically illiterate.

Demming’s basic message was that quality is a management responsibility, and poor quality is almost always the result of imposing systems and objectives which thwart people’s desire to do high quality work. He also said the role of management was to drive out fear, something best done by eliminating quotas, numerical goals, and merit ratings. A good part of the overwork and pressure that infects business today comes from people either collecting data to satisfy the organizational mania for measurement, or facing objectives that have been produced by the statistically illiterate.

The mania for measurement wouldn’t be quite so bad were it not for the sad fact that most people involved neither understand the point of the figures nor are able to deduce anything useful from them. Many of these solemnly-reported figures are like the “statistics” beloved of baseball commentators: “That’s only the twelfth time since 1907 that the third player in a visiting team from south of the Mason-Dixon line has struck the ball on the first pitch so that it landed exactly 20 feet to the right of a woman sitting on a red cushion. Amazing!”

No statistical objective will matter if it defies common sense or flies in the face of reality.

Remember Occam’s Razor. Don’t invent unnecessary “entities” to explain what is more simply understood by using existing concepts, such as chance. Then add Carmine Coyote’s Cutthroat and stop inventing unnecessary measurements and statistics to manage or lead. As Simon Caulkin wrote recently in the Observer (a British Sunday newspaper):

Despite management's obsession with hard numbers, many organisations are a fact-free zone, swirling with untested assumptions. Horrifying sums of money are committed on superstition or whim. . . . As Peter Drucker says: “Thinking is very hard work. And management fashions are a great substitute for thinking.”

No measurement can be a substitute for hard thinking and taking your time to work out what may truly be the underlying causes of the problems you need to deal with. No statistical objective will matter if it defies common sense or flies in the face of reality. And no amount of performance management, incentivization, or bullying leadership will save an organization where those in charge are, in Caulkin’s words: “. . . in love with claptrap and blinded by ideologies.”

Technorati tags: business objectives performance management incentives business ideology leadership slow leadership

Adrenaline Junkies

When I was at university, I knew many people who left nearly all their work until the last moment, then sat up late into the night, finishing some term paper with moments to go before the deadline. In some cases, the culprit was simple procrastination. But I had several friends who acted like this deliberately. They believed that working under extreme pressure made their work better. The same attitude is fairly common today. I’ve met many managers who believe that pressure is needed to get the best from people; that no one will fulfill their potential until they are working against tight deadlines, or under pressure to produce a result in record time. Such managers use this line of thinking to justify limiting resources and piling on work demands. In their eyes, they are actually helping their people do better by giving them greater and greater challenges.

This belief is so prevalent that it’s worth thinking through in detail.

I think it’s based on the way people often feel when the pressure is on. They feel energized and excited. They feel they’re doing something great, perhaps even if they aren’t. The culprit, of course, is adrenaline: the substance our body makes under stress to give us a short-term energy boost to cope with fight or flight.

It’s easy to become an “adrenaline junkie,” constantly looking for the next high. Most organizations have quite a few such addicts. They try to turn every problem into a crisis, since only crises give them the fix they need. Then, like any other source of sudden excitement, the effect steadily becomes less intense, so that the person needs more and more of whatever it is to reproduce the burst of ecstatic stimulation they got the first time. So each crisis must be a little more pressing and potentially terrible than the last to call up the same jolt of adrenaline.

Under the influence of an adrenaline fix, people usually react more than think, rushing into hyperactivity to work off the energy they’ve stimulated in themselves.

Do people truly do exceptional work under the influence of this natural performance-enhancing drug? Maybe . . . sometimes. Usually they only feel that they do. What the human body needs for fight or flight isn’t mental acuity or creativity; it’s raw, physical energy, which is mostly what adrenaline provides. Under the influence of an adrenaline fix, people react more than think, rushing into hyperactivity to work off the energy they’ve stimulated in themselves. Most of the friends I knew who believed that last-minute rushes of work helped them didn’t turn in anything exceptional. Sometimes what they did was plain bad, but mostly it was ordinary; probably much what they would have done without the delays and adrenaline rush. I think for many adrenaline junkies the true stimulus to work this way is the wish to feel special and excited. Most are ordinary folk like the rest of us, except for those few minutes or hours when they manage to produce a feeling of euphoria and excitement by throwing themselves up against some terrifying deadline.

