What we can still learn from Mao's Little Red Book

I am old enough to remember Mao’s Little Red Book. It was a collection of advice, analysis and sayings, and if you were a leftie in the Sixties there was no chance you hadn’t at least got a copy on your bookshelves. (No need to actually read it.)

I remember quite a few of the spectacularly unconvincing sloganeers that demonstrated more the chasm that separates Chinese from English ideas about language than anything specific about Maoism. My favourite was ‘Peoples of the world unite and defeat the US aggressors and all their running dogs’. I so wish I had said that.

So what has all this to do with management? At about the same time there was a story in the British media that seems to have been published primarily to ridicule Maoist revolutionism. It was about a lathe operator in a factory somewhere in China who had said that once he had read the Thoughts of Chairman Mao his lathe had turned three times as fast.

Of course everyone in the West laughed. What a fool. What a typical piece of irrational propaganda.

A little later another journalist found the man and took the trouble to ask him what he had meant. His answer was illuminating. Before he read the Little Red Book, he replied, he has simply come to work each day and followed orders. He had known all along that there were things wrong with his lathe that could easily be fixed but he did not think it was his job to do anything about t it. Just obey orders. But once he had read the Great Helmsman’s book he realised that it up to him to do something about it. So he did, and lo and behold, his lathe worked a lot better.

Not really very astonishing, of course. Yet I spend my life surrounded by staff and managers – often quite senior managers – many of whom would rather die than challenge the way things are done. And no wonder – after all what would happen if really they took the initiative and did something on their own authority?

Perhaps I can answer that slightly rhetorical question by my own recent experience. I recently attended a long offsite management meeting led by my immediate boss. He’s a good guy – I like him, and he once told me that he had chosen to work in this company precisely because he was tired of bullying corporate cultures.

So far so good. But in the course of this same meeting we happened to talk about whether the company's managers are empowered. Of course they are empowered, he insisted. I have told them they are. Of course they aren’t, I replied (over and over again – it was perhaps not the most constructive of discussions) – not until both the means and the authority are explicitly put into their hands. Which they had not been.

We came to a bit of an impasse, and started to talk about another subject. As he spoke my boss gave a little dig to one his other team members about a project that had overspent without his permission, and how the project manager had had a dressing down as a result. The amount the project manager had overspent was a small fraction of the total project costs, but this allegedly empowered project manager was in trouble. Most absurdly of all, my boss made it quite clear that, had the manager in question simply asked for permission to do what he did before he did it, he would have been authorised to do it anyway!

Apparently empowerment meant empowered to do things that work, but not things that don’t. Bearing in mind that empowerment is of significance only when you need to make a serious decision, this puts the project manager in an impossible position – damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.

I think I would rather have been Mao’s lathe operator.

What happened when I asked the Board to let their staff think

A few years ago I was Head of Consulting Services (and Quality Director) for a medium-sized public sector consultancy in the UK. I was a member of the Operating Board, and tasked by the MD with making the organisation's services and capabilities more dynamic. After quite a lot of thought and quite a lot of talking, I started to home in on the idea that the best people to decide how to do this were their own consultants.

After all, as I used to put it, our clients pay us £35,000 every day for advice about how to improve their organisations - so why don't we ask the people they trust to help us too?

The reaction was fascinating. Or dispiriting.

At one extreme was the HR Director, who suggested that it would simply degenerate into navel-gazing - an interesting response from the one person you would have expected to have a little faith in people. In the middle was doubt that they would come up with anything saleable. And at the other extreme was the common demand that directors be present, to make sure that they worked on whatever it was the directors (basically, as in most consultancies, a bunch of overpaid salesmen) thought important.

No, I argued, the last people you want in the room are the directors. They can get a team together to respond to market demands or their latest bright idea any time. What I wanted my innovators to work on was their own ideas. After all, they are the ones who spend their lives thinking about how we do things, they are the ones who know what the biggest problems our clients face and they are the ones who have spent their lives developing solutions for dealing with them. If they don't have any ideas we could develop, what on earth were we paying them for?

