Managing a company, managing yourself

Dilbert — Scott Adam’s comicstrip satire on office life — depicts a world where people do a lot, but achieve nothing. I could describe the comic, but Adams’ strips tell it best:

Adams offered common-sense, humane fixes to this waste at the end of one of his books, The Dilbert Principle. When I read the book a couple of years ago I thought his advice was so useful for management that I wrote notes on it immediately. But when I reread those notes the other day, I was surprised at how much of his advice is useful for individuals too.

Take his advice to ‘eliminate the assholes’. It’s obviously helpful in a company. Yet lots of us think it’s useful to be assholes to ourselves, especially after we’ve failed at something. Not so. As Kelly McGonigal writes in The Willpower Instinct, ‘Study after study shows that self-criticism is consistently associated with less motivation and worse self-control. … In contrast … being supportive and kind to yourself, especially in the face of stress and failure is associated with more motivation and better self-control.’

So here are my notes. You might find them helpful too.

The OA5 company

Employee effectiveness is fundamental — they produce great products, and with great products and effective employees, any company will be successful. Here are three implications:

1. Stop messing around with stuff that doesn’t create great products or effective employees.

i) Stop doing stuff that’s one step removed from the fundamentals. For example:

• Write software, not policies for doing so.
• Develop products, but don’t go establishing a Task Force to test product development improvements.

ii) Stop tinkering (e.g. altering the organisational structure or rewriting company policy). Major streamlining is fine and truly abominable stuff must be changed. Otherwise, keep things consistent, warts and all. Here’s why:

• Tinkering disrupts your employees, who work best when things are consistent.
• Good products and effective employees will make tinkering unnecessary. They’ll generate enough income to make, say, a poor compensation plan seem adequate. And effective employees will suggest improvements without being on a Quality Team.

2. Get your employees Out At 5. Your employees will be effective if they’re creative and happy. You can keep them that way by getting them Out At 5. Here’s why:

• This isn’t settling for less productivity, just less time: people are mentally productive for only a few hours a day, and they know how to fit their activities into a reduced time.
• It’s also the best way to keep employees happy & creative: work can only give people so much satisfaction; after that, they need to get away from it and recharge elsewhere.

3. The real job of managers.

The big picture which managers fret over is actually in the details: the casual conversations, the coffee, and the office supplies. The way you approach these everyday activities will be what drives or stalls your fundamentals. Here are some ideas:

• Stay out of the way. You can’t do much to stimulate happiness and creativity, but you can kill them. Tell people to focus on what’s important, that creativity is okay, and then get out of the way. Don’t manage things that don’t impact productivity (e.g. dress, how work spaces are decorated); don’t create artificial creativity processes (e.g. an Employee Suggestion Plan).
• Eliminate the assholes, whatever their skills.  They suck the life from everyone else.
• Make sure your employees are learning something every day. They’ll be more productive, satisfied and energetic. So support all requests for training. Support experimentation. Reward good communicators.
• Teach employees to be efficient, and lead by example. Creative work in the morning; brainless work (like staff meetings) in the afternoon. Keep meetings short, and make it clear that brevity and clarity are prized. Respectfully interrupt people who take too long to get to the point: it will give everyone permission to do the same.

Whom gives a damn?

‘Irregardless may be the most hated word in the English language,’ writes a pedant called Mignon Fogarty, who styles herself as Grammar Girl. Grammar Girl’s claim is bunk. Surveys have repeatedly shown that moist is the most reviled word in the English language. So flesh-crawling do people find the word that American psychologists were provoked to research why (it’s the association with bodily fluids). Irregardless, meanwhile, is waaaay down the list and seems mostly to be loathed by fussy word-watchers. But boy do they make a fuss. According to Australian linguist Pam Peters, there are fewer natural examples of irregardless being spoken or written than there are instances where it’s cited as bad English.

Extraordinarily, enthusiasm for linguistic conformity can even top enthusiasm for actual literature. Fogarty’s irregardless quotation comes from a book entitled Grammar Girl's 101 Misused Words You'll Never Confuse Again, in which she takes words like loath and loathe, and tells you how their meanings differ. It’s a handy reference book, the sort of thing you turn to once in a while when you get stuck, like the manual for your power drill. It’s not a work of enduring genius. And yet it’s rated 4.1 on Goodreads, a higher rating than Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Homer’s Odyssey, Mantel’s Wolf Hall. I know that those ratings aren’t entirely comparable, but they’re still revealing.

Some of this enthusiasm is healthy. It’s good to better ourselves. And it’s fun to learn new things, especially about subjects we thought we understood. We’ve been steeped in language since birth, so discovering more about our words is fascinating.

But just as language is intrinsically interesting, it also seems intrinsically associated with education and good breeding, with snobbishness and insecurity. This association regularly crops up in reviews of Fogarty’s books:

This is a really good book on grammar. ... It even taught me a few things ... [But] I didn't know that people had such a hard time with such no-brainers as "guerrilla" vs "gorilla" and *gasp* "peak" vs "peek" vs "pique"! I'm embarrassed for anyone who learned something new whilst reading those chapters.

These neuroses appear in Fogarty’s own writing too — like in her book’s introduction where she explains how she sees language:

Once some people start using a word incorrectly, that use can spread to a point where there’s an all-out battle between the people who support what the word is supposed to mean and the masses who think it should mean something else.

Sadly, the masses are often unaware that they are even the target of a stickler war. Yet, target they are, and sticklers who will judge you for using the wrong word are lurking everywhere — in your school, your workplace, your family, and your favourite Internet hangout.