I think for many adrenaline junkies the true stimulus to work this way is the wish to feel special and excited.

Some of you reading this are probably going to protest that you know of clear instances where working under intense pressure did produce an exceptional outcome. Of course. It is bound to happen sometimes, if only by chance. Some defenders of the belief look to wartime emergencies and claim that a national crisis produces a massive burst of creativity in response. In reality, I think much of the reason for any creative spurt under such circumstances is the enhanced willingness of those in power to listen to off-the-wall ideas—the kind of suggestions that would have been instantly dismissed in less desperate times.

Any sports enthusiast knows the terrible threat of performance nerves. The adrenaline is flowing, but the outcome isn’t excitement or euphoria. It’s fear, a clouded mind, and a sense of numbness that seems to paralyze you from actions that you performed with consummate ease when you were relaxed. The finest players in any sport develop an uncanny ability to relax in situations that would have other people trapped in an adrenaline high to beat all adrenaline highs. They know that the best way to a clear mind, precise movements, and sound judgments is to be as relaxed as possible, even under pressure.

All the time that these people appeared to be doing nothing, their minds were working constantly: thinking about the topic, reflecting on what they read, turning the subject over and over in their heads to come up with fresh insights and creative viewpoints.

Yet I did have one or two friends, outstanding and brilliant people, who never wrote down their assignments until the last moment and still turned in work on a regular basis that put the rest of us to shame. What were they doing? Were they proof that pressure could indeed produce brilliance?

Well, no. All the time that these people appeared to be doing nothing, their minds were working constantly: thinking about the topic, reflecting on what they read, turning the subject over and over in their heads to come up with fresh insights and creative viewpoints. They left the dull business of writing it all down until close to the deadline to give themselves as much relaxed time to think as possible. When they sat at a desk to write, what they wanted to say was fully formed in their minds. All they had to do was put it on paper.

The human mind and body cannot handle being run flat out all the time. The more adrenaline highs it has to deal with, the greater the wear and tear on nerves and tissues. The people most likely to experience burnout are those who work hardest and seem, at first, to cope best with the pressures. You may be able to leap into action in every crisis to begin with, but the process will steadily grind you down. Cynical and manipulative employers use people while they still have enough energy, and throw them away when they’re worn out. Civilized employers understand that brilliant people need time to think, even if for much of that time they don’t appear to be doing anything at all, and that everyone needs time to rest and recover after any significant effort.

To end with, here’s a great quote from a blog called Rands in Repose:

Yes, you can argue that one can be exquisitely creative when one's hair is on fire. It's the necessity is the mother of invention argument. But, seriously, if your hair's on fire, are you going to take the time to consider all [potential] hair dousing techniques; or are you just going to stick your head in the nearest convenient bucket before it really hurts? Panic is the mother of the path of least resistance.

Technorati tags: creativity work pressure adrenaline slow leadership

Short-termism

Here’s an interesting quotation from “Breaking the Short-Term Cycle: Proceedings of the CFA Centre for Financial Market Integrity and the Business Roundtable Institute for Corporate Ethics Symposium Series on Short-Termism” published earlier this year. It points to many of the aspects of “fast management” that have been noted on this site, including the tendency to view measurements produced by accountants as if they describe reality, not mere accounting conventions:

Short-termism refers to the excessive focus of some corporate leaders, investors, and analysts on short-term, quarterly earnings and a lack of attention to the strategy, fundamentals, and conventional approaches to long-term value creation. An excessive short-term focus combined with insufficient regard for long-term strategy can tip the balance in value-destructive ways for market participants, undermine the market’s credibility, and discourage long-term value creation and investment. Such short-term strategies are often based on accounting-driven metrics that are not fully reflective of the complexities of corporate management and investment.

