Business Without the Bullsh*t: 49 Secrets and Shortcuts You Need to Know (35 page)

For example, right before you’re about to make an important presentation to senior management, your (secretly evil) employee might tell you, “There’s a rumor going around that you’re addicted to painkillers. Now go in there and knock ’em dead!”

As you can well imagine, such news is so distracting that you’ll find it difficult to focus and probably end up making a fool of yourself. Which is, of course, exactly what your employee wanted.

The only reason this trick is so effective is that the banana peel is being thrown by somebody you (wrongly) believe has your best interests at heart. If this kind of “news” came from an obvious enemy, you’d probably just shrug it off.

Thwarting this trick, therefore, involves identifying enemies who disguise themselves as friends. (These are the “frenemies” I identified in “Secret 11. The Ten Types of Annoying Coworker.”)

With every work relationship, ask yourself, “Does this person stand to gain or lose by my success?”

Consider the question both from a business perspective (e.g., “Are we both in competition for the same promotion?”) and a psychological perspective (e.g., “Does this person—or would this person—resent my success?”). For example, a coworker who expresses schadenfreude (delight in the misfortunes of others) when successful people are struck by disaster will probably be secretly delighted if you fall flat on your face.

Timing is also important. Unless there’s some reason you needed
to know that particular bit of information at that particular moment, assume that the true purpose of the revelation was to trip you up. A true friend would have remained mum.

In some companies it’s like clockwork. Every couple of years or so, somebody in the executive suite decides that what’s needed to make the organization
really
productive is a new approach to managing people.

Despite what you might think, management fads aren’t fads because they’re something new. Quite the contrary, what makes them fads is that companies glom on to them… one after the other after the other.

Here are nine common management fads with tips to ensure you can still build your career, even while your company pursues faux panaceas.

I won’t go into what the six sigmas stand for, because you can look that up on the Web. Suffice it to say that the idea is to improve the quality of your processes by identifying and removing the causes of defects and errors.

In theory that’s not a bad idea, but in practice Six Sigma is like a cartoon cult. It involves awarding people differently colored belts (as in a karate class) based on their expertise in the Six Sigma
methodology. The result is a hierarchy of “belted” experts who run around the company pretending that they know how to do other people’s work better than the people who actually do it. Endless meetings ensue, with little or no effect.

What to do? Well, if your company implements Six Sigma, expect everything to take 10 to 20 percent longer than it otherwise would because of buttinsky “experts” clogging up the way the organization runs.

This productivity tax will continue for about two years, after which everybody will gradually awaken, as if from a bad dream, put away their funny little belts, and pretend that Six Sigma never happened. So your best bet is simply to wait it out.

Reengineering
is one of half a dozen euphemisms that executives use when they’re planning to fire a bunch of people. (Some others are
downsizing
,
rightsizing
,
creative destruction
,
rationalizing
, and
ventilating
.)

Executives use these euphemisms because the fancy terminology makes them sound as if they’re doing something impressive rather than merely laying people off, an action that is always the result of one of two things (or both):

The challenge with reengineering is spotting it before it actually happens. In my experience, there are three e-mails that
always
signal that a layoff is imminent. The exact wording will vary, but they read like this:

If any of these e-mails arrives in your inbox, a “reengineering” is not far behind. If you get the third e-mail, the “reengineering” is next week.

If your company is going through, or about to go through, a round of layoffs, it’s time to find another job, regardless of how well you’re positioned to survive. Layoffs almost never work and almost always signal that a company is in a downward spiral. (See “Secret 39. What to Do if There’s a Layoff.”)

The idea here is that people with similar skills should be “pooled” for work assignments. For example, suppose you’ve got a group of engineers. Rather than simply have them report to a director of engineering, you also have them report to the director of marketing and a chief technology officer.

The result is predictable: an endless, debilitating turf war, where each manager fights to be considered the “real” manager by finding extra hoops to be jumped through and extra rocks to be fetched.

Productivity grinds to an immediate halt. For example, I was once employed by a firm that had a matrix management structure. As a result, people were expected to spend three hours a week in three different staff meetings, which meant wasting nine hours of every workweek.

There are other disadvantages as well. Because this system creates more managers, the organization quickly becomes top-heavy. Management becomes completely consumed by arguments over who will do what and when.

If you’re determined to remain with the organization while this stupidity plays itself out, plan on spending a lot of time answering e-mails and texts while attending mind-bendingly boring meetings.

But don’t despair! The concept of matrix management is inherently unstable. It only lasts until one manager wins the turf war, after which the scheme collapses, usually within six months or so. Once again, you’ll need to wait it out.

Consensus management is usually seen as an alternative to the top-down decision-making common inside hierarchical organizations. In theory, important decisions are to be made with the agreement of everybody in the group.

Since everybody has a say in the decision, anybody can effectively veto any decision. As a result the only decisions that get made are those that are innocuous and support the status quo. Difficult decisions—ones that might ruffle feathers—tend to get shunted aside.

