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FAI = Frontal Assault Idiot
Since I already have a post regarding the FAE, why not supplement it with one on the FAI?
The other day, my friend and mentor, Bill Livingston, rightfully and truthfully called me an FAI. The picture says it all. No more words are needed, except for: “poor me, boo hoo”.
Wannabe
Everybody wants to be a manager or director. Hell, why not? Extracting yourself from the pig sty of hard and sweaty work that directly creates value is the smart thing to do in an obsolete org that is structured as a stratified pyramid. And, how many orgs do you know that aren’t structured as outdated command and control hierarchys? Subjectively of course, I assert that managing and directing others ( fancy words for command and control) is easy relative to doing hard work and constantly getting beat over the head with the schedule stick. Plus, it’s pays more, and you get to have some fancy title of superficial importance appended to your name. Oh sure, you have to put up with whiny direct reports (like me 🙂 ) but does that really warrant more pay and value by fancier and higher paid people positioned even higher up in the pyramid of woe?
I respect people, not titles. If you, as an anointed and highly compensated manager or director:
- listen to your people and treat them as equals,
- actively and visibly help your people get their jobs done better and better each day ,
- pay for ongoing training that’s critical to the company’s future success,
- constantly and diligently take action to repair decaying infrastructure as a result of increasing entropy (2nd law of thermodynamics)
- don’t act two-faced (e.g. pounding your people with schedule while espousing “quality is king”),
- behave congruently and with integrity,
then I’ll respect you and the title that you rode in with. Otherwise, fuggetabout you, your fat head, and your fancy title. Other people, out of the natural fear that all pyramid org structures auto-instill into the minions at the bottom, may feign respect, but I won’t. However, being human, and (hopefully) not too stupid, I do publicly kneel and pay homage to the awesome power to instill fear that is naturally built into the hierarchy – most of the time. Since “most” is not the same as “all”, you can use your imagination to envision my day-to-day experience in a hierarchically structured workplace.
Being a software designer, I’ve learned that different structure types enable or disable different types of behavior. The pointy haired hierarchy, with it’s long history of top down command and control misery, is a disabler of highly creative, adaptive, and efficient human behavior. Since humans (especially those in western countries) are mostly about “me and my story”, and those at the top always accumulate riches at the expense of those at the bottom and on the outside, the pyramid of woe won’t be going away soon.
Regardless of the amount of damage inflicted upon those at the bottom and to external stakeholders, the people at the top will continue to wield their power to keep themselves entrenched. Why continue this irrational behavior? In order to continue living the high life of luxury and consumption, of course. However, the relatively flat network structure fueled by the rise of the internet, will eventually displace the collapsing corpo C & C hierarchy in the future. Those that wait too long will die. Too bad this global maelstrom of change won’t happen in my lifetime.
The FAE
Over the years, I’ve read quite a few books and articles on managing the soft side of an organization. In many of these info sources, I’ve seen the term FAE = Fundamental Attribution Error mentioned. The FAE represents the tendency of a manager to instinctively and unthinkingly blame a person’s character and/or work ethic for under-performance. The real cause, which cannot possibly be true in a corpo manager’s conditioned mind, is likely that his/her inability to create, nurture, and continuously sustain a helpful, supportive, learning work environment is killing productivity and creating under-performers.
Of course, the FAE cannot account for all under-performance in an absolute sense. There are self-made underperformers (like BD00) in every org, regardless of the quality of the surrounding work environment.
Trees
This tree below is my personal creation. You’re tree would likely be different than my tree. Nature creates perfect trees. Man tends to destroy nature’s trees and to create arbitrary artificial trees to suit his needs. Man must create, either consciously or unconsciously, conceptual trees to make sense of the world. How attached are you to your trees? Are your trees THE right trees and are my trees wrong? Are trees created by ‘experts’ the trees that all should unquestionably embrace? Who are the ‘experts’?