There is a great deal of learned debate about the reasons for short-termism and its effects on commerce, especially on investment markets. A quick search of the Internet will turn up hundreds of references, both pro and con. Much of this debate is shrouded in language so full of financial jargon as to make it unintelligible to anyone outside the investment community.

By chasing “hot” stocks and continually buying and selling to try to generate higher returns, investors cause the very problem they complain about: managers who will sacrifice the future to produce a short-term win.

I think there are simple ways of looking at this problem. Firstly, when society as a whole is fixated on immediate gratification, it is unlikely that investors will be any different. By chasing “hot” stocks and continually buying and selling to try to generate higher returns, investors cause the very problem they complain about: managers who will sacrifice the future to produce a short-term win. Investment used to be about putting money into a business and relying on a steady stream of earnings from dividends. Now many large businesses no longer pay dividends at all, and investors have moved away from true investment into becoming traders: people who make their money by continually trying to buy and sell at a profit. A quick glance at the number of shares changing hands daily on the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq will prove that both now cater primarily to short-term traders, not long-term investors.

Another factor is diminishing levels of trust. To stay invested for the long term, shareholders must trust the organization’s managers to be good stewards of their money. To manage from a long-term perspective, executives need to trust that the shareholders won’t suddenly withdraw their support, or force some radical change of direction, if they go through a temporary bad patch.

What we see is the opposite: organizations that appoint new leaders with loud fanfares, then fire them if they don’t produce the desired upward movements in profits and share price in the blink of an eye. It’s the downside of the fashionable cult of proclaiming certain individuals to be exceptional and heroic leaders. If you believe appointing one person can change the fortunes of a massive corporation (a totally irrational belief, but a common one), you will also believe that the same one person might be the cause of all its problems. Shareholders often drive down the price of a company’s shares because of disappointment that a CEO’s policies aren’t paying off as quickly as they wanted—which is usually very quickly indeed.

Without patience or trust, there can only be short-term objectives, since no one is prepared to take the risk of waiting for the longer-term to receive their payoff. Rather than wailing about inherent short-termism among managers and investors, we should look to the underlying cause: our habitual impatience and greed for getting what we want without waiting for it. Such attitudes used to be seen as evidence of childishness. Today they are often praised as showing “drive” and “get up and go.”

It’s assumed no one pays attention for more than 30 seconds.

If people have a short attention span, the media undoubtedly carries much of the blame. As Dave Hurd wrote in an extremely funny and perceptive article in Rogue Project Leader magazine:

The media has to explain what we just heard a politician say. Not only that, but if you missed the speech you have virtually no chance of seeing it again in its entirety. Unless you read an impeccable news journal you’re not going to see the full speech again. It gets spoon fed to us in clips, sound bites, and analysis.

It’s assumed no one pays attention for more than 30 seconds. If you do, the continual repetition, oversimplification, and manufacturing of sound bites can drive you mad with frustration.

The cure for short-termism is simple: slow down and think.

We cannot have it both ways. If we want to place our hopes on long-term growth and stability, there is no place for short-termism. If we simply want jam now and to hell with tomorrow, we have to accept that eating our jam today may be followed by long periods on bread and water. It’s more profitable to reevaluate the measures of success that are in use than to castigate people for trying to match up to them. Simon Caulkin, writing in The Observer, a British Sunday newspaper, on July 23, 2020, quoted Fred Reichheld, director emeritus of consultancy Bain, this way:

The culprit . . . is the profit-based system most companies use to manage performance. Managers are judged and often rewarded on their profit figures. But financial measures make no distinction between how profits are earned. Are they the result of creating new value from customer relationships ('good profits' from increasing loyalty), or were they earned by appropriating value from them ('bad profits')?

