Freedom from optimism

Downward mobility has few perks, but O how you savor them.

Lately I've been enjoying what I would have once called defeatism, and I'm enjoying it the way a newly released ex-con enjoys a day at the park: the freedom is exhilarating, but the unregulated newness of it all is a bit frightening. Call me a "glass-half-full guy" in the midst of an extremely sexy flirtation with value-neutral pessimism.

Because here's what they didn't teach us in management training, though the few of us who paid attention learned it through experience anyway: While leadership has always required the ability to inspire hope in the led, the practice of modern corporate management seems to be based on a profound willingness to deny unpleasant reality.

This isn't the case everywhere, of course. In some industries incoming reality is so compelling that illusionists don't even hang around for a cup of coffee. But there are certain professions and institutions that just seem to exist in their own management-enforced reality vacuums.

It begins with a simple truth: Nothing great was every achieved without enthusiasm. Unchecked by feedback from facts, however, that simple truth leads to an organizational culture in which criticism of dumb ideas and obvious failures is considered a far more heinous sin than the original screw-ups. And it doesn't ever end well.

In my management days (which ended under a since-removed management "team") I was forever whistling past graveyards of my bosses' creation. Yes, the rational side of me understood that there was little I could do to build anything successful from such crooked timber, but reason also told me that there was zero chance of success if I couldn't convince those around me that Happy Times Were Here Again... if we could only implement this new cobbled-together system or that new jackass initiative. And we desperately needed to make things better. Pessimism might have been warranted, but it just wasn't practical.

In theory, managers hash-out this stuff behind closed doors. In practice, the disgruntled wisdom of the middle-management class is seldom communicated up the chain. And since I was typically the guy who wound up delivering those negative "What on Earth were you thinking?" messages to my former bosses, I can attest personally to the rewards showered upon the sycophants who manned the conference-table battlements of the denial status quo.

These days, with our industry still making perversely inflated double-digit profits as it drives straight off the cliff of its impending destruction, there are all manner of studies and findings and imperatives, all of which the leaders and managers deliver with hardened, tough-guy conviction. We have to change, they say. We can meet these challenges and thrive. Harrumph.

And as I listen, my sense of resigned disbelief feels incredibly liberating. The new platitudes are the same "radical" ideas that got derided and tossed aside two years ago when we first suggested them, back when they could have made a difference.

I don't intend to spend the rest of my life being a punk-ass naysayer, but let's face it: We've got too many team players in America right now, too many executives and MBAs and consultants spinning invisible cloth for emperors, saying popular things, sizing up their in-house opponents instead of the changes in their industries. This isn't going to change until the leaders at the tops of those institutions -- companies, governments, agencies, schools -- decide they value insight above the comforts of a stroked ego.

Of course, I'm not holding my breath while I wait for that day. And I ain't whistling, either.

Comments

[Pam]

Bad few weeks, eh?

Around here, mediocrity rules.

[Ben]

Semi-related: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution just cut a huge chunk of reporting jobs. The remaining reporters will have more to do, less time to do it, and will, in many cases, have to compete for newly defined beats. Many old ones have been eliminated.

The good, experienced reporters are jumping ship (one to Newsweek, for example). Morale is said to be awful.

I wonder: These cuts, combined with my current subscription, will help this shrinking industry grow its double digit profits, as investors apparently demand. In the short term.

In the long term, their increasingly bad coverage, occasioned by their scarcer resources and the flight of their good reporters, will cause me to cancel my subscription and search the Internet for the one thing I currently do not use it for: local news.

In the long term, of course, the paper will also probably be sold to someone new. It won't much matter to the old investors that Atlanta no longer has a decent newspaper. And the new investors, seeing ways to increase profits, will offer more staff cuts.

And I haven't got into competition with new media.

Just trying to cheer you up.

[Anna Haynes]

Ouch.
It's like being saddled with our existing leaders in govt, going into global warming.

glad it's liberating though. I'm slower, haven't reached that pt yet.

[David]

Gosh, Dan ...

Don't let it bring you down
It's only castles burning,
Find someone who's turning
And you will come around.

[Daniel]

It hasn't been a bad couple of weeks. It's been a bad 10 years, and based on my conversations and e-mails with journalists elsewhere, I think it's been a fairly universal experience.

And you know... whatever. I've wasted a lot of time and energy trying to correct problems and help people, and the net result was that the problems just changed form and the people are still unhappy. Freedom from optimism allows one the liberty to step outside of that group misery and just start making the new things you imagine. Maybe those new things will solve problems or make people happy. Maybe I won't be able to implement all of them. C'est la vie, c'est la guerre.

It's nice to think that we can manage change, but it's more realistic to say that often times what survives after a disaster adapts to that uncontrolled change and then after the fact someone defines that process of survival and adaptation as "management." But our ancestors didn't "manage" the Cretaceous Extinction Event -- they just made it through the mass die-off and kept on evolving.

That's what I think is about to happen: Not a smoothly managed transition from one media epoch to another, but a sudden mass-slaughter of the dinosaurs.

I also believe, but cannot prove, that this is bigger than what's about to happen to media. We're just the canary in the coal mine.

And the thing is, destruction of old things that don't work anymore may be frightening, but it isn't a tragedy. It's nature's way. We need this change, and at some level, I think we all sense it.

[DeweyS]

Ben's post reminded me of a Dotcom I worked for in 2001. I left after the 4th round of layoffs.

The first round was fine -- they chopped some deadwood and people who were better-off-elsewhere.

The 2nd round chopped more deadwood and only accidentally a few niche producers. My real disappointment was some people who disappeared should have been ridden out on a rail instead of just laid off. "We have to pull together in this time of difficulty."

The 3rd was painful -- they chopped some of the supplemental/supporting players who were not central to the "business goals" but were keeping a lot of necessary stuff out of the way to those of us who were. "We're all in this together."

4th round was chopping well into the meat and only eliminated a few problems. After that we were crippled. Those of us left had more to do with less and they were promising customers more and more. "Work smarter" was the theme.

So I did work smarter -- I left the company.

From what I can tell, a "reorganization" works in 2 cases:

1) Where you really do want to move in a completely different direction and change everything to support that.
2) Where you realize you're bleeding badly and cut enough to stop the hemorrhaging fast enough that the company doesn't bleed out -- and *then* you move on.

Either is traumatic and you cut *both* ends off the Bell curve -- one end you ax and the other end runs away because *they can*. Neither is a good thing -- it's just a way of avoiding something worse.

Most other cases are like a restaurant selling the cookware to save the silver -- it might work for tonight's dinner if you start with enough things already cooked.

As far as needing this, I agree that the result will be better in many respects (though the mathematically inclined might consider the topic of local maxima). However, the "survival of the fittest" method is often distressing to the individuals involved.

--
Dewey