Ask Mr Manager #3

With the economy is disarray and unemployment rampant Mr Manager has once again been called upon for advice in not to just retain your job but even to improve your chance of promotion.  Of course many people see Machiavelli as amoral and evil, even though he was really just pointing out how to achieve and maintain power.  This is also true of Mr. Manager – business is business and in these troubled times success depends as much on perception as reality.  So the first step in your plan to succeed without breaking a sweat should start with visibility.

To achieve visibility requires speaking out, but not in praise of anything because any success no matter how modest will have dozens of people claiming the glory.  No – what you must do is speak out against any project or activity that is doomed from the outset.  Every organization has these and they are easy to spot.  Here is a list of candidates which you can predict will fail.  Opposing these or predicting failure is sure to mark you as a person of vision.

1. Product with specifications greater than 1000 pages
2. Projects requiring more than a couple of years to reach fruition
3. Any team or morale building effort
4. Any reengineering effort that requires multiple managers and processes
5. Any new or innovative process

Of course there is always the remote possibility that one of these projects might actually limp to some sort of conclusion.  However, no project is ever clear of weak areas and things that didn’t turn out so well.  In that case you point these out with a shake of your head and say ”Well – that’s just what I expected”  This will reinforce your growing reputation as a visionary and brilliant leader.

Now no manager works alone or without competitors so at some point one of your competitors will have managed to have you put in charge of a doomed project staffed by zombies and cretins. Obviously your first task is to find a way to switch jobs but this is not always possible so you have two options.  First you can quickly isolate and fire the zombies and cretins but then a bloody massacre no matter how justified will not enhance your reputation unless you aspire to being seen as Ivan the Terrible.  So the most viable course of action is to identify the worst of the worst and begin building their reputation, by making them employee of the month, bragging about their immense value to your project.  Your purpose here is to make them seem so useful and valuable that some unsuspecting fellow manager will “steal them away from you”.  This is especially rewarding if the manager who steals this “valuable” asset is a competitor because once he steals your best player he will have just infected his own project with this failure virus.

But many times your fellow managers will fail to fall for this ploy so you must resort to a tried and true strategy commonly known as “kick them upstairs”.  That is you do everything possible to have these losers promoted off of your team and into a position where they can drive your competing managers into gibbering idiots.  This is a highly effective strategy and widely used which tends to explain the disappointing performance of many large corporations and the federal government.

But don’t make the mistake of ever giving any of these zombies and cretins a bad performance review – NO – they must be given the highest praise because otherwise they will be chained to you forever.  If you cannot find a way to remove these cretins from your staff then place them in key support positions for projects belonging to competing managers.  This offers the potential of making your project look better than your competitors because you aren’t any worse than anyone else.  As a last resort bundle these losers up and put them in charge of the United Way Campaign.

The normal corporation is composed of managers who are constantly searching for ways to make themselves appear to be highly productive hard driving team players.   So naturally your objective is to make yourself appear to be a brilliant and a major contributor to the success of the team.  This is best accomplished by remembering that in the large corporation form always is more important than substance.  Or to put it another way volume always trumps brevity, because as everyone knows any document longer than a few pages will not be read by any manager or executive.  This means that all of your reports should be jammed with irrelevant facts and graphs and if you can include some very complicated equations even better.  Then your report should be packaged in a binder with a cover letter that describes in subtle detail why everything in this report is self evident to any manager as capable as the addressee.  This will ensure no one ever reads it while demonstrating your penetrating intellect and incisive analytical abilities.

As you climb the corporate ladder it is important that you give the impression that you are not only a hard worker and key player but that you are also a strategic thinker.  This is more easily accomplished than you might think.  It is important that you associate yourself with important sounding jobs that have no possibility of a measured result while avoiding those that include names like Operations, Budget, Accounting, or Quality.  Instead volunteer for assignments that have Strategic, Worldwide, Market, or Planning in their title.  Projects with these in their title have little chance of accomplishing anything while drawing the attention of upper management.  Your value to these projects can be increased if you carry a full briefcase home every night giving the impression that you are slaving over this project.  Of course your reports should be lengthy and filled with confusing statistics. 

If you have ever wondered how some upper level manager, who can’t even order a Starbucks Coffee without assistance, got his job – well now you know – it is all about how things look rather than what they are.  Mr Manager is pleased to provide you another lesson in how to achieve success without actually having produced anything.  

