Why lazy, do-nothing, busy-body managers are the best kind
Update
On February 4, 2008, I wrote Taste it Next Time about a way to change how you live, and I said I would come back to my own use of it and tell you how it went. The answer to that ties in with other thoughts on the way organizations work, and how to boost the quality of the tales you tell.
Habit: 1, Me: 0
The method was simple: just put off, for a brief time, doing what you want to cut back on (or even halt for good). A mere five-minute delay will (in theory) be the first step to mastery over this habit, and a reassertion that you, and not ‘the habit,’ are in control of what you do. When the five minute delay grows easy, you can go on to a delay of half an hour, a full hour, half a day, a week. Sometimes when you pass by that initial impulse and don’t give in, the urge will leave you in the meantime.
One of my habits is that I eat a little bit of food every few minutes. I set the method to cut back on these snacks or drop them.
I did not fare so well.
Indeed, when a few days had gone by, I forgot to put off the satisfaction of the urge. It didn’t even occur to me to try. In short I went back to the habit.
Now from time to time I did remember my resolve, and I began to look at when I snacked, to try to find out when I did it. That might then tell me why I did it. And I found that I would go grab something to eat when one of two things took place:
- I was trying to solve some problem
- I was worried about something.
These two are linked and would come to me both at a time, for when something worried me, I set my brain to try to solve it.
One more thing I found, was that sometimes what worried me lay wholly out of my power to affect. These include global problems outside the reach of any one man. Worrying over such things, I looked for answers to them, and the next day the problems were there in the news once more, and this made me worry, and seek an answer all over again. And so it went.
The Chipper Director and the Grousing Editor
Now the reason that I ‘forgot’ to put off the snacks was twofold. First, my mind went somewhere else. It went to solve the problem, and was too busy to remember self-mastery. Second, I as a whole was using the snack to cope with the problems, so I had asked myself to go to some trouble when the benefit of doing so would not be right at hand, but the loss of the benefit would come right away.
This put me in mind of the time when I worked as an editor on movies.
The editor has control over the process of how a movie is put together. This means which shots or takes are used out of all those printed, how much of each shot or take to use, and in what order to put the shots or takes for the whole movie. But the editor is not his own boss (unless he wears more hats and is also director and producer). The editor usually works for the director, and the director then must consult with the producers.
As we look higher up this ladder, we find that each higher rung has more say over the final shape of the movie, and does less work to bring that shape into being. The editor cuts the strips of film, marks them, stores them, fetches them, pastes them together (today these are done for the most part with keyboard and mouse on a computer). The director consults with the editor every day, sometimes for the whole day, and views an endless series of different ways each scene could be put together. The producers see the whole movie a dozen or so times and see only these ways the movie could be shaped. The top producers at the distributor might only see the movie in one form at a preview, which then is accepted as the release.
When I was the editor, I used to get annoyed at all the changes my directors wanted, many of them too small to be worth it. ‘Why don’t we try this?’ they’d say, or ‘What about this instead?’ A lot of the time it looked to me like the director was just fishing. He had nothing against the way the scene was working, not really, and only wanted to see a different option.
‘Easy for you to say; you don’t have to do the work,’ I’d grumble, before putting in a few hours to make the change and then show it again.
An odd thing happened.
A lot of the changes were better.
A Rule to Live By
I wouldn’t have made those changes on my own, because the chance a change would make the scene better didn’t seem worth the reality of the time and effort I’d have to spend on it. (Many times changes didn’t work any better, which meant almost as much trouble changing a scene back to the way it was before, though the amount of trouble to make a change at a digital workstation was very small compared to the amount required with rolls of film.) even when a scene nagged me, if it looked as though changes held only a small chance of improving the scene, and the work would surely be onerous, I would tend to settle for ‘good enough’ and accept that the scene was already about as good as it would ever get.
I think as well that this would have been true of the director a lot of the time — if he had been the one who had to spend the time and trouble to effect the change.
This is one of my great lessons from my movie days:
It is good to part the one who calls for change and the one who must carry out the change.
We can apply this principle to most endeavors, to life, and to talesmanship.
In business, the boss should have only the results in mind, and none of the trouble to achieve them.
In life, the coach who governs your actions should have nothing to gain from going easy on you.
In talesmanship, the editor who says at last, ‘It’s done’ should not be the one who does the rewrite, makes the cuts and smoothes them, recasts the order of scenes, renames the characters, or writes the new scenes.
More on this tomorrow.
(Composed with pen on paper Sunday, March 16, 2008)