All that cheap advertising and discounting wins the shortest of short-term customers: the kind who will buy from whoever is selling at the lowest price today, regardless of anything else. Such customers are more than fickle. They have no product or brand loyalty, so their purchase is always a one-off event. Adding more of them simply increases the “churn rate” at which existing customers must be replaced by new ones—a process that adds considerably to costs without creating any actual value.

The cure for short-termism is simple: slow down and think. Then think some more. Reflect on the real, lasting value of whatever you are doing or rewarding. The old saying is that if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. If you reward gut-reactions and snap judgments, you’ll end up with leaders who behave like Pavlov’s dogs, salivating whenever the shareholders ring a bell and yell for fresh short-term profits. I guess shareholders get the managers they deserve . . . and vice versa.

Technorati tags: short-termism quick fixes executive incentives slow leadership

Is the Jingle in Your Pocket Worth the Jangle in Your Head?

Many of the basic causes of today’s epidemic of overwork come from the overweening expectations of financial markets. The capital investment necessary for business is almost wholly controlled by huge financial institutions such as global banks and investment houses, themselves businesses with shareholders trained to expect continually growing returns. Very little of those returns come from dividends. Indeed, many businesses, especially in high-tech fields, pay no dividends at all. The high returns that Wall Street and its equivalents around the world crave are produced by rising stock prices and the buying and selling of stocks, derivatives, and even less comprehensible financial instruments. And whereas benefiting from dividends is a long-term activity, relying on a steady income stream, trading is an essentially short-term business. You take your profits as soon as you think a peak has been reached, and before the inevitable slide in prices follows.

“The solution was to base as much as possible of the incomes of those at the top of an organization on upward movements in the share price.”

Shareholders and managers have an uneasy relationship. Shareholders want as much return as possible, which means keeping salaries down. Managers want to take their own profit from the work they put into running the enterprise. I don’t know who invented what must have seemed a sure-fire way to keep both sides happy, but I’m going to guess he or she was looking to earn a mint of money as a result. The solution was to base as much as possible of the incomes of those at the top of an organization on upward movements in the share price, whether by paying direct bonuses or awarding stock options. At one stroke, the interests of shareholders and managers were perfectly aligned. Pay top executives to drive up the share price, so the shareholders can trade the shares at a greater profit.

Fluctuations in share prices are short-term phenomena, and most are driven by the profits reported on a quarterly or semi-annual cycle. The immediate result of our unknown genius’s brainwave to link executive pay to share-price movement was to fix every executive’s gaze on one place: the next quarter’s profit figures. Falling profits now signal cuts in executive earnings (or, since employment negotiations tend to ignore the downside, at least a standstill), something no one views with ease. Worse still, in the tightly-knit world of boardroom members, “missing the numbers” represents a loss of face for all those involved. It must have seemed that the plan was working beautifully.

“In the crazy logic of Wall Street, meeting your objectives is seen as no more than you are paid for.”

Then the law of unintended consequences stepped in. At least two consequences seem to have been missed. First, in the crazy logic of Wall Street, meeting your objectives is seen as no more than you are paid for. It may (sometimes) stop the share price from falling, or limit its decline, but it is no reason to drive it up. To do that you must exceed no only your own estimates, but also the expectations of a legion of analysts, whose thinking is based on who knows what calculations. And since this year’s or this quarter’s results are old hat the minute they are announced, whatever you do achieve must be exceeded again on the next cycle. It is an accelerating treadmill no one can get off.

“Many of today’s leaders are overstretched, overburdened, and overly concerned with the demands of the financial markets and stockholders’ insistence on immediate gratification.”

The second unforeseen consequence of a myopic focus on quarterly numbers is simple: meeting or exceeding them becomes worth any sacrifice, given the alternatives. CEOs nowadays last barely 2 years in office on average, even if some manage to leave with generous “golden parachutes”. Most of todays’ top executives work harder than rich people have ever worked in the past. However, it takes far more than their own efforts to keep ahead of the relentless demand from Wall Street for more productivity and higher profits: it means forcing everyone else to work just as hard, or preferably even harder, than they do. And since people must continue to produce more at less cost, that means driving up output without increasing wages, salaries, and benefits.

