When Wess Roberts wrote The Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun, I hope he got a lot of angry mail.

Last month I made some suggestions about what IS leaders could learn from McDonald’s and the roof fell in. While a lot of my mail was complimentary, many correspondents took issue with some of my advice, all of my advice, the notion that there are any parallels between McDonald’s and IS, some or all of McDonald’s business practices, and the quality of the McDonald’s dining experience.

You would think I had said you have something to learn from Attila the Hun. Hey, that was Wess Roberts, not Robert Lewis.

It’s easy to find reasons not to learn from others. The Germans, for example, discounted relativity because Einstein was Jewish. The result: No atom bomb, they lost World War II, and we watch reruns of Hogan’s Heroes.

Because McDonald’s experiences high turnover in counter help and pays low wages for these positions, some of my correspondents said you have nothing to learn from it when you look at your own hiring practices.

Wrong answer. You have a lot to learn, not by blindly imitating but by paying attention. McDonald’s structures its work to require as little expertise as possible. It hires anyone who can do it. And it pays its employees what the market will bear. Neither McDonald’s nor its counter and kitchen workers think of these jobs as careers – it’s just basic employment. It’s better than welfare, and McDonald’s can sell burgers at a competitive price.

McDonald’s recognizes the need for jobs as well as careers. Do you? If you’ve structured every position in IS as a career, you’re probably making a mistake. Jobs in IS require more expertise than working the counter at McDonald’s, but in some situations you can still move expertise from individuals to systems and processes. Figure out when it makes sense to do so. Have you looked for the opportunities, or have you assumed they don’t exist?

In IS, you often structure the work around the unique abilities of the employees you have instead of first defining the position. McDonald’s doesn’t have much to teach you here, but a local entrepreneur, who gets more from 10 employees than competitors get from 20, may. Since he’s in the garment trade, though, not IS, you have nothing to learn from him, do you? Sure you do.

Some letters indicted the whole fast-food industry, not just McDonald’s, saying it exploits workers. Yes, and many employees in IS wear pagers and are on-call 24 hours a day. Is that exploitation, or is it the nature of the work, and so long as there’s no misrepresentation as to what’s expected, there’s no harm and no foul?

Whether it’s Attila, McDonald’s or (worst of all, according to some participants in my Infoworld.com forum) Microsoft, you have something to learn from any individual or organization that has proven itself highly effective. And with all due respect to Stephen Covey, not all of the lessons are obvious, they won’t all feel good, and they don’t all come from people and companies that are admirable in every respect.

In fact, you won’t find any company or individual you can admire in every respect. Not one. Not even you. Or me. Although it’s easy to be self-righteous, it’s hypocritical because no matter how much the other guy looks like Bill Clinton with Zippergate, somewhere in your own life you know you’re Newt Gingrich, just as guilty only nobody knows about it.

Self-righteousness is just another form of arrogance. If you’re unwilling to learn from McDonald’s, are you willing to listen to an employee you find personally irritating? Probably not, but you’re doing both yourself and that employee a disservice.

Learning from others is like learning from history. Sure, there are lots of wrong conclusions you can draw, and if you do learn you’ll find a whole new set of mistakes to make. But if you fail to learn, from history or from contemporaries, you’ll just make the same old mistakes, and that isn’t just dumb … it’s boring.

I finally watched The Matrix last week. It’s a thought-provoking movie that asks three disturbing questions:

1. Does anyone call what Keanu Reeves does “acting”?

2. Has there ever been a stupider premise than the human body as the ideal source of electrical energy?

3. Does Moore’s Law make the movie’s basic premise inevitable?

We’ll leave the first two questions to Roger Ebert. Before we dig into the third …

Last month I asked what you envisioned as the center of your network, the mainframe or the PC. In other words, is the point of your network to connect terminal devices to the systems that drive them, or is it to connect employees to the resources they need to do their jobs?

The e-mail and forum exchanges on this question surprised me. Most unexpected was that nobody proposed putting processes in the center, even though the process view of the enterprise dominates consulting circles these days. The correspondents who proposed an “acentric” perspective also caught me off-guard, since to me acentrism means no design focus.

What bothered me the most, though, was how many respondents told me the enterprise “never stopped running on the mainframe.” This contingent disputed my assertion that a company’s work is performed by individual human beings, and that companies succeed or fail one person at a time.

On reflection, this isn’t a question of who is right – the question is which perspective is the most useful. With the mainframe in the middle you’d divide work into three categories: Data preparation, where people and feeder systems massage data into processable formats; The Work, which is what host applications do; and exception-handling, which is what people do with system outputs (since the system does The Work, it only reports the exceptions it can’t handle).

With Process in the middle, both humans and information systems fulfill roles in the company’s core processes, performing well-defined tasks that transform inputs into outputs.

Both of these perspectives can be useful. I’ve designed and implemented quite a few successful applications based on the systems-centric view myself, and as mentioned, the process-centric perspective currently dominates business design.

When you put the employee in the middle, though, several good things happen. First, you reduce overhead. Every time one employee hands work to another, entropy happens – work goes into managing the transfer of work rather than getting the work itself done. With a human-centered view you’ll organize resources so work stays on a single desk until it’s done.

Second, customer relationships will improve. When one human being owns each piece of work, the company has a chance of looking less like an impersonal machine that answers all requests with, “We can’t do that – it violates our procedures.”

To understand the third benefit, let’s revisit the basic idea behind The Matrix – that eventually we’ll all be slaves to one or more artificial intelligences. Just thirty years into the future, Moore’s Law will have clicked over twenty times, so computers will be one million times more powerful than they are today. One million.

No matter what the cognitive task, computers will be better at it than you are, so if the mainframe is in the middle, you’ll be working for it. Likewise for process-centered work – computers, being far more capable than humans, will do all the interesting stuff. (In the movie version, we’ll do nothing but cheap manual labor. Fortunately, Microsoft will have written the operating system and our heroes will take back the world when the blue screen of death happens.)

If humans are in the middle, we may have a cable going into our skulls (although I sure hope wireless technology has progressed more by then) but it will be to augment our abilities, not to boss us around.

Okay, this is the stuff of a summer movie, and your choices today will neither save nor destroy the world two decades from now. My point is to illustrate the third benefit of putting humans in the middle of your system designs – you’ll help make your company a better place to work.