Ignorance Is Alright, Stupidity Is Not.

I have been managing people for more than 30 years.  In that time, I have learned a few things.

I have also, in my time, run across people who - for one reason or another - found themselves in management positions with absolutely no experience in managing people and who were abysmal in doing so.  For someone in this position, panic is not an option.  Neither for that matter is arrogance.  Many who have never actually managed people think, "How hard can this be?  I tell them what to do and they do it".  Right!

I know that any experienced managers who may be reading this at this moment are chuckling - if not outright laughing - at the absurdity of this line of thinking.  Not coincidentally, this line of thinking is often entered into by those who have no children either.  This is not because employees are like children, but rather that people have brains and because this is so, they think about what they are told to do and decide for themselves whether or not they will do it.  If they do not see the sense of the action being mandated, they are less likely to proceed than not.

One such inexperienced manager is a guy I will call Dick Pulanski.  Dick was a highly intelligent man who had been very successful as an executive in a two-man investment firm.  Dick's spouse, also very intelligent and experienced in an emerging technology, was offered a position as the senior executive of a new division of a larger organization.  Dick's wife was valuable enough to the organization that she was able to negotiate a good (if largely nonfunctional) position in the parent organization.  Good for Dick!

When one underperforming division within the parent organization was left leaderless, Dick decided to offer to become the new leader of that division.  As he hadn't screwed anything up in his current position, he was given the job.

After meeting with the management staff and soliciting opinions as to the problems with the organization (other that the obvious global economic disaster that was current), he decided that the problem was too much management.  "Cut the fat!"  So Dick decided to eliminate the managers responsible for running the individual geographic regions and have their subordinate function managers report directly to the newly formatted executive committee (6 VPs and himself for a 150 employee organization) because after all, all you need to do is tell people what to do and they will do it, right?

In less than two years, the parent organization sold off the assets of the now horribly underperforming entity to their competitor for substantially less that the book value of the assets.  The competitor shut down all operations and laid off all but three employees.  One of those three employees was Dick, who had negotiated a five year contract for a largely nonfunctional position with the competitor as part of the sale.

The morals of this story are as follows:

•    Intelligent and smart are not necessarily the same thing.
•    Success as a financial trader absolutely does not mean you know anything about business.
•    When someone who has more managerial experience than everyone on your executive committee combined tells you that what you are doing is stupid, LISTEN!
•    If you are the senior manager of an organization with many different entities, putting someone with no actual people management experience in charge of one of them, is BEYOND STUPID!