Saturday, May 26, 2007

Brownian E-motion

One of the most common American management fallacies is that it doesn't matter what you're doing, as long as you're in motion.

Look busy ... look energized ... look enthusiastic ... go, go, go! Run, run, run!

Of course, if you're thrashing about in a constant frenzy, there's one thing that you are most definitely not doing --

thinking.

The ubiquitous electronic leash, otherwise known as e-mail, cellphone, pager, or Blackberry, does nothing to help this situation.

Instead, interruptions, diversions, and distractions become a constant.

Gatekeepers are completely absent from the environment [there's no limit on the number of emails, demands, claims on one's time that can be made on any given day].

Attempts to prioritize tasks or focus on any particular task are undermined both overtly and covertly by the organizational culture [which usually seems to paint anyone who insists on taking time to think about what they are working on as 'inflexible', or somehow 'negative'. God help any poor soul who actually verbalizes a desire to work on anything without interruption].

As a result, the difficulty of ever getting anything actually done results in frantic corner-cutting to complete tasks before the next interruptor lands;

which in turn results in errors;

which in turn result in the need for amendments and revisions and corrections [updated reports, patches to the code, revisions to the plans, changes in the blueprints, etc.];

thus, in a self-fulfilling prophecy, assuring that it is impossible to ever get anything actually done.

And we wonder what causes burnout.

Marathon

Pheidippides fell,
Gasping for Marathon,
Spurned by the flame that some unnamed other
Raised from his cooling grasp.

This deed is remembered
Not by the name
Of the man who died,
But the place that killed him --

For it is always easy to name
The place where flame has passed,
Hard to recall
Distorted faces
Suffering under the light they bear.

© 1983

The General Façade

There is a story, largely apocryphal, that the Russian general Potemkin deceived Catherine the Great by instructing workers to build 'stage sets' of villages along the Dnieper river in the late 1780s.

These 'stage sets' were housefronts, storefronts, churchfronts, with nothing more substantial behind them than there is on any Hollywood backlot; locals were recruited to serve as 'extras', and were scrubbed and freshly clothed, and furnished with other trappings of prosperity, so that the Empress would be pleased with the condition of her people and the great things that her general [and minister] had wrought.

The original 'Potemkin villages' are now thought to be a pre-urban legend of sorts, but their counterparts certainly existed in the Soviet Union and Communist China - and even in New York City, where in the late 1980s anyone driving the Cross-Bronx Expressway could see artists' renditions of curtains and flowerpots bravely propped up in the blown-out windows of abandoned tenements.

Potemkin's Office is the organizational counterpart to the Cross-Bronx plywood paintings. It's any organization, sacred or secular, for-profit, non-profit, or official, in which appearance has become so much more important than reality that there is little or no reality remaining behind the façade ... or the reality behind the mask is very, very different from the painted illusion.