IGNORANCE IS BLISS, MANAGERIALLY
I’ve been thinking about the words of the greatest management theoretician of the 20th century. That’s Sergeant Schultz from the old Hogan’s Heroes TV show, the guy who said:
“I know NOTHING!”
There speaks wisdom. Inevitable wisdom. And to understand why that wisdom’s inevitable, I had to call out the CAV. The CAV is a system description of the entire Universe: it’s
COMPLEX
AMBIGUOUS
VOLATILE
To survive the CAV world, management experts have gone through a series of evolutions. Squads of MBAs developed MBO (Management by Objectives). But that took place before our modern understanding of chaos and complexity, so I’m suggesting that we need to take it to the next step:
MBI: MANAGEMENT BY IGNORANCE
MBI, like all modern management systems, is driven by a few snappy, TED-style axioms. You can safely assume that the following points will change your life, allow you to win land wars in Asia, and bring about universal peace if you only apply them diligently (it’s up to you, so don’t screw this up):
1. ALL IGNORANCE IS NOT CREATED EQUAL: Peering through the fog is different from hunting black cats in the coal cellar at midnight.
2. STUFF HAPPENS: This is an important factor in management since so much management is based on reports, and most reports are based on the old accounting idea of a financial exhibit as a “snapshot of financial value”. You don’t learn much about an ecology (or a ballet, or a soccer championship or a Shakespeare play) by looking at a snapshot. Interactions over time are critical, and identifying trends, distributions, and trading ranges over time has a lot to do with managerial success.
3. DIFFERENT STUFF HAPPENS AT DIFFERENT TIMES: That character in The Hunger Games wished: “May the odds be ever in your favor”. That’s not gonna happen, in the Hunger Games or out of it. Success is a function of continuous adaptation.
4. IT’S ALL ABOUT MANAGING THE INFLECTION POINTS: There’s an old math concept called catastrophe theory that tells us the world consists of (a.) a lot of fairly random drifting, and (b.) those “asteroid and dinosaur” moments where everything suddenly, violently changes. Military men described this when they noted: “War is months of boredom broken up by minutes of sheer terror”. It should be noted that no one ever won a war by managing the boredom.
How do you manage those moments when everything’s gone ultra-wacko and the standard solutions won’t cut it?
a. Don’t be Wile E. Coyote: Remember the old Warner Brothers cartoons where the coyote runs out past the edge of the cliff, suddenly looks back and spots the edge as he realizes he’s standing on this air, and then drops? That’s a bad strategy unless you enjoy falling several thousand feet before you’re hit with an Acme? anvil. (Some people are into that, I suppose…) If you keep your eyes open and spot the edge before you’re beyond it, you’ve got more options.
b. If you ARE Wile E. Coyote, then don’t go too far out or too far down: When the going gets tough, the tough shouldn’t necessarily get going. Staying the course is a lousy idea if the course leads you off the Coyote Cliff. Moving carefully and preserving options – performing serious due diligence, defining everyone’s commitments – reduces the number of Warner Brothers cartoon moments in your career. And your life.
c. Grab something solid on the way to the bottom: It’ better to be the guy hanging desperately from a tree limb over the abyss than to be the guy splattered like strawberry jam at the bottom of the abyss. Tree limbs, in the business world, can be “white knight” company sale options, hedging capital commitments, good client relationships, or the right insurance policies.
5. ASYMMETRY: THE MOMENTS WHEN THE ODDS ARE IN YOUR FAVOR Life’s often driven by market timing. We see this in the natural world in infections and pandemics: a disease is in the world for decades or centuries; then there’s a sudden minor change, opportunity opens up and disaster spreads – which is some kinda good times when you’re a virus. So how do we put the tested profit strategies of hideous plagues to work in our own business lives?
a. Kick ‘em while they’re down: Lions pick off the weakest animals in the herd, and infections hit hard when we’re tired, sleepless, and our immune system’s feeling the effects of age and our rockstar lifestyle. Infectious agents drift through the world until they see an opening: then they slam all their resources into it, grow fast and grow all over until they’ve overcome all those weenie T cells and done their part to increase human misery.
b. Beat up the little guy: Predators and infections look for battles they can win. Often, this means ganging up on a weak and pathetic victim – oh, boy, chow time!
Of course, the key here is to figure out who’s a “little guy” and who isn’t – today’s academic weenie is tomorrow’s Jeff Bezos swallowing up planets in his quest for galactic hegemony. In this regard, it’s wise to remember the NFL Rule before the other guy remembers it and uses it on you:
THE NFL RULE:
When you’re facing the toughest offensive line
in the NFL, make sure you’re not playing football
c. Cut your losses quickly: The natural world implements the FIDO principle: forget it and drive on. Commitment may be good for the soul but it’s Hell on the wallet, so successful predators always remember when to hold ‘em, when to fold ‘em, and when to move on from the old Kenny Rogers songs.
6. PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT: SURFING, NOT CONQUEST We expend resources in every aspect of our business lives: training, time spent with employers, certifications, networking – to say nothing of the non-business investments in homes, relationships, vacations, kids’ educations, and that collection of early Batman comics that you’re so damn proud of. We’re continually forking over our hard-earned personal equity, but we seldom evaluate what’s we’re getting for the big bucks we’re laying out there. Sun Tzu, that well-known ancient Chinese Uberdude, has some sage advice[i] that gives us a start on this:
a. Everything’s a portfolio: Every department in your company, every person, every customer, every sales channel, product… The whole bit. One of Master Sun’s great innovations was getting the generalship out of the Homeric struggle and focusing it squarely on return on capital. This applies to everything in the Universe – and beyond.
b. The world isn’t rigid, and successful leader must be flexible enough to adapt. Master Sun noted that the great leader is like water: when he’s in a valley he waits and accumulates his resources, while when he’s on a steep mountainside with gravity on his side he can pour down like a mighty cataract and sweep all opposition from his path. This isn’t a discussion about topology. It’s a roadmap for how to succeed: understand the dynamics of the situation you’re managing, and re-tweak your approach to go with the flow, dude.
c. Life isn’t linear, and success comes from spotting and embracing the surprises. Let the Universe be your guru. It’s going to do what it does regardless of how you feel about it. When you adapt your leadership to the ways it’s working at the particular moment, you can feel pretty good about it. When you don’t – you and President Clinton can feel each other’s pain, and see what that does for y’all.
We “Manage by Ignorance” because we haven’t got a choice: we’ll be ignorant about most of the stuff around us whether we like it or not. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Once we open ourselves to surprises it’s sometimes scary and often annoying – but at least once a year it’s Christmas.
Namaste.
[i] Which makes sense, since he was an ancient Chinese sage