Consensus management is also subject to what’s called the
Abilene paradox
: a group will unanimously agree upon a course of action that, individually, nobody wants, simply because no one is willing to go against the perceived will of the group.

The good thing about management by consensus is that it’s easy to manipulate the consensus to be whatever you want. You do this by volunteering to keep minutes of all the meetings in which consensus is to be reached.

That way, when you write up the minutes for distribution, you can characterize the discussion so the consensus was that a certain decision was reached rather than just that a discussion took place. You’ll thereby be providing a valuable service to the entire team.

It sounds like good advice: focus on the single thing that your firm does better than anyone else. You will thus make your strategy difficult for competitors to imitate and keep your organization from wasting time doing things it’s lousy at.

Unfortunately, organizations, just like the people inside them, tend to be as self-aware as a turnip. As a result they seldom know what
they’re really good at, and often believe they’re wonderful in areas where they’re startlingly mediocre.

More important, this management fad keeps a company locked into doing what it was successful at in the past, thereby making it less able to adapt to changing circumstances.

If the core competency fad takes hold, your only refuge is to get involved in the committee that determines the core competency. As the committee mulls the issue over, gradually migrate your allegiance (and job) to whatever part of the company looks to be winning.

With management by objectives (aka MBO) you define objectives within an organization so that management and employees agree to them. Then you compare the employees’ actual performance with the agreed-upon objectives.

On the surface there’s nothing wrong with this idea. However, it becomes a fad when people turn what should be a fairly simple exercise into a paperwork nightmare. In this case the process of planning and evaluating work takes more effort than the work itself.

What’s worse, explicitly laying out objectives—and basing compensation on them—makes it difficult for organizations and individuals to change gears when something unexpected happens.

The best way to deal with MBO is to use the process to negotiate the terms under which you’ll get a raise or a promotion. I discuss this in “Secret 4. How to Use Your Performance Review” and “Secret 5. How to Ask for a Raise.”

Since the days of Tom Peters’s
In Search of Excellence
, management pundits have insisted it’s possible to become successful by imitating the strategies and tactics of existing firms that are already successful.

There’s only one problem: it doesn’t often work. The most successful
companies—Apple, Coke, IBM, P&G, etc.—tend to be one of a kind. The strategies that work (or worked) for them aren’t likely to work in a different industry or for a smaller firm.

What’s worse, the “successful” firms featured in “best practices” books are often past their prime anyway.
In Search of Excellence
is a case in point. Most of the companies featured in the book soon experienced horrible problems, and several went bankrupt.

Fortunately, management fads based on “best practices” always peter out when companies actually try to implement those practices. Your best approach is to slather on the lip service and proceed with business as usual.

This fad is truly evil. In order to improve performance every year, management awards major promotions, raises, and perks to the top 20 percent of employees, offers continuing employment to the next 70 percent, and fires the bottom 10 percent.

In theory stack ranking is supposed to create and reinforce a meritocracy. In practice it forces managers and employees to spend an enormous amount of time and effort fighting political battles.

In stack ranking organizations, managers become successful by advocating for their employees’ rankings rather than by developing their potential. Employees thrive by looking good (and making others look bad) rather than by actually getting work done.

If you work for a firm that’s using stack ranking, your best strategy is get assigned to a group where you’ll be the star, so you’ll rank at the top and thus get the rewards. Then make certain your boss knows how much better you are than everyone else.

Similarly, avoid getting assigned to a team full of talented people, because then it’s more likely that somebody else will get ranked higher than you.

Long term, you probably want to get out of any company that
practices stack ranking. Companies that adopt it tend to either stall and become less innovative (Microsoft and Motorola come to mind) or turn into snake pits that tolerate all sorts of unethical behavior (such as Enron).

Restructuring, sometimes known as
reorganizing
, is the management fad that never goes out of style. Restructuring consists of the shuffling of responsibilities from one executive to another, usually accompanied by the renaming of various groups or divisions.

Executives love restructuring because it creates the illusion of bold strategic change without their actually having to change something. Many large companies restructure every year or so and they never explain why the last restructuring didn’t work.

This is not to say that companies never need to restructure. Indeed, as a company grows or changes direction, it’s sometimes necessary to change things up. Much of the time, though, restructuring just provides the illusion of change rather than actual change.

In most cases, restructuring is simply a manifestation of turf wars among the managers, accompanied by juicy political infighting of the “who’s in and who’s out” variety. The resulting turmoil makes everything grind to a halt while everyone tries to figure out what’s going on, to whom they’ll be reporting, and what that person is like.

Managers newly assigned after a restructuring can cause real headaches. They often feel they must assert their new authority over their new group by making some bold decisions. However, since the newbie doesn’t yet understand the entire situation, these decisions are almost always bad.

When you experience a restructuring, your best bet is to ignore the political imbroglio and instead hunker down and do your job really well. Ideally, you want to be able to announce the achievement of a significant goal immediately after the new manager comes on board.