Management and the Liberal Arts

Part I John Milton

The Bible says that “there’s nothing new under the sun” and that is very true. Any student of history can discover universal lessons in leadership, management, business strategies, and corporate politics. Indeed Nicolo Machiavelli’s book “The Prince” is nothing short of a management handbook for the discerning reader. Actually in practice the modern corporation is really no different than any ancient kingdom. It has its kings, princes, barons, and yeomen. It is filled with courtiers, dissidents, loyalists, allies, and enemies. What is important to the modern manager is to be able to use the histories of these kingdoms as examples of how to deal with the challenges both internally as well as from competition. Admittedly sometimes it requires some thought and analysis to see these examples and a good example is found in Paradise Lost as Satan and his lieutenants discuss their recent fall from grace. With a little imagination you can see the lieutenants Moloch, Belial, Mammon, and Beelzebub as corporate board members discussing with the CEO how to recover their competitive position.

The language – even in the seventeenth century – is high poetry but the arguments and the personalities can be found in virtually every corporate board room today. The first speaker is Satan who offers some motivational remarks before they get down to the business of deciding what to do. It is Moloch who speaks first:

My sentence is for open war:of wiles
More unexpert , I boast not, let us rather choose,
Armed with Hell’s flames and fury, all at once
O’er heavens high towers to force resistless way
Turning our tortures into horrid arms
Against the torturer
Which if not victory, is yet revenge

This is a classic response from a classic personality. This is the response from the “shoot first aim later” manager. He does not recommend analyzing what went wrong and what must be done to correct it. Instead he is the manager whose response is to raise more capital, retool the factories, increase the advertising, retrain the sales team, and attack the market one more time with more energy. Every organization has its Moloch, he’s the one who gets the job done and overcomes all obstacles – as long as he is told what he is expected to do. He is enthusiastic, emotional, and substitutes action for thought and analysis. This attitude is reflected in his last line where even if he fails, he at least will get some emotional satisfaction in revenge. The next person to speak is Belial, the pragmatist. Every organization has its Belial, he is the intelligent one, the realist, the one who acknowledges the defeat and offers another alternative:

First, what revenge? The towers of Heaven are filled
With armed watch that renders all access
Impregnable, this is now
Our doom, which if we can sustain and bear
Our supreme foe in time may remit his anger

Of course this is really not a plan at all, but a recommendation to simply accept defeat. This is your classic risk adverse executive. The company has suffered a major defeat at the hands of a competitor and rather fighting back as the risk taker Moloch advises, Belial wants the opposite. He wants to protect what remains rather than fighting back and possibly losing even more. Risk adverse executives are not effective in highly competitive environments. The next to speak is Mammon, who at least seems to have thought about the situation and offers a valid option:

…with what eyes could we
Stand in his presence humble, and receive
Strict laws imposed, to celebrate his throne
With warbled hymns, and to his God head sing
Forced hallelujahs, while he lordly sits
Our envied soverign?
To found this nether empire, which might rise,
By policy, and long process of time,
In emulation opposite to Heaven

This desert soil wants not her hidden luster, gems and gold
Nor want we skill or art, from whence to raise
Magnificence: and what can Heaven show more
To found this nether empire which might rise
By policy, and long process of time
In emulation opposite to Heaven


So Mammon rejects the frontal assault recommended by Moloch, the risk adverse acceptance offered by Belial and offers a realistic appraisal and solution. He recognizes the defeat but believes they can be great again and need to regroup. His option is to revamp, restructure, offer new products so they would emerge as a new and stronger enterprise equal to the competition. Although Mammon captured the feeling of the meeting and offered a strategy, it remained for Beelzebub to offer an alternate approach altogether.

There is a place
If ancient and prophetic fame in Heaven err not
Another world, the happy seat of some new race called man
Thither let us bend all our thoughts, to learn
What creatures there inhabit, of what mould
Our substance, how endured, and what their power
And where their weakness, how attempted best
By force or subtlety

In effect Beelzebub suggests a market survey with the idea of opening another market where they would be stronger. This type of manager is one capable of recognizing the setback, analyzing the situation and formulating a new strategy. And it is this approach that is accepted by Satan.

Admittedly Milton’s prose is compressed and requires some reflection and thought to apply it to modern management, but the lesson is there. What Milton describes are the four possible approaches to a severe shift in the market and competitive position of a company. These are the classic alternatives faced by managers today. Now we turn to management as seen through Shakespeare where the lessons are more visible.