I found it very hard to get a toe-hold on their imaginations. A couple did not seem to mind, and I would swear that the chairman (who thought no-one but he understood our business) was only neutral in the pleasant expectation that I would fall flat on my face. So begrudgingly, they accepted my proposal, with a very strong undertone of scepticism.

Fortunately there was one notable exception to this symphony of indifference and cynicism: the Managing Director himself. We started innovation management the very next week. It worked too. And yes, practically the first question the teams asked themselves as soon as they had a decent idea was, Who can we sell this too?

What you think when you're not thinking

I spend a lot of my time training people in management. One thing that always surprises me is the ease with which people stop thinking about what they are doing and start to introduce key phrases that are simply shortcuts to failure.

Politicians and 'leaders' of other kinds seem to be especially prone to this, so it's much more than a peculiarity of naive managers - I can only imagine how often phrases line these came up around Bush's Cabinet table while they were 'planning' Iraq.

So, if you hear others – or yourself – using any of these words & phrases, something’s very, very wrong…

‘Pragmatic’
You only have to glance at Wikipedia to have a bad feeling about pragmatism. There it is defined as 'behavior which temporarily sets aside one ideal to pursue a lesser, more achievable ideal' - which is only to say, pragmatism decides in advance to settle for second best.

But for many in business, being pragmatic is itself the highest ideal. It's strictly an ideal for people who want their inability to think beyond their noses to look like a virtue. If they are being 'pragmatic' they are preparing for mediocrity.

‘Hopefully…’
Hope is indispensable to life, but a poor basis for delivering results.

Relying on hope alone is like driving into dense fog and assuming that there’s nothing in there you will regret smacking into head-on. As soon as you substitute the word ‘hopefully’ for specific thoughts about exactly what it is that is likely to derail your hopes, you have more or less committed yourself to failure. Regretfully, but quite hopelessly.

‘Obviously…’
For example, the Earth is obviously flat, it obviously stands still, and the Sun obviously goes around it once a day.

If you are relying on the obviousness of things to save you, then you are ignoring the fact (obvious enough) that the whole point of most useful effort is to deal with fact that what used to be obvious doesn’t make sense any more.

‘It’s only common sense…’
Common sense is what we think when we are not thinking. It was common sense that got us where we are today. If common sense were enough, we would not be trying to change things.

I once had to manage a supplier to whom we were paying £16 million to deliver a major new system. He was useless, and perhaps the clearest sign of his uselessness was the fact that he would defend all his recommendations with the words, “It’s only common sense”. Eventually it got too much for me, and I told him that if we weren’t going to get anything better than common sense for our money, he could go. The project was a massive failure, not least because it turned out he didn’t have any ideas that weren’t common sense.

Of course, it's hard to resist common sense, since you have to dig it up by the roots and deny that a lot of things we all take for granted are worth anything. Even worse, common sense is what Antonio Gramsci called 'the practical ideology of the ruling class' (sorry to intrude politics into management) so when you attack it you will usually find that you are stepping on someone's toes - someone bigger than you. Make sure you have lots of equally big friends when you do this!

‘But in the Real World…’
But if you are starting out on any undertaking of any consequence, the ‘Real World’ is the problem! The Real World doesn’t work. I’ve been to the Real World, and I can tell you, it's six inches too small on each side, the light is bad and it has a slightly cheesy smell you would not want to live with if you didn’t have to. So don’t accept it just when you have the chance to change it!

‘That’s all very well in theory, but…’
The underlying problem with the idea of the Real World often seems to be the far more destructive idea that ideas are ‘just’ theories, and theorising is no more use than navel-gazing. Even worse, too much thought is widely believed to stifle action.

Which will come as news to what are probably the two most productive activities humanity has ever devised, namely science and mathematics. The latter is nothing but theorising, and the former is only happy when it has a good theory at its centre.

In fact, if you don’t have a ‘theory’ about what you are going to do and why, then you don’t know what you’re doing. Literally.

In summary?

• A mirage is not a vision.
• A wish is not an objective.
• A slogan is not a plan.

Unless you’re invading Iraq, of course.