Published May 2001

Old adage ‘be yourself’ works in business, too

Back in the early 1980s, two themes in American business accidentally bumped into each other and found they had a lot in common.

The first was based on the idea that what stood between a corporation and its performance was “motivation.”

The underlying idea was that modern organizations were so complex and distant, the economic need less intense, and the work so boring and unrewarding that people needed constant re-motivating.

To the corporate mind, this was a job best left to professionals, so companies began bringing in professionals to organize seminars, retreats and training events aimed at revitalizing the troops. For a new generation of “Buy My Book” management gurus, equipped with PowerPoint and great haircuts, this proved to be a bonanza.

The second theme was that corporations could improve their performance by patterning themselves after other, successful companies.

This was the older idea, actually, and its widespread use was really a pop-culture “cover” of an academic classic: the management case study. The difference was that while case studies were often boring, the new style of raising profits by “doing it the ‘ABC Company’ way” was exciting and enticingly simple.

In the right setting, either or both of these themes can become useful, productive tools for business management. Like a lot of things, though, they can get us in trouble when we use them as substitutes for thought.

The absence of thought can be funny, sometimes. One of the management gurus who was very successful in combining the two business themes once starred in a set of television programs in which he extolled the management styles of various companies.

At one point, he went on and on about how this one company had eliminated the need for middle management by assigning all management functions — including hiring, firing and performance reviews — to a “self-directed team” of workers.

Quite possibly, the team worked just as he said, but when you looked carefully at the video showing the team in action in the workplace you realized that something was wrong. Instead of a real workplace, it looked like something between “The Stepford Wives” and a cloning experiment.

In the absence of management intervention, the team, like any good organism, had begun to replicate itself. When new people were needed, the team hired people that looked just like the original members. In a relatively short period of time, everybody on the team looked alike. Same age, same color, same everything.

The fact that the management guru apparently hadn’t noticed what had happened to the “self-directed team” is funny, and we should enjoy that, given the inflated self-image of management gurus in general. But his mistake is precisely the same kind we can so easily make ourselves, as managers.

As a general rule, we, as humans, tend to value communications, and, therefore, as managers, we tend to overvalue people who are articulate. More accurately, perhaps, we tend to undervalue people who are less articulate. In addition, there is something of a tribal impulse in most of us. We tend to like people who are like us.

There is nothing wrong with these human tendencies. They have served us well for thousands of years. The results for management, though, can be disappointing, if not disastrous.

In recruiting and screening, it takes a conscious effort to pick the right person for the job, even if we don’t really have an instinctive liking for him or her, and it also takes a conscious effort to recognize the quality of ideas in a person whose language skills lag behind his or her thinking skills.

For top management, it takes a very conscious effort to recognize that patterning the company’s behavior after someone else’s isn’t likely to bring the desired results.

In business, we can learn things from the successes and failures of others. Ultimately, though, we have to place the lessons we’ve learned into the context of our own organization. What works for GE or Hewlett-Packard might not work so well for your company.

The idea that “being yourself” is more likely to bring success than imitating others works for businesses as well as for individuals.

James McCusker, a Bothell economist, educator and small-business consultant, writes “Your Business” in The Herald each Sunday. He can be reached by e-mail to otisrep@aol.com.

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