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.  

Managing Dead Horses

In my travails as a manager and a periodic lecturer on management, I am constantly amazed at how some managers, many of them highly placed, seem to continue making the same mistakes over and over again. Explaining good management practice never seems to penetrate because the lessons don’t seem to fit the problem as these managers perceive it. Sometimes, the lesson is best explained with an analogy and these are some examples of poor management as explained by a fellow project manager who has clearly encountered more than one of these management solutions to otherwise intractable management problems.

In terms of Project Management it is always a good plan to get off of a horse when you discover that it is dead, but this logic isn’t always followed by modern managers who seem to insist on alternative strategies. I’m sure you will recognize some of these strategies and may even have attempted some of them yourself, so here they are – the alternative strategies to dismounting a dead horse.
1. Changing Riders
2. Buying a stronger whip
3. Falling back on “This is the way we’ve always ridden”
4. Appointing a committee to study the horse
5. Appointing a committee to study the horse’s equipment
6. Arranging a visit to other sites to see how they ride their dead horses
7. Increasing the standards for the performance of dead horses
8. Increasing the standards for the performance of dead horse riders
9. Appointing a committee to revive the dead horse
10. Appointing a committee to review the acquisition standards for horses
11. Appointing a committee to review the job description for riders
12. Creating a training session to improve riding skills
13. Comparing the state of dead horses in today’s environment with those of previous decades to show that today’s dead horses are really an improvement
14. Changing the standards so that the horse is no longer technically dead
15. Hiring an external consultant to show how the dead horse can still be ridden
16. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase their collective performance
17. Increasing funding (horse feed) since the horse is obviously malnourished
18. Declaring that “No horse is too dead to ride”
19. Doing a study to determine if outsourcing will reduce the cost of riding the dead horse
20. Buying a computer program which is guaranteed to enhance dead horse performance and productivity
21. Declaring a dead horse more cost effective than a live one
22. Forming a process action group to find uses for dead horses
23. Promoting the dead horse to a position of greater responsibility

Did you wince? Did you recognize some of the actions you may have taken in the past when you discovered that a project you launched isn’t meeting expectations? Certainly it is easier to look back and criticize because hindsight is always 20:20 but then at the time some of these may have seemed quite reasonable. Of all of these the first one is the one that is most commonly implemented because it presumes the horse is dead because of the rider so what is needed is another rider. At the base of this strategy lies the manager’s belief that the project he initiated is sound but it is the leadership (not his of course) that failed. Sometimes this dead horse will have several riders and owners before a manager has the courage to declare the horse is dead and no rider can get it to run or even walk.

Another favorite and one that you see with company mergers, is the idea that if you can’t get the dead horse to perform, harness it to another dead horse in the hopes that they both will suddenly come to life and perform as never before. How many times have you observed this in the corporate world? Ironically, when this happens you sometimes get the Zombie effect as the two dead horses begin to shamble and stumble about in some semblance of competitive life.

The fact is that when the horse is dead – bury it. This is a hard lesson but it is surprising how many otherwise intelligent and reasonably competent managers can’t bring themselves to declare the horse is dead even though they can see it is lying on its back with all four feet straight up. But as an experienced Management Consultant, I must admit that in many cases the manager who has steadfastly refused to acknowledge the horse was dead was promoted to a higher level position seemingly reserved especially for dead horses with no discernible brain activity, frequently with such grand titles as Vice Chairman or even CEO. I guess this is attributed to the miracle of modern (management) medicine and it requires the intercession of an outside consultant to declare the horse is dead.


By way of disclosure this dead horse analogy is not original with me but I do not know its origin so I cannot attribute it to the original author. Only the comments are mine. C.