Ποιμήν Λαων

Jack Welch divided the universe of workers in any organization along two axes, each comprising a binary on-off feature, i.e. competent/incompetent and drinks-the-Kool-Aid/doesn’t-drink-the-Kool-Aid (he did not say “drinks the Kool Aid”, because he had a vested interest in having people drink his Kool Aid.  He said “With the program”.  A less weighted formulation would be “agrees with the mission”).  This yields four groups of people:

• Competent – drinks Kool Aid;
• Incompetent – drinks Kool Aid;
• Competent – does not drink Kool aid
• Incompetent – does not drink Kool Aid.

Readers who think visually can draw the graph for themselves.  It looks like the intersection of State and Main in a four-corner town in Nebraska. 

Incompetent people who do not agree with the mission never get their feet in the door.  Competent Kool Aid drinkers go far – they reach the C-suite.  Incompetent people who are with the program are important, too – they keep the ranks of middle management full, act as a reservoir of institutional knowledge and help morale, although they do have to be cut in lean times.  It is the last group, the competent people who do not drink the Kool Aid, who are dangerous.  They gunk up the wheels, sow dissent, milk their position for its perks, ask not what they can do for their company but yak yak yak.  They might rise to the occasion during an emergency, but in ordinary times they add no value and hurt morale.  They need to be excised like a cancer.  Švejk belonged to that group (he was smarter than he let on).  The Bonjour Paresse lady, who is protected by French labor laws, is an extreme case.  I also belonged to that group when I was part of the corporate world.  That’s why I own mobile home parks now.

I recently learned of another way of classifying workers.  An ex-military guy who runs a business near my park in northern New York told me that, when he was an NCO, he would group enlisted people according to the way he asked them to do tasks.  The first group, he would tell, “Go do this”.  The second, he would tell, “I need this done.  Get it done by noon, and do it using steps A, B and C”.  For the third group, he would say, “Do this, get it done by noon, do it by means of steps A, B and C using tools X, Y and Z, and if you fuck any part of it up, I will have my boot so far up your ass you, your wife and your knuckle-dragging, snot-swilling children will taste the shoe polish”.  He told me that he borrowed this from a military management writer who grouped soldiers in Viet Nam according to their proximity to a bouncing Betty mine.  If you were within twenty-five meters of a bouncing Betty when it went off, you would be dead.  Within fifty meters, you would be injured.  Within a hundred, you would be alive, albeit with an awful ringing in your ears.  You needed a certain amount of common sense and quick reflexes to not be too close to the explosion.  He divided his soldiers into twenty-five meter men, fifty meter men and hundred meter men.

The manager at my park in northern New York is a hundred meter man.  The soon-to-be ex maintenance guy at my park in central New York is a twenty-five meter man. 

Mike, the manager at the park in central New York, recently found me a free mobile home.  It will cost me about $25,000 when it is moved, installed and rehabbed (free mobile homes are not free), but its bones are solid and its roof is constructed for the applicable snow load.  I will get some or all of the cost of buying and installing the home back from the sale thereof, and the value of lot rent is equal to that of a growing perpetuity. The home had belonged to an old lady whose lawn Mike had mowed.  She had offered it to him first; he demurred.  I asked him why he didn’t take it, and he said, “I don’t have the capital to rehab it.  And if you make money, I make money.”  He has said that before; every time he does, I go all gooey like butter inside.  He recently moved his own home into the park.  He built two new porches, cut down a few trees, put a foot-wide gravel perimeter around the skirting, and put in flagstone paths that snake around the lot.  Inside the home, he covered the walls with wainscot and knotty pine to make it look like a hunting lodge.  My own house does not look nearly as good as his. 

By contrast, the home of J.B., the maintenance guy at the other park, has always been a problem.  I have asked him to clean it up, but his home and lot seem to have a gravitational force that sucks in mechanical objects and an entropic field that makes them fall apart.  He blew off plowing late last autumn and left me hanging.  He borrowed money and did not pay it back.  He sold me a truck that broke down immediately.  He broke a water main and cut through an electrical wire when he was excavating.  When I asked him to clean up his lot, I would say, “We need to lead by example.  How can I ask a tenant to clean up if your lot looks like this?”  After the twentieth or thirtieth second chance, I had no choice but to get rid of him.  It had gotten to the point that failure to do so would have destroyed my credibility.

In fairness to J.B., ninety percent of what he did was quite good.  He could do structural work, plumbing and simple electrical.  He could dig and lay septic and water mains.  He welded clips onto new skid steer attachments to adapt them to the old machine that I had bought.  He was loyal.  But being right ninety percent of the time is like saying, “Please your Honor – I only drive drunk ten percent of the time”.

After the ex army guy told me the story of the three groups, I asked, “And you can’t fire anyone in the military, right?”  He said, “No, but you can counsel them out at the end of their hitch.”

“You tell them they are incompetent and they shouldn’t re-up?”

“I’d tell them that civilian life might be better for them.”

“Because they are a bunch of idiots?”

“Not always.  Sometimes, people are too entrepreneurial for the army.  They are not stupid, they just don’t like the structure.  They do well when they have more freedom.”

I do not know of an equivalent face-saving way to spin J.B.’s departure.  But in the civilian world, we have a luxury that managers do not have in the military.  We can change people.  They, by contrast, have to try to change their people.