Obliquity

I was at the used book sale at the local library last week, and I looked at one of those management advice books. I can't remember the name now, but a quick skim revealed the usual obvious truths. (Be self-observant in order to be emotionally genuine in order to interact with other people honestly.) It did explore one concept that interested me, one that I have thought about before but never had a concise name for: obliquity.

The concept is straightforward: Don’t focus only on your goal, and don’t head straight for your goal.

In business it means that keeping both eyes on the quarterly earnings reports is shortsighted and ultimately self-defeating. Witness our numbers-driven economy with its inflated parasitic financial sector, outsourced everything, tapped out consumers, and multi-billion dollar annual trade deficit. Contrast us with Germany, until recently the largest exporter in the world. Germans have worker friendly jobsite conditions due to powerful labor unions, universal health care, six-week vacations, mandated worker representation on corporate boards, and much more. Germany decided to have an economy that works for a majority of the people, with a broad spectrum of utilitarian goals. Wonder of wonders, Germany is also an economic powerhouse. Even with well paid, well treated workers they have a trade surplus. But it isn’t so surprising.

Back in the early part of the 20th century Henry Ford understood that he should pay his workers well enough so that they could buy Ford automobiles. Over the past 30 years or so the philosophy in corporate America has been to fire half the employees, keep wages flat for the other half and work them harder, and then hope that some other company’s employees have enough money to buy your product. Meanwhile, investors found that, at least in the short term, it was more profitable to plow money into a credit bubble than to actually go to the trouble of manufacturing useful things. We are experiencing how well that worked out.

Here’s an old column by Robert Cringely about high tech companies being managed to death. It includes the real life parable of the R&D department of Celanese being gutted in the name of earnings. Once again, the straight numbers guys miss the point.

One of my favorite examples of obliquity is daylighting, that is, the architectural practice of letting natural daylight into a building and intelligently managing it. The building in question is a school. Now, if you accept the premise of No Child Left Behind, the way to increase school performance is to have rigorous standardized testing with penalties for underperforming schools. (As I have written elsewhere, the educational equivalent of bayoneting the wounded.) The school in question was retrofitted with daylighting and test scores instantly jumped 15%. Apparently, just that much improvement in their work environment allowed the kids to concentrate on their studies. I wonder how much better our schools would perform if they weren’t designed like prisons or blast-proof bunkers.

A study by the Heschong Mahone Group found that the performance of workers at an incoming call center improved 6-12% with better views out windows, including more vegetation. Office workers performed 10-20% better on cognitive skills tests when they had windows with attractive views. Think about all the money corporate management wastes trying to wring out a few percentage points of financial performance when they could do so much more for the price of some windows and landscaping. Someone once pointed out to me that heating and lighting a commercial building costs less than $20 a square foot annually, but the cost of paying the people who work in the building costs hundreds of dollars per square foot annually. Increase productivity by 10% and you’ve blown away your utility costs. And yet, people still work in drab, shoddy, poorly lit cubicles.

Here’s the “Duh” quote from Adam Smith:

- "Where wages are high ... we shall always find the workmen more active, diligent, and expeditious, than where they are low." (from "The Wealth of Nations", 1776)

B-B-B-But, that would cost more money, just like providing a decent workplace and treating employees as if they mattered. Yup. Money that would pay a dividend.

Managers of all types get caught up in the raw financial numbers because raw financial numbers are what they were taught in their MBA programs. They weren’t taught to stick their heads up and look around at the general scenery. The truth being that the general scenery is where the action is.

Contrast the statements of the CEO of General Motors and the CEO of Honda. The CEO of GM once stated that GM was company that made money and that it just happens to make cars. The CEO of Honda stated that Honda is a company that makes cars and that it just happens to make money. Who is making money now?

This gets me back to the management book. It is just the business version of a thousand self help books, health books, and diet books that clog the publishing industry. All of them have a special magic formula for success, whether that success is measured by self-esteem, absence of disease, or pounds shed. It doesn’t seem to work that way. Happy people don’t deliberately follow a formula. They live full human lives. That is, they take part in their community, they spend time with family, with friends, and alone. They work, they play…this is sounding really hokey, and you know the shtick, but it is true. It is my observation that happy people don’t obsess about why they are happy or how they are going to remain happy. They just go do good stuff. Likewise with health and weight loss.  Most healthy people don’t diet. They don’t gorge on the “little known key nutrient that will extend your life and give you abundant health.” They cook often and eat good food. They live an active life. They have an overall lifestyle that works.

The cute parable on the subject is the one about the old cat and the kitten. The old cat sees the kitten chasing its tail and asks why. The kitten says “ I know that happiness is in my tail, so I chase it.” The old cat says, “It’s true that happiness is in your tail. But I just walk where I want to and it follows me.”