Benjamin Franklin, Gregg Toland, Stephen Hawking and Post-Its

When John Adams journeyed to France to help Benjamin Franklin get support for the Revolutionary War, he set up shop to meet with well-heeled and colonist-sympathetic French people. I can imagine him at his desk, with parchment and quills and whatever the equivalent of White Out was in 1778, all ready for the business at hand—brokering agreements for aid. But where was Franklin?

He was confused at first. His senior partner had been allegedly been doing smashingly well. Yet he didn't appear to be working with any diplomats? Office? What office? John was confused.

Finally he found his man: Attending operas, a pretty girl balanced on each knee. Hobnobbing with aristocrats, flattering them for their art collections and skills at the virginal. Playing chess in clubs, making sure he lost to wealthy, influential men.

Finally the Puritanical Adams, enraged, said to Franklin: "You're supposed to be WORKING!" And Franklin replied, "Dearest John, I AM!"

I want to pause and mention that I am ever not knocking Adams. Both he and Franklin—and Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton and the rest—were brilliant people. My admiration for them is boundless. (And in the spirit of International Women's Day, add Abigail Adams, another tremendous intellect, to that list.) I am a student of American history and find the achievements of these individuals to be unparalleled and astonishing.

But Franklin understood something Adams never did. (The latter was eventually relieved of his post and sent back to America in humiliation.) Benny knew that work was about achieving results. You didn't have to be sitting behind a desk. Nothing wrong with it, but if it's not necessary, Franklin reasoned, why do it? You can perform some very profitable work at the opera, the cafe, the salon and the dinner party. And Franklin did.

I was thinking of that recently while attending a webinar. Everyone else who was participating was going on about processes that had been overly complicated by too much thought: the nomenclature used to describe them was (deliberately) obtuse and the software needed to plan the Normandy-like assault of the task at hand was overkill. And I thought, What the fudgsicle does any of this have to do with productivity? With just doing a job and getting it out of the way?

There were "equations" that describe how simple concepts such as time management work. Discussions of process and calculations of outputs and metrics and all sorts of hooey they love to teach MBAs today. The great Bob Hoffman, an advertising man, has stated that marketers can complicate the shit out of a salami sandwich. He's right, only it's worse than that: Modern managers can complicate the shit out of anything. Don't believe me? Count all the buttons on remote controls these days. Tell me what most of them do.

Another story that I thought was relevant involved Orson Welles. (Your thoughts really wander at these webinars, let me tell you.) When he was about to make Citizen Kane, his first film, cinematographer Gregg Toland told him he could teach all the technical minutiae in a three-day weekend, as it really wasn't as complicated as it was made to sound; the ideas behind the technicals were what mattered.

It dawned on me that somewhere along the way, business, and particularly such "gut" areas as marketing and advertising, had coopted the mechanisms of the hard sciences to appear more solid and certain than they really are. We borrow their processes to prop up fuzzy thinking and hazy reasoning, using the accoutrements of Stephen Hawking to cloak simple concepts in powerful armor, lending them more weight. And it's bogging us down.

I flashed back to a grad school project, where the leader of the group I was in said before we started we had to engage in collaborative map making. "Huh?" was my reaction. Oh, we were going to create a mind map. "A wha—?" He showed me, using the new kewel software he had on his shiny new MacBook. Then the five of us spent 45 minutes making such important decisions as what geometric shapes and colors different thoughts should be, and what the best font for the task was. (We eventually decided on Helvetica, although I'm sure today we'd choose Arial, Helvetica having lost much of its luster since then.)

I flashed back to volunteer work I used to do on two small symphony orchestra committees, where we would have meetings (that I would have to drive for an hour and a half to attend) and discuss whether we should use Facebook, LinkedIn or Slack for our messaging, and whether Google Docs was better for writing than Word or Pages or anything else. Was Wordpress or Wix the best for our proposed website redesign? Or Weebly? Or Squarespace? Or Jimdo? Or Webnode? Or Tumblr? Or Blogger?

Some of the participants became very passionate about these things, to my amazement. The arguments went on over pizzas and many bottles of Crystal Geyser. Over many phone calls that had to be taken and many that could be silenced. But one thing I noticed during all this:

No work was getting done.

But we decided on WordPress!

I think...

When I left that group, almost a year later, very little had been done toward rebuilding the website or increasing the outreach of our "brand." Or just about anything else, save for planning the yearly fundraising gala and arranging for a small shuttle to take audience members from their cars to the front door of the theater, which was a good hike, actually. That's what was done in a year. I could have done it all in four hours, if I wasn't worrying about the messaging software or whether X integrated with Y or if certain files viewable on a Mac were viewable on a PC or........

But everyone sure got to roll up their sleeves and act like they were doing work. Oh, did I mention there were lots of PowerPoint presentations too? Lot of them. Whoo-weee!

My wife has a very complicated job at a major company—the largest company on the entire West Coast in its field, actually. She is one of the top people there, and has been there for 30 years. She does many things, all of them complex. And do you know how much of this organizational software she uses?

Zip.

Do you know how many cloud apps she's wired into with her coworkers?

Zilch.

Do you know how she keeps tabs of everything in her world?

Post-It notes.

"What the **** do I want with that software?" she asks. "I'd have to learn all about how to use it; I already know how to use a Post-It."

Her coworkers have been learning new processes designed by coder geniuses to manage work flow all the while she has been...working.

So her work is flowing. She's not learning how to manage it. She's managing it. With good ol' fashioned Post-It notes, plus a good memory and a keen mind. Keeps you sharp without having to do yoga or tai chi.

She hasn't even bothered to connect an email client to her phone. "I don't need that stuff bogging me down everywhere." She does an astonishing amount of work every day, mostly by skirting the shiny objects everyone else chases.

And by the way, I'm writing this on a 1997 version of Word. I refuse to get a newer laptop because said version of Word won't run on it, so I would have to buy a newer, more cluttered, less efficient version.

I'll close by saying that while Adams was sent home in great disgrace, Franklin was the toast of France, and he remained there as the sole U.S. minister, forever flirting with the ladies, sitting in opera boxes, playing chess with aristocrats.

Forget process. And don't get obsessed with metrics. (As Warren Buffett points out, we measure so many things simply because we can.)

It's not about any of that. It's whatever gets the job done.

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John Grabowski isn't just a business writer working in tech, real estate and healthcare; he's also the author of two novels and a collection of shorter fiction. His first novel, Entertaining Welsey Shaw, was praised by Kirkus Reviews for being witty, fast-paced, and “filled with flirtatious banter.” His latest novel, Made in the U.S.A., about two buddies who decide to take a cross-country road trip, will be released by Arbiter Press early next year.