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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.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

Humans are tribal.

Whether it’s an evolved behavioral trait — a hypothesis Edward O. Wilson’s new book, The Social Conquest of Earth (2012), supports quite strongly — a learned, cultural one, or a combination of the two (most nature/nurture arguments are, after all, false dichotomies) will undoubtedly be the focus on much future research.

The nature/nurture question doesn’t matter to you at all. Where you live as a business leader, what matters is that both you and the humans you work with are tribal, not why they are tribal. The same holds true for you as a parent, part of a community, member of a political party if you are, and voter, which I hope you are: You’re tribal, everyone you know is tribal, everyone you read and read about is tribal too, with almost no exceptions.

It’s the old joke: There are two kinds of people, those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don’t.

Except the second kind is as rare as unicorns.

A person is tribal if his/her self-assigned membership in an identifiable group biases their acceptance of ideas, evidence, and the quality of the people they encounter. It’s why, in so many companies, the bean-counters in Accounting distrust any spending proposed by the propeller-heads in IT, who have no patience for the HR bureaucrats. It’s also why they all agree that the company’s pointy-haired bosses exemplify the Peter Principle.

My tribe is better than your tribe. Everything about us is better. And not just better: Everything about my tribe is admirable; everything about yours is despicable.

Tribalists aren’t “they.” The question isn’t whether you’re tribal. It’s what you do to minimize the damage you do to your ability to understand and solve problems by being tribal.

Self-awareness is a good start, of course. It will help you fight the tendency. It’s most useful when you need it the least, though … when you have time to think and reflect. When you’re in a heated argument, and your side is trying to win a political point over the other side, that’s when cooler heads are desperately needed. Exactly when you’re most likely to be a hothead instead.

Fighting a tendency this deep-seated (and very possibly innate) is more admirable than effective. An alternative that’s more likely to keep you on an even keel is to embrace the tendency but to send it in a harmless direction — possibly even a productive one.

Choose your own tribe, and choose it carefully. There’s no reason you have to belong to an already identified combatant tribe, either, and many reasons to avoid doing so.

In political discussions, for example, I find that identifying with the non-existent “Competence Party” invented in this space several years ago helps me avoid falling for the worst of the partisan nonsense fomented by the propagandists who have taken over most of our political dialog.

Join me. Once you’re a member of the Competence Party you’ll have no reason to become enraged at one party because of something horrible ascribed to it by the other. You’ll recognize that you’re just seeing symptoms of incompetence — something our tribe does our best to avoid by limiting our own information-gathering to sources whose first allegiance is to accuracy. And, you’ll immediately recognize attempts to make you angry, recognizing that whoever is trying to enrage you is playing you, no matter which side they’re on.

It works in business situations, too (which is fortunate, because otherwise this would be a pointless KJR). Imagine, for example, that you find yourself in the middle of a dispute between, say, IT and HR management, due to a conflict between IT’s need to recruit a position and HR/Recruiting’s policies and procedures.

Instead of choosing sides or trying to decide which side is right and which side is wrong, join an IT outsourcing firm who just took over responsibility for whatever the work is that IT needs the hoped-for new hire to handle. Ask yourself what that outsourcer would do to fill the position and compare it to the arguments being made by the parties you’re listening to.

Anger makes people stupid. Exploiting tribal tendencies is a great way to make people angry, so joining a non-combatant tribe … even if it’s one you’ve just invented … will help you keep the exploiters from messing with your head.

There’s another, more practical advantage to joining a non-combatant tribe: When an issue is undecided and the votes are close, both of the combatant tribes will need all the help they can get.

You might have to join one, but if you do, you get to choose.

Even better, you can negotiate favorable terms for doing so.

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