Bruce's Company

After a pretty good start, I stopped updating this blog, partly because I got sick of writing stuff, and partly because I got paranoid about someone discovering it. But I still think about important principles of running a company, and I'm more convinced than ever that these ideas need to be written down, even if I myself never use them.

But I'll try not to use any more examples from my current job, for fear of reprisal. (Why not delete them? I just can't bring myself to do so. Some of it's pretty good, actually!)

So today I want to talk about what I think is my most important idea. No more of this "saving the best for last" business; if I take that approach, odds are good that I'll never get to it. This idea is what I call the "Army of One" idea, although it has little to do with how they do things in the Army (actually, I think that the Army internally intended that ad campaign to be entirely ironic, knowing that no one would get it until it was too late). But first a tangent--er, some background.

One thing that I've complained about over and over is how companies frequently are so short-sighted with respect to the customer. Many companies brag about being customer-focused. I'm amazed that anyone thinks that this is worth bragging about. Hello! Of course you're customer-focused! That's where all the lettuce is! If you didn't have customers, you wouldn't have a business. This is not rocket science. My bank, Zions Bank, currently has an ad campaign that says "We haven't forgotten who keeps us in business." Well, that's mighty gratifying! I think in one of their commercials they even once said that they haven't forgotten whose money it is sitting in their accounts (almost in those exact words, mind you). My goodness. Where did they find all those geniuses that are running that enterprise? You mean I could walk into any branch of Zions in the state and they could tell me who was the owner of any given account I'd care to name? Wow!

Okay, enough sarcasm. The point is, a business is nothing without its customers, and so any action that they take must always be considered from the point of view of the customer. Everything must work out for the best for the customer. Now, I'm not saying that companies shouldn't occasionally make hard choices that may perturb or even alienate some or all of their customers. The long-term view must be maintained. But ultimately, the customers will be your business, period. I know this all seems pretty obvious, but the fact is that businesses are constantly violating this principle for reasons large and petty. I'd give examples, but I need to move back to my main point, and you probably agree with me here anyway.

So. Businesses exist because of their customers. They serve their customers, of course, through their employees. And they have a similar relationship with their employees as they do with their customers; that is, a combination of synergistic and adversarial. Both parties are trying to get as much as they can out of the other without having to pay too much. The "pay too much" side of the equation causes companies to lose sight of their employees' point of view, just as they sometimes lose sight of their customers'. Once a company loses sight of that, they can easily start heading down a path where the "synergy" part of the relationship is increasingly forgotten and the "adversarial" part of the relationship is dominant. This results in an us-versus-them management environment, which is the worst possible scenario for a company's productivity.

In an us-versus-them environment, the employee does the absolute minimum to avoid getting fired. His presence in the office is primarily intended as a ruse to give the impression that he's working. He may even put in some pretty long hours! Not working, mind you, but seats in chairs is still the number one metric for measuring work performance. The primary work that he does is to try to give the impression that he is working. These guys just love the modern taboo against firing people. They bet that their boss doesn't have the bergertis to fire them, and most of the time, they're right.

In us-versus-them offices, the smarter the employee, the better he is at gaming the system, and so the less work he does. (This is why some companies don't like hiring people who are too smart. Yes, there really are companies like that. Trust me. And any company that does not put a premium on smarts is an us-versus-them company.) Think Wally in Dilbert. He's my favorite character in that strip. I think that he's absolutely brilliant! He's a lot smarter than the token female engineer in that strip, whatever her name is, who is a great programmer but yet kills herself over and over to no avail as regards her standing in the company.

Here's an example of Wally's brilliance:



It should be pretty obvious that companies with employees like this are not going to be terribly productive, but just to be explicit, allow me to give an illustration. I think I read this in the excellent management book Peopleware. In Australia, I suppose there's some law against workers in "essential" industries going on strike, so the workers in those areas have come up with a way to go on strike without really going on strike. They call it "working by book." That is to say, everything they do is exactly, to the letter, according to what the relevant manual calls for. The effect of this is that productivity grinds to a halt. Air traffic controllers, for example, only allow planes to land or take off once every seven minutes, which causes the entire air transit system to become gridlocked. What can the management do? They can't fire these people; they're doing their job, after all! In fact, they're doing it exactly how their management wants them to! In theory.