Many of today’s leaders are overstretched, overburdened, and overly concerned with the demands of the financial markets and stockholders’ insistence on immediate gratification. The result is leadership that is short-term and based on instant responses: habitual or automatic reactions, emotional responses, instant judgments, and quick-fix solutions that ignore or avoid the real issues. When you are going flat out, you have few alternatives and no time to find any more.

It’s time to call a halt. The essential first step in changing course comes from a shift in attitude and viewpoint: in this case, a move away from the current obsession with short-term results and immediate returns towards a long-term understanding of what makes for organizational longevity and a worthwhile working life. Unless this happens, the treadmill is only going to run faster.

Technorati tags: incentive pay work pressure executive stress slow leadership

Labor Day Thoughts on Ethics, Civilization, and Business

Ethics lies at the heart of what it means to be civilized, not morality, though what may count as immoral behavior is rarely ethical either. Morality is based on following established beliefs, teachings, and precepts, often specific to a particular religious tradition. It also varies from culture to culture, so what is considered important for morals in a strict Muslim household may differ profoundly from the precepts a strict Hindu, Jewish, or Christian household would follow. Ethics is based on the use of human reason to guide behavior—as is Slow Leadership—and a belief that whoever exercises reason most is likely to behave best. To this must be added a deep faith in individual freedom, since destroying freedom is nearly always the first step of any tyranny, religious or secular.

I’m not blind to the failures and drawbacks of human reason, nor its limitations, but it’s hard to see that there is a better guide to how we should behave in business life.

Civilized societies do not indulge in mindless prejudice or pogroms; nor do they block each individual’s freedom to seek out a personal answer to the problems of life. And though human reason can err—especially when people’s desires cause them to defend positions they want to be true, even though they can sense they may be not—it still provides the best safeguard against being taken in by plausible liars. As I read recently, asking people to go through life without recourse to reason is like like telling someone groping through a dark place by the light of a single candle to blow their candle out. I’m not blind to the failures and drawbacks of human reason, nor its limitations, but it’s hard to see that there is a better guide to how we should behave in business life.

Morality may be based on dogma; ethics is not.To take an ethical position means to demand sound, rational reasons for people’s actions: reasons that can stand up to scrutiny and questioning, providing a basis for basing decisions on more than personal self-interest or prior belief. And whereas morality is fixed, ethics (and reason) are never finished with seeking greater understanding.

One of the hallmarks of today’s conventional management thinking is how dogmatic much of it has become. When people believe that already know all the answers, what need is there to question further, or even review what they believe they already know? It is this dogmatic belief in conventional business principles that has fueled much of the macho, narrow-minded thinking among today’s leaders. Where someone with an ethical cast of mind sees fresh questions to be explored and new principles to be considered, the conventional leader sees only known tasks to be completed as quickly and cheaply as possible. For one of the most fiercely-held dogmas of conventional leaders is an unquestioning belief in the primacy of profit, whether it is over people, principles, or the passion that makes work worth doing.

If you know all the answers, there is nothing to learn. If you know only that you will never know for sure, there is every reason to go on testing and exploring, in the hope either of adding further certainty or disproving what once you thought you knew.

The principles that ethical thinkers follow are what others have called “strong beliefs, lightly held.” Their strength comes from having a firm basis in reason. Most have been fiercely argued, tested, and validated by experience. They are lightly held because reason shows us that what we think we know today may be disproved by some change in circumstances or fresh understanding. The basis of dogma is faith and clinging to set ideas; the basis of ethics is learning and a readiness to let go of anything that can no longer be justified, however dear it may be to our past thinking. If you know all the answers, there is nothing to learn. If you know only that you will never know for sure, there is every reason to go on testing and exploring, in the hope either of adding further certainty or disproving what once you thought you knew.

