Managed by Morons

Many, if not most, organisations are poorly run. Instead of delighting their customers, they are hotbeds of dysfunctional behaviour, where employees spend much of their time engaged in turf wars, political storytelling, and pointless processes. The result is disengaged employees, disappointed customers and dismal financial performance.

Managed by Morons shows that it doesn't have to be that way.

Managing an organisation is easy. The ideas and principles are well understood and have been publicised in magazines and books for years, yet they are rarely practised.

Successful management revolves around three activities:

1. Creating focus by defining the organisation's purpose - clarifying why customers should choose to do business with the organisation and why employees would want to work there.
2. Continual testing and learning - understanding how business processes, structures and systems work and then improving them.
3. Maintaining a positive culture - supporting learning and improvement and reinforcing the organisation's purpose.

This approach is not radical, nor is it new. Many examples and case studies prove its worth. However, self-interest and unchallenged business dogma shape a substantial amount of management thinking. Managed by Morons challenges those beliefs that prevent managers from concentrating on the three core actions.

Instead of ensuring focus on their organisations' purpose, managers concentrate on the wrong things:

• They promote financial measures ahead of the organisation's underlying raison d'etre. As managers focus on the wrong outcomes, they complete the wrong tasks.
• They use targets to "drive" performance. As managers link these targets to individual measures rather than the organisation's overriding purpose, employees hit the targets by any means possible, invariably resulting in perverse outcomes or "hitting the target but missing the point."

Instead of learning, managers create barriers to testing and improvement:

• They believe they know all the answers and push their favourite projects, ignoring the knowledge and experience of their employees.
• They refuse to admit there are failings in their departments, seeing this as a sign of weakness and stifling any chance of improvement. If managers don't accept that there are problems, those problems will never be addressed.
• They build their careers by working on "big strategic projects" that cannot fail rather than learning via small-scale tests that they think are "too tactical" and not worth their time.

Instead of creating a culture that enables employees to learn and improve toward a common goal, managers create environments which stifle innovation and teamwork:

• They create internal competition between employees with "employee performance management" systems that destroy motivation and collaboration.
• They penalise employees for failure. Instead of learning from mistakes, employees hide their failures and refuse to try new things.
• They strive to control their employees rather than trusting them and allowing them the space to try new things.

Using a combination of case studies, management research, a little humour and some blunt reinforcement of the obvious, Managed by Morons demonstrates that managers who can suppress their self-interest, face their organisation's problems and act to improve their processes and systems (rather than trying to control and motivate their people) achieve outstanding performance.

Unfortunately, despite the approach's success, it is politically challenging, requiring managers to take personal accountability for organisational performance. Few managers (and fewer politicians) want to admit failure for fear of looking bad.

Common sense is, unfortunately, not common practice. Yet, those managers who are honest with themselves find that their customers, employees and stakeholders love them for it.