Everything is easy if someone else has to do it.
A story about Jack Benny:
He saw a chimpanzee act and decided he wanted it on his show. Excited, he described the act to his writing team. “Wait!” one of them shouted as Benny turned to leave the room. “What do you want them to do on the show?”
“What do I want them to do?” Benny replied as he started walking out the door. “How should I know?” And just before the door closed behind him his team heard him say, “That’s why I have writers!”
Jack Benny, of course, knew how hard the job of a television comedy writer is, unlike those of us who, to draw a parallel, complain that Dilbert isn’t funny as often as it should be.
There was, for example, a colleague, back when I worked for a large services firm, who, while explaining the sophisticated management consulting services she and her team were going to provide, decided some contrast would help. And so, “The technology is the easy part,” she explained to the CEO.
Of course it is … if, that is, you’re a management consultant in a position to describe it with all the detail a passenger in a Boeing 737 can provide about a crime that took place on the ground below.
Or there was the colleague — a programmer this time — who was quite certain that managing manufacturing was really a very simple proposition. Which was why he saw no reason to ever actually set foot in the factory, even though he supported the company’s manufacturing system.
And there was me, back in the early days of client/server computing, sneering at the unnecessary complexity associated with setting up and provisioning a mainframe computer, when in the world of PCs I just had to insert the Turbo Pascal installation disk, let it whir for a few minutes, and the PC was ready to go. Knowing what I now know about what’s required to set up a modern n-tier environment these days (very little), IBM’s old mainframes, complete with VTAM, CICS, and all the other holiday trimmings, seem like simplicity itself.
We all do this. We criticize the CEOs of struggling businesses for failing to anticipate a marketplace change we ourselves saw with perfect clarity through the magic of 20/20 hindsight. We complain about employees who report to us who fail to get the job done in the time we alloted when we couldn’t even begin to do their jobs ourselves. We ridicule HR, when we aren’t ridiculing Accounting, or Marketing, or, for that matter, members of Congress, the Supreme Court, or the President of the United States, for their ineptitude.
No matter what the issue, we say, “It’s really very simple,” its simplicity correlating perfectly with our lack of detailed knowledge.
This phenomenon seems to be getting worse. There are, I think, two root causes: compensation practices, and 24/7 career demands.
Compensation practices first: Increasingly, actual work that creates real value is considered less valuable than managing that work, which in turn is less valuable than managing those who manage the work, and so on, ad infinitum. The human mind being what it is, those who make the big bucks have to rationalize their compensation to themselves. Why are they worth so much more? Well it’s obvious: The work must be much, much easier than providing oversight to the managers of those who who supervise it.
That leaves the 24/7 career demands — the merging of personal and professional time that has become the default condition for so many of us. It’s a culprit because it has led to the decline of the hobby.
Beyond their obvious value in helping people leave the office at the office, thereby reducing stress, making life more enjoyable, and as a fringe benefit giving everyone who has one an additional topic of conversation, hobbies provide one other benefit: People with hobbies learn that even a seemingly simple field of endeavor contains endless complexity for anyone interested enough to explore it. Whether the field is bridge, chess, cabinet-making, golf, home auto repair, guitar-playing, photography, knitting, or pottery, learn just a bit to get started and you mostly learn how much more you have to learn.
Which, perhaps, back when people had time for hobbies, might have led them to conclude that other fields held just as much unexplored complexity.
Is there a solution? Beats me. Looking for one is something of a hobby of mine. All I can tell you so far is, it’s complicated.
This is exactly why I hate it when the users say they want something to happen “automagically”.
Even more than usual, this column contains significant wisdom. I think I’ll go back to my chess game now.
Everything looks easy to those who know nothing.
Spot on. We need more humility when we bloviate about areas we know little about. Compensation is an excellent example. I rarely say that someone makes “too much money for what he does.” That would take way more knowledge than I have. If some group, through some voluntary process, decides to compensate that person that amount, I leave it there.
While I am not directly in IT, I use a lot of IT in my job of providing metrics. My annoying example of “simplification” of my job is the recent push to document what I do in written documents of less than 30 pages each – written to the level of someone who uses MS Excel Spreadsheets and hasn’t ever used a formula more complicated than a summing function.
A piece of the problem is that those who are the best at things make them look easy. What you don’t see is the experience or the brain at work. Olympic level athletic events are a good example. What looks easy is the result of hours and hours of trying to be as efficient as possible with absolutely no wasted motion or energy. the less wasted motion, the easier it looks to do.
The topic reminds me of the joke of the consultant that fixes a machine with a sledge hammer after many others have been called in and presents a bill for $10,010. When asked, $10 is for swinging the sledge hammer, $10,000 is for knowing where, how hard, and when.
Besides the two reasons cited (compensation practices and lack of perspective engendered by a hobby) here is another reason. The “deer in the headlight” syndrome.
Example: I get called on to detail the when, who and how of a project/task. The when and who goes smoothly, but when I get to the how the audience’s interest dissappears to replaced with “I don’t want to know the details. Just get it done”. By not having a clue about the how the audience finds themselves in a loop. I don’t understand what is being said, but instead of trying to overcome that shortcoming in order to appear competent I simply disengage. So I never learn the how. And, it isn’t my job anyway.
I think you have rediscovered the Dunning-Kruger effect. Or at least a variation on it.
Possibly a variation. My understanding of the Dunning-Kruger effect is that it’s about how people assess their own performance against that of others who have the same general set of responsibilities. What I’m talking about here is how people with one set of responsibilities assess the difficulty of the work performed by people who have a very different set of responsibilities … for example, IT professionals looking at sales representatives, and vice versa.
“Increasingly, actual work that creates real value is considered less valuable than managing that work, which in turn is less valuable than managing those who manage the work, and so on, ad infinitum.”
What do think think is the cause behind this? I would love to hear your thoughts on this and think it would make for a fascinating column.
I see the same thing but don’t have many good theories. My best theory is business (i.e, management) schools. Their traditional industrial mindset still lingers and has proliferated and multiplied as graduates go forth into management positions.
Keep up the great work!
I think it’s as simple as this: Top executives are personally visible to the board of directors; regular ol’ employees aren’t. More than that, a company’s top executives develop personal relationships and friendships with board members … they are, in a very real sense, members of the same club.
So when the time comes to negotiate executive compensation, the board’s compensation committee is in the position of having to make a friend happy or unhappy.
Add to that the simple financial reality that every dollar paid to a top executive is a dollar that isn’t available to pay to a line employee and vice versa, and the rest is probably inevitable: The folks in the executive ranks benefit by rationalizing their heightened importance compared to people who do real work.
Which leads to one more factor: Economic theories ignore, so far as I can tell, the power dimension of human interaction. We’ve had a thirty-year decline in the influence of labor unions. Most people I know consider this to be a positive development, as labor unions distort the labor marketplace.
This contains an assumption … that marketplace distortion has a moral dimension. And it ignores the extent to which labor union power acted as a check on corporate management power. Part of that check took place in the court of public opinion. As labor unions have declined, public advocacy for the value of actual work declined with it.
Understand, I have little expertise in this subject, so this is more speculation than informed analysis. It fits the facts I know. That doesn’t mean I know enough of the facts to be worth listening to.
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