Inform Yourself

The Genius Project: A Legacy of Dependence

One of the most pervasive management principles that remain from the industrial era is the belief that companies have to manage and control people. The conventional wisdom of the industrial economy was that all workers should do things the prescribed way, the way the company says. To achieve this, if the job required a worker to be able to do something, and the worker wasn’t good at it, it was the worker who was expected to change to better fit the role, not the other way around. This has created a legacy of dependence where people look to the company or management to tell them how to proceed, how to work and how to be. This creates a sense that the job is more important than I am, and therefore what I think isn’t as important as what the job or company needs. People become dependent on those with management authority to decide what must be done. They consent to being controlled, but unfortunately all this remnant of the old industrial age does is preventing people from tapping into their own talents and Genius.

In the Industrial economy people were considered in many ways a distraction, an obstacle to performance or an unavoidable expense. While many organizations argue that this isn’t so, that no real legacy exists and that they have updated their entire approach to people to be aligned with the realities of today’s economies, in practice they continue to operate from a basis closer to Taylor’s industrial view. They just don’t realize it.

We see it all the time in the organizations I work with and to help make my point to these companies I have developed three litmus tests. Whenever I work with an organization that tells me that people are their absolute most vital asset, but their actions don’t support their words, I ask them the following questions to help make my case:

1. “If you have a Chief Executive Officer, and a Chief Financial Officer, and even a Chief Operations Officer, can I meet your Chief People Officer?” While there are a growing number of companies that do have some similar title or position, the great majority of companies that tell me they value their people above all else, don’t show me this in their actions because they have no such role. Finances, operations and governance are still more important and require Chief positions to head these segments of business. People are usually the primary responsibility of a Vice President of Human Resources who reports to one of the other Chief officers.

2. “Where do you record capital equipment purchases and payroll on your books?” The answer is almost always that capital equipment is listed as an investment, which is itemized out over a certain number of years, and payroll almost always goes in the expense column. While the company may want to believe that people are their most important asset, they continue to practice an old belief as to how they manage that asset. At least from a financial perspective, they don’t view the money they spend on people as an investment, just an expense. Not much has changed from industrial era view that people are an expense and something to be reduced as much as possible.

3. If the company manufactures anything I ask them, “What is the defect rate for the products you make compared to your human turnover rate?” All too often the company tells me that their defect rate is much lower than their turnover rate. This just means that they do a far better job of production management than they do people management (i.e., they fail less with things then they do with people).

This is not to say that these companies are lying. For the most part they truly do appreciate that they are in an intellectual economy and they really do believe that people are the most vital asset, but the very field of management itself is so founded in the industrial mentality in which it was born that they just can’t appreciate these basic flaws. It’s easy to miss this kind of “big-picture” insight because we all exist within the very thing in question, the thing that is flawed. It’s so big that you completely forget you are inside of it.