Overwork, stress, leadership through fear and manipulation, the exploitation of the many on behalf of a chosen few, are ethically unacceptable because reason and experience tells us that they cause harm to individuals and society at large. I believe this to be true, not because of any dogma, but because I can think through the consequences of such actions as these and see the results. Living and working in an atmosphere of fear and threats produces alienation and hatred, with results that range from personal feuds and labor disputes, through social unrest, to terrorism. When a select few manipulate and exploit others for their own benefit, there can neither be freedom nor democracy. As many totalitarian societies have proved (and not a few authoritarian corporations as well), the result is a long slide into corruption and repression. The elect suppress those they exploit out of fear that their corrupt rule will be overthrown and their cosy lives ruined. The exploited come to hate their masters and so plot secret rebellion.

To set aside macho, brutalized, and dogmatic business beliefs is to set aside what must, in the end, destroy the very people and organizations who hold to them.

Do long-hours cultures and high-pressure workplaces exploit and demean those who work in them? Are there better ways of producing higher productivity that do not demand that people subordinate the whole of life to the pursuit of profit for others? Can we balance the need for profits to sustain a business with the need of its people for stimulation, personal development, and a sense of meaning and satisfaction in what they do? These are all ethical questions, and the answers are most likely to be found by exercising our reason to consider the consequences to our actions and explore the alternatives. The basis for civilized work is a reasoned and ethical approach to business life. To set aside macho, brutalized, and dogmatic business beliefs is to set aside what must, in the end, destroy the very people and organizations who hold to them. Look at Enron.

Much of management theory is unscientific, not because it lacks potentially verifiable ideas, but because it is not constantly subjected to rigorous questioning or tested against changing experience. It is more like the teachings of religious faith: statements to be taken on trust because of the reverence accorded to those who made them, often in different circumstances far in the past. Slow Leadership aspires to be more than a movement concerned with improving work/life balance or workplace culture. We suggest that you slow down, but not simply to rest and renew your energy. Most of all it is to allow you to use your innate powers of reasoning to find solutions to the dilemmas that face you; and to question, again and again, whatever others tell you that you must accept on the basis of obedience to doctrine.

What distinguishes a leader is not primarily skill or technique: it is character and values, with both firmly based on taking whatever time is needed to exercise your freedom to think and seek out what is beneficial to all, not merely convenient for a few.

When Mrs. Thatcher (a lady not noted for flexibility of mind or belief) was Prime Minister of Great Britain, she was fond of saying: “There is no alternative.” This was meant to end all debate in her favor. But there are always alternatives. If we believe there are none, it is either because we have not allowed ourselves time to find them, or we do not like those we can see. Management and leadership are about practical ethics. There is no basis in either one for unchallengeable doctrine or dogma, just as there is no known ethical basis for dishonesty, fraud, discrimination, or greedy exploitation of others. What distinguishes a leader is not skill or technique: it is character and values, with both firmly based on taking whatever time is needed to your exercise freedom to think and seek out what is beneficial to all, not merely convenient for a few. That is truly Slow Leadership.

Technorati tags: business ethics reason management dilemmas slow leadership

Raising the (Business) Speed Limit

There are times when eager technophiles miss the point about whether or not devices like BlackBerries and cellphones are a cause of worsening work/life balance. Take the article by Dan Farber on August 25th 2006 on ZDNet. He pretty much dismisses the possibility that always-on connectivity to your place of work could be a problem. Here’s how he sees today’s trend towards organizations raising the pace of working and expecting their people to stay in touch all the time:

It's as if the speed limit were raised from 55 mph to 75 mph, and companies expect workers to meet or exceed the upper limit. A faster pace doesn't necessarily mean more work; it can mean more productive work and faster results, especially if a company has good policies around collaboration, such as not copying everyone on every email. However, working at 50 mph in an environment moving at 75 mph isn't going to be sufficient to stay in synch with the pace of business.

