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.