Creating the vertical aspect of the tree is called leveling. Creating the horizontal aspect of the tree is called balancing. Leveling and balancing, along with scoping and bounding, are powerful systems analysis and synthesis tools.
High Falutin’ Titles
Along with a whole bunch of co-workers, I’m a member of the professional networking site linkedin.com. It’s a great site and I highly recommend it.
It’s interesting to browse through the profiles on LinkedIn. Everybody’s a freakin’ manager, or director, or chief-this, or chief-that. However, when you read their accomplishments, you can’t tell what the freak they’ve done. They seem to mostly describe the functions of the org areas that they’ve worked in. WTF? Of course, I don’t have any facts (I only use facts when they bolster my argument and I auto-reject all others 🙂 ), but I’d bet the farm that most of these people don’t direct or manage anyone and they haven’t done squat in years. They’re each, OMG!, a dreaded individual contributor. I picture them, perhaps wrongly, walking around flaunting their titles, manipulating people (instead of helping them to develop and grow) and barking out non-sensical orders that they’ve pulled out of their arses. They behave this way to look/feel important and they actually fool a few people for a while.
It’s sad, because I think that at the core of their souls, all people want to do the right thing for all. However, the shining light at their core has been trapped in no man’s land by layer upon layer of ego. The culprit behind ego inflation in the corpo world is a dysfunctional org structure. Specifically, it’s the obsolete 150 year old pyramidal, hierarchical structure of entitlement that all dinosaur corpo citadels pay homage to.
“Enough with the rant, got any alternative ideas smarty pants”? How can you mobilize a large group of people to change the world and prevent chaos from reigning without a corpo pyramidal caste system? One way is to organize as, and more importantly, operate in accordance with, a circular ring structure where all rings are directly connected with robust and high bandwidth communication channels. Instead of managers in the inner rings, there are leaders. Leaders focus more on developing people instead of enriching themselves.
So you say that the multi-ring design is nothing more than a squashed hierarchy with the innermost node representing the CEO? You’re literally right, but not figuratively. The main reason for operating your org structure as a flat concentric set of rings is to eradicate the deeply ingrained 1000s of years old “I’m better than you because I’m higher up in the food chain” mindset that unconsciously pervades all hierarchies. Sure, the people residing on the inner rings still have the responsibility to make org-wide decisions, but they do so with a more down-to-earth and people-centric mindset.
A non-conforming, ring-based company organization can’t possibly work, right? Blasphemy and off with my head! I know of at least one company that’s successfully implemented the “ringo star”. Semco Inc. of Brazil. If it piques your interest, Google them and/or check out the articles bookmarked in this twine: The Magic of Semco.
Thanks for listening.
Who’s Important?
Do you want to know who’s really valued by your organization’s so-called leadership? Just take a look at who’s located physically close to them. Look who’s got the big offices and what they’ve actually done to grow the organization. Look at who gets to go on company junkets. Look at who gets the training dollars. Are they the organization’s value producers, or are they the overhead consumers? Are they members of contracts, finance, marketing, human resources, business development, communications, compliance, or are they the people who create the value that keeps the organization alive: the engineers, the designers, the manufacturers, the integrators, the testers, the customer trainers, the customer support staff? Odds are that the people who directly create the wealth are cloistered in cubicle farms at the “back” or “bottom” of the building and treated as second class citizens. Long live those fossil managers who are stuck in the past and are ignorantly happy to operate by Ford’s , Taylor’s, and Sloane’s rules – regardless of what they say. Clueless dolts.
Hierarchy and Holarchy
In a man-made hierarchy, each higher level transcends and excludes the lower levels. In a holarchy, each higher level transcends and includes the lower levels. In a holarchy, all entities are unique manifestations of the whole. Thus, full alignment occurs and high performance is achieved.
What type of organization do you work for? How would one know if he/she is working in a hierarchy or a holarchy?
Why am I here?
WTF?
Meh!
D'oh!
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