Stupidity and Management I
The typical standard management model of most organizations is based on the theory that the smartest person is the person in charge. This is an easy assumption to make. After all, the manager usually has a college degree and all the other trappings of being more intelligent than everyone else. Theoretically, their greater “smartness” is why they are in charge and why they make more money.
But here is the problem: If the person at the top of the management ladder is seen as the smartest person in the organization, this immediately implies that the people who report to that person are not as smart. And if it is a multi-layered organization, then each succeeding lower layer of the hierarchy is obliged to do less and less independent thinking, or, if you will excuse the colloquial phraseology, to be and act dumber and dumber than the layer above, totally deferring to all instructions from upper layers.
If you were to create a graphic to illustrate this system, you would end up with an inverted pyramid. In this inverted pyramid, all the intelligence is at the top. And as the requirement for less and less intelligence cascades down through the ranks, when you finally get to the bottom, you see a most interesting effect: all the people at the bottom (i.e., the ones who are actually on the assembly line making the product, or the ones who are interacting directly with customers), are required to suppress all independent thinking. In many cases they have just as much (or more) knowledge or intelligence or experience as the management, but they are not allowed to use it.
This oh-so-common management model is a direct result of Principle #5 (Everyone Wants to Look Smart). It is understandable that the person with the most power would want to use that power to indulge their own need to look smart, by requiring the people under their control to look dumb. However, to maximize one’s effectiveness as a manager, it would be far better to utilize Principle #1 (i.e., Lack of Thought and Information Is Power). To apply this Principle in a management situation, we use:
The Less Thinking a Manager Does,
the More Thinking the People
Who Work for That Manager
Have to Do, and Vice Versa.For a manager to be truly effective and get the most and best performance out of his subordinates, it is essential for that manager to be as dumb as possible. That way, employees will no longer spend 90% of their time and energy avoiding doing anything bright or creative that might make accidentally make that boss or the middle managers feel stupid. Instead, with the incompetence and confusion of the management openly acknowledged, those same formerly unmotivated employees will now be forced to tap into their own imaginations, and work at their highest efficiency. They must do so in order to fill the endless infinite void of management’s mental non-activity.
Read the genesis of the book
© 2008 Justin Locke. This material may not be reproduced or re-transmitted without permission from the author.