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Craziness can be good. Positive feedback loops can be good. It’s like steak and hot fudge … two good things that aren’t so good when you put them together.

Many businesses need their crazies. They’re the movers and shakers who combine a willingness to do the outrageous with a complete lack of fear. They put the company in harm’s way, forcing everyone else to figure out how to make things work that didn’t seem possible until the consequences of failure made them possible after all.

Without their crazies, many companies would fall into complacency, coasting along until all momentum is lost and the company either closes its doors or is bought by some other, larger company whose executives want no part of craziness either.

The problem with craziness is that every time a crazy does something crazy and it works, it ratchets up the positive feedback loop — the loop that says, “This works, so I should do more of it.”

It’s the loop that says if 16 ounce sirloins are popular, 64 ounce sirloins will be even more popular … and hey, here’s an idea: Let’s just put a steer on a plate instead.

And so it happens that at some stage in a company’s life, its resident crazy publicly commits it to selling a perpetual motion machine … something it can’t build because it can’t be built, but which would be so popular in the marketplace that when the company fails to deliver the goods, it must be the fault of those close-minded engineers who aren’t willing to consider the possibilities.

It must be their fault because it can’t be the crazy’s fault. It can’t be, because part of being a crazy is that everyone is afraid of them. They’re willing to do anything and everything necessary to get their way, and over time they’ve built up so much political capital by making things happen that even the company’s top executives are afraid to rein them in for fear the board of directors will side with the crazy.

Something else about crazies: While they’re very good at insisting other people take responsibility, they’re the best excuse-makers in the galaxy, exceeding even the Flarpswenkers of Tau Ceti IV, who are so good at it that people (well, entities) pay good gimtarkers just to hear them blame-shift.

The crazies, after all, have a track record, so if their next flash of inspiration doesn’t work out as planned, it must be Someone Else’s Fault, and that someone must be Held Accountable for failing to get the job done.

No matter where you sit in the company you’ve probably been the crazy’s victim, because the crazies of the business world have no respect for reporting relationships. If they want something from someone, they ask them directly.

No, that’s not right. The crazy doesn’t ask you. He (or she) tells you. Whatever else you were working on doesn’t matter, because whatever the crazy wants is your top priority if you want to keep your job.

Your existing assignments and responsibilities, which your manager has delegated to you so your workload more or less matches your capacity? When dealing with a Crazy you understand you now have two full-time jobs — the one defined by your manager, and whatever the crazy’s next whim says it is.

Change seats. You’re now the CIO. What can you do about a crazy? Very little, which is better than nothing at all.

One possibility, which has little chance of success but it can’t hurt to try, is to reform the crazy just enough to protect your staff. Your message: Whatever the need, ask you, and you’ll assign it personally, making sure the very best person gets the assignment.

Good luck with that, but what the heck.

Your other alternative is to be patronizing … not with the crazy, but with the CEO about the crazy. Commiserate frequently about the need to accommodate the craziness, even when it means scheduled, important work is put on hold for a while.

Because really, if you and the CEO agree that disrupting the plan is okay, you can tell your employees they don’t have to work double shifts to handle their regular workload and the crazy.

That should get you by until the crazy eventually self-destructs. Which will happen, because if there’s one other thing crazies have in common, it’s a complete lack of regard for building and maintaining relationships.

And that, eventually, is politically fatal in even the craziest environments.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

I’ll probably regret writing this piece, and I apologize in advance for so overtly bringing in, not just the headlines, but an attitude about them. But if I wrote about anything other than the debt ceiling I’d feel like Nero with his fiddle.

And, two very big principles to be learned from the debt-ceiling fiasco are directly relevant to business leadership. You and (I hope) every other business executive in the United States would do well to apply both of them in your day-to-day work.

ROT

The first principle is a matter I’ve written about several times, both in this space and in Keep the Joint Running: A Manifesto for 21st Century Information Technology. The acronym is ROT and stands for “Relationships Outlive Transactions.”

It’s a principle the Tea Party and its representatives don’t appear to understand. Long before the debt ceiling became a crisis … before the last election, in fact … a prominent Republican politician (John Boehner, I think) defended Nancy Pelosi as a person at a Tea Party rally and was booed for his trouble. He wasn’t defending her politics, or her tactics. He simply pointed out that she’s a good person regardless of what you think of her politics, and that was considered horrible.

I’m not going to go into a who-started-it analysis. Doing so would be about as useful as figuring out whether the Hatfields or McCoys were to blame for their legendary feud.

Blame isn’t the point. It’s the situation as it is today that matters, because every participant in every dysfunctional relationship has a decision to make every day … whether to escalate or do their part to help dial it down.

And right now, it’s the Tea Party caucus members’ failure to understand the importance of dialing it down that matters. Eventually, they’ll face the consequences, because the most important relationships are the ones you form with your political opponents. Those are the relationships you have to be able to rely on when the situation gets thick.

Don’t make this mistake in your relationships with other players in your company. The moment you make disagreements and decisions that don’t go your way personal and acrimonious, the next time there’s a decision to be made, you won’t have much influence.

Principles

In the 7/30/2011 Star Tribune was an commentary by David Strom that spoke admiringly of the Tea Party caucus members for sticking to their principles.

Which they have, and sticking to one’s principles is, as Everyone Knows, a Good Thing.

What Strom and the people he admires fail to grasp is that those who disagree with them have principles too … principles they believe in just as strongly and passionately.

Juveniles deal with this sort of situation by demonizing whoever disagrees with them. Their opponents become bad people, which makes ignoring what they want just fine. They’re them — they’re stupid, evil, inept, smell bad, and their mothers dress them funny.

It’s this approach to disagreement that leads to brawls between fans of different British soccer teams.

A mark of personal maturity is recognizing that when two people disagree on a subject, their opinions can be equally valid. Different perspectives, experience, underlying assumptions, values, and planning horizons can lead to very different conclusions. (“Can be” isn’t “must be,” though. When I disagree with a flat-earther, I’m right.)

Which means people don’t compromise because they’re weak. They compromise because they’re mature enough to realize political opponents aren’t enemies — they’re just people who have reached a different conclusion.

Political conservatives take as a guiding principle that government is best when it governs least. Political liberals take as a guiding principle John Rawls’s idea that a fair society is one you’d choose to live in without knowing in advance where you’d be born into it. (I won’t comment on either the level of correlation or the level of consistency with which the Republican party adheres to political conservatism or the Democratic party to liberalism.)

In a calm conversation, liberals and conservatives would acknowledge the validity of the other side’s guiding principle, which means they’d agree that the challenge is finding the proper balance between the two.

Regrettably, we aren’t having a calm conversation.

In the end, the problem with Washington DC isn’t politics. It’s the absence of politics. Politics is the practice through which people who disagree with each other reach a path forward they might not agree with, but can agree to.

As a business leader, you need to excel at this practice. And you need to encourage excellence in it with everyone you work with.

The alternative? There isn’t an alternative. Businesses that fail at this fail.

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