Here's my point. The whole point of this long and tedious article. In many, many jobs, especially knowledge worker jobs, especially software development jobs, it is entirely possible for your employees to "work by book." Maybe not in exactly the same way as the air traffic controllers, but the effect is the same; that is, the gap between employees' maximum productivity and their actual productivity under us-versus-them management is a yawning chasm that will cripple your business. And you can't do anything about it. Because the software development process is so opaque, and the metrics are so fuzzy, that you cannot substantially prove that one developer is that much more productive than another. Or, perhaps more importantly, you can't prove that all of your developers aren't as productive as they ought to be. Oh sure, you might know. But you can't prove it. And if you're the type that won't fire people, you're stuck. Of course, even if you do fire people, you're still taking a huge loss each time you try and replace an employee.

Us-versus-them management cripples productivity. And yet it runs rampant in the business world, because it's so easy. A company that can truly master the alternative, which I call "Army of One" (the point! At last!), can gain a big competitive advantage.

Here is the Army of One management philosophy, in a nutshell:

Pay your employees lots and lots of money.

Ha ha ha! Just kidding! Needless to say, that's not a solution. That's the opposite of a solution, in fact; it's the "default choice," which is what you make when you can't come up with any real ideas. Any time you have a problem, and somebody comes back with a solution that essentially amounts to spending more money, that just means that they didn't come up with a solution. Because anybody can spend money; the whole objective of being in the world of business is to not spend money. Otherwise, it would be like playing a board game in which there are no rules. Each participant would just yell out "I win!" and the game would be over.

So. What's the Army of One management philosophy? It is the practice through which each employee feels like he and he alone is in charge of a certain slice of the universe. That slice may be big or small, but the crucial point is that the health of that slice (over the long term) is entirely a function of how well that employee does his job. He is an Army of One in that slice of the universe.

That's it. That's all! Just give an employee an area to be in charge of (note that I did not say "an assignment"; I'm talking about space, not time) and say, "This is yours." Then leave him alone for a while (whether an hour, or a week, or a month, depending on the job), come back, and see how things are. If it's well in hand, give him some more. Repeat. The employee will gain great satisfaction from knowing that there is a slice of the universe that he is in charge of, and by golly, that slice is humming along like a fine-tuned machine. As that slice gets bigger, the satisfaction increases, and inevitably the salary will too, because you'll naturally pay people with larger responsibilities larger salaries. But note that the raise follows the prior job satisfaction; it's not doled out as a measure to promote satisfaction to begin with.

Once an employee is an Army of One, what happens? He gets to work early to work on his kingdom. He works hard all day long. He might even stay late. Working, mind you, not just putting in the appearance of working, because what good would that do? Also, crucially, there's never a time when the employee doesn't have anything to do. Do you own your own house? If so, have you ever looked around and said, "Yep, it's all done! There is absolutely nothing else I can do to improve this house." Of course not. There's no such thing. Similarly with an employee working on his kingdom.

Of course, the manager may still need to occasionally advise the employee concerning his priorities to ensure that they align with the company's. Also the manager may need to clear the road in front of the employee to make sure there aren't insuperable obstacles blocking his path. The kingdom that the employee is building also actually has to mean something--no "busy work" kingdoms.

Now I suppose that this may still be pretty obvious to people reading this. But it certainly hasn't been obvious to most of the managers under which I have toiled. Most of them take a strictly us-versus-them approach to management and hand me one task after another without any regard to my point of view. I want to be a good employee, so I do it. And what do I get? Another assignment. This is perfectly reasonable, of course; after all, they're paying me to do something, aren't they? This is the trap that management falls into. And soon it all devolves into a game of us-versus-them.

Now, I know you're raising objections. And there are definitely difficulties in trying to implement this management style. What about teams? What about one-off assignments? What if the company isn't growing? These are all legitimate concerns, and I plan to address them in future entries. The Army of One management style isn't necessarily easy to pull off in all situations. That's why the us-versus-them style is so much more common. But as I detailed above, the trade-off is a huge win.