Blue Collar Rocket Science

In writing about the European front in World War II, it’s been argued that American troops were well-prepared for the realities of field warfare because they hadn’t been raised to be soldiers. By training, the GIs were farmers, mechanics, workers of all stripes. When a German tank broke, more often than not the crew abandoned it. When an American tank broke, the crew often figured out ways to get it running again using a boot lace and a tin can. The Germans waited for orders, the Americans improvised.

The Germans were excellent soldiers. The Americans were excellent doers.

In my experience, even the best-run companies I’ve worked for have had a built-in tendency to run like the German army. In fact, a lot of managers I know would define adherence to a hierarchy to be the very definition of “well-run.”

I disagree. In the media age, the weakest companies are those where management insists on being completely in charge. Or worse, where “rewarding individual initiative” is a mantra but is regularly undercut by actually rewarding the opposite.

CEO Ike

If you are a CEO, you may imagine yourself looking at a map of France, pushing little chess pieces closer and close to the Rhine river and think you are doing a great job. But what General Eisenhower knew was that it was the people represented by those chess pieces, those men in a tank with their boot laces and tin cans, that were actually getting the job done. All Ike did was point and say “go there.”

In the corporate world, I spent several years managing a team that had been waiting for orders, inside a department that had been waiting for orders. It seems that some years before I had been hired, senior management had become nervous about the people in their Internet operations department making decisions on their own, doing things, making money in ways that weren’t well-understood at the top levels of the company. That’s reasonable. It’s never good to have things happening in your company that you don’t really know about.

But what seems to have been the reaction to the situation was utterly incomprehensible to me. Instead of educating themselves about what this new Internet line of business was, Senior Management cracked down on it. They moved key components to other departments, they used layoffs to purge staff, and they buried profit from the Internet into a line item that merged it with other lines of business.

When I arrived, almost five years later, the site was paralyzed by inaction. The people who I expected to be leading were looking around for leaders, and finding none. Being who I am, took a different approach. I unlaced my boots and dug a couple of tin cans out of the garbage.

That was five years ago and I’ve been gone for more than a year. I hear, once again, that improvement at that company is just around the corner. I can only hope it is, because they’re just about to hit the ten year anniversary of when they cracked down on the Internet line of business and a much smaller competitor began eating away at their market share at an impressive clip.

Unfortunately, I have my doubts that anything is going to resolve soon. The problem isn’t unique to one company — it’s endemic to the business model that we instinctively embrace in America. Senior management naturally wants to give orders and have them followed.

But technology has decentralized power in ways that many senior managers don’t get. Many of us have worked under people who withheld information to maintain control. Without getting into the self-defeating aspects of that tactic, the sheer difficulty of hoarding information in the information age makes it a poor choice. Information is free, and freely available to your competitors as well. If they don’t do an end run around the info-hoarders, internal staff will. And if staff doesn’t do it, your own customers will.

At the job I’m recalling, management was aware on some level that their Internet operations was a broken tank. What they didn’t seem to understand was that their preceding actions had, in effect, been to issue the following order “Do not fix the tank. We will fix the tank.”

During the time I was there, lip service was given to rewarding staff who took initiative and fixed the tank. However, as anyone in a field related to marketing should know, there are explicit messages and there are implicit messages. And nothing sums up how management sends implicit messages better than this one slide from the Netflix Reference Guide on their “Freedom and Responsibility Culture”:

The real company values, as opposed to the nice-sounding values, are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go

Management that says it wants employee initiative, but only rewards employees who contributed to greater and greater levels of hierarchy is far too common. It is an untenable approach to a long-term culture of success, and the numbers will eventually catch up to companies with this fault as the competition moves both faster and smarter.