A dirty little secret you can invoke to keep you sane is that there are so many confusing words that everyone is part of the “confused masses” for at least a few of them. [...] So don't be ashamed if you get confused. The only reason to be ashamed is if you are too lazy to find out what is right once you suspect you might be wrong. [The emboldening is all mine.]

An all-out battle against ‘the masses’; grammar police and judgement; laziness, shame and insanity. It’s bourgeois balderdash.

But there is some unfortunate truth to it. Mastery of Standard English has always been a sign of education and class—and means of exclusion. The delight of Fogarty’s reviewers at learning something new about language seems amplified by their relief that they will now seem less ignorant. They’ve taken a step away from the unthinking masses and towards the discerning elite. So Fogarty’s not wrong that structures of discrimination do exist around language, but she certainly wrong was to write as if such discrimination is reasonable.

The fact is that, like most skills, writing in Standard English is something that only a few people need to master. A builder needs to know how to plaster a wall, an inuit how to build an igloo, and a journalist how to write Standard English (or, truth be told, maybe just their subeditor). Like mastery of igloo-building, perfected Standard English won’t help most of us do our jobs, improve our relationships or pursue what we care about. We’re as good at writing correctly as we need to be.

Besides, writing correctly is not the same thing as writing well (though, in formal contexts, the latter will involve the former). Learning about minor linguistic distinctions neither makes you write much more eloquently and nor does it give you something worth saying. Some of Fogarty’s correctly written sentences are inelegant; others, like the ones above, are so unhelpful she shouldn’t have written them at all.

Often, incorrect English isn’t that bad anyway. Few of the mistakes Fogarty picks on would truly make something more difficult to read. And though as one reviewer laments, ‘it is disappointing to learn that “snuck” will eventually be acceptable by all’, are they equally saddened that gat is no longer the past-tense of get or that thee has been swallowed by you? Language is always churning. There is sometimes loss of usefulness, as words with a particular nuance have their specificity shaved away. And it is useful to have a consistent standard of communication for formal contexts. But that’s all there is to it: usefulness. It’s not about the Gandalf of Good Grammar fending off the mindless orcish masses.

So here’s the deal. If you want to learn to write more correctly, feel free. It is enjoyable, and there are worse ways to spend your time. But if you don’t want to, well, whom gives a damn?

[This article was inspired by Robert Lane Greene’s fascinating book, You are what you speak. He writes a weekly column on language for The Economist. Thanks, RLG.]

Lotto: Everybody loses

A good way to sell stuff is to transform the reasons people don't want to buy into reasons why they should. Luxury watches are an expensive self-indulgence, and none of us want to feel selfish. So Patek Philippe reassures us that ‘You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation.’ That nugget of egotistical decadence? It actually makes you noble, a good parent, a guardian of heritage. And definitely not selfish.

The British Lottery is now pulling the same trick with their new campaign and its sneaky, squalid question: ‘Who wins if you win?’ Their adverts show happy, healthy, mostly younger people holding pieces of paper that say like ‘my kids’ or ‘my best friend’. I thought that buying a lottery ticket was foolish. But apparently it’s an investment, it’s altruistic, it’s about winning. Hurrah!

Unfortunately their slogan is hogwash. For starters, you’re very, very unlikely to win. That’s partly because millions of other people are buying tickets too. But it’s also because only half the revenue from UK lottery tickets is paid out as winnings, making the average return on investment -50%.

So who’s making this useless investment? Well, not the comfortable, sun-kissed people from the adverts. Lottery tickets are mostly bought by those who have less money and have been educated to a lower level, people who feel so disadvantaged that they’re prepared to make any investment in the hope of a better life. The Lottery is sometimes called a tax on stupidity. It’s not. It’s a tax on desperation, and poorer people are more desperate.

Frustratingly, the lottery actually seems to perpetuate their condition. Only around a quarter of Lottery revenue goes to charitable work. Ideally, it would reinvest that revenue back into poorer, lottery-ticket-buying communities. But according to a 2009 report by Theos, it doesn’t. (The Lottery’s ludicrously uninformative website gives no data either way — a bad sign). And wherever its money is spent, 60% of it goes on sports, arts and heritage, generally the preoccupations of better educated, wealthier people. Whether you win or not, needier areas probably won’t.

There’s another, subtler cost to the Lottery: the damage it does to our perceptions of wealth. For one, it says that wealth inequality’s okay, that it’s good to collect crazy amounts of money from the majority of people and give it to a randomly-selected few. Most people lose cash, and a few get more than they know what to do with. That’s the opposite of what the state should model to its citizens.

Remind me what's attractive about this?

The Lottery also promotes the idea that you need vast amounts of money to be happy. But for most people a decent income is enough. An article by Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman showed that once people earn $75000 a year, further increases in income don’t much increase their day-to-day happiness or decrease their unhappiness and stress. The reason more people don’t earn $75000 is that some people earn so, so much more than that. If there was less income (and wealth) inequality then people would be happier. The economy would be stronger too: wealthy people spend their money on less economically beneficial stuff. So greater equality sounds great to me. Unfortunately, the Lottery encourages the opposite.

The Lottery isn’t about altruism, it’s about inequality. It’s not about happiness, it’s about discontentment. And it’s not about winning, it’s about losing — especially if you’re poor. But its ingenious little line will take all those great reasons not to buy and twist them 180 degrees.