Let’s look at his analogy with speed on the road, because I think it’s a good one.

Raising the speed limit generally causes everyone to drive faster. You don’t have to increase your own speed, but if you don’t you’ll likely be constantly harassed by everyone else. You’ve probably experienced what it feels like on the freeway to have an eighteen-wheeler bearing down on you at 80 mph, flashing his headlights and blaring his horn for you to speed up or get out of the way. That happens in the work environment too. If one person is working steadily at a modest pace while everyone else is rushing around in some manic state, at the very least the “slow” person is going to get some hard stares and snide comments directed at them. Besides, does a faster pace typically mean “more productive work and faster results” as Mr. Farber claims?

If one person is working steadily at a modest pace while everyone else is rushing around in some manic state, at the very least the “slow” person is going to get some hard stares and snide comments directed at them.

Let’s go back to the vehicle analogy. Does driving faster get you where you want to go more quickly? Is seems that it should, but we all know things don’t always work as they ought to.

High-speed driving, like high-speed working, needs special skills and a vehicle capable of being driven safely at high velocity. Sadly, many drivers have more appetite for speed than they have the skill to handle it. And if pressure from other drivers forces them to go faster than they know they should, you can add increased anxiety and all the ills of tension to the list of drawbacks. There’s nothing like knowing you’re driving way too fast to make any journey exhausting and nerve-wracking. Driving a car faster than the engine and bodywork (and brakes) can cope with greatly increases the chances of skids, rollovers, and other dangers such as tire blow-outs. High-speed roads are highly dangerous places to be, especially when the weather is bad and there is rain, ice, or snow on the road surface. It’s well understood that when everyone drives faster, it increases the number of accidents, as well as the severity of the consequent injuries, even in good weather.

Many managers have far greater confidence in their ability to handle large workloads and high-pressure environments than is deserved.

Business is very similar. Many managers have far greater confidence in their ability to handle large workloads and high-pressure environments than is deserved. The “vehicles” they are driving—their personal skill sets and past experience—may be as shaky and prone to breakdown as any old clunker of a car you might see being driven too fast on the Interstate. And the business environment, like the road surface, may be full of potholes or covered with rain and ice.

It’s easy to claim that going faster gets you where you want to go more quickly. But that assumes that every driver is fully capable of handling the higher speed, every car is in tip-top mechanical condition, and the road surface is dry, smooth, and free from obstacles like bits of tire and wooden planks that fell off a truck. In the real world, you are more likely to encounter some testosterone-fueled idiot in a flashy sports car, who imagines his driving skills are way better than they are, and considers slowing down in bad conditions a sign of being a sissy.

There are managers who can barely cope safely with the workplace equivalent of 50 mph without crashing and burning, let alone 75 mph.

Ever encountered a testosterone-fueled manager similarly trying to impress the world with his he-man status and going way beyond his capabilities to do so? I’ll bet you have. There are many managers who can barely cope safely with the workplace equivalent of 50 mph without crashing and burning, let alone 75 mph. And if those who stand to gain most financially from raising the general speed of operations get the idea that faster is better, why stop at 75 mph? Why not push everyone to drive at 100 mph, or 150 mph? If more crash and get killed, who cares? They probably weren’t very good drivers anyway.

That is exactly the attitude of too many organizations today. Going faster doesn’t naturally increase productivity or bring faster results, unless you count more accidents as an increase in productivity. Besides, when you’re hurtling along, clutching the wheel because you’re terrified something awful is going to happen, you’ve no chance to look around you or enjoy the ride. That too is becoming almost universal. By living at breakneck speed (literally), you’ll flash through the ride of life and never get to enjoy it—even if it doesn’t end in a pileup. Not even the latest model cellphone or BlackBerry will help with that.

Technorati tags: face-paced life high-pressure work productivity leadership slow leadership