The return of managerial bone-headedness

Fear and paranoia are even more part of corporate life now than they were a year ago, writes LUCY KELLAWAY

THE BEAR market in management bullshit is over. Last week, I came across two signs that managers’ brief flirtation with being sensible – which started the day that they watched staff of Lehman Brothers leaving the bank with their stuff in boxes – is now finished. It is time to be sillier than ever before.

A friend who works at a large, multinational company tells me that he arrived in the office the other day to find a bottle of water had been placed on his desk – and on every other desk in the 11-storey building – alongside a little card displaying a series of yellow blobs from the palest lemon to the deepest ochre. This represented the colour of urine depending on how much water had been consumed and was meant to tell employees whether they ought to be drinking more. Dehydrated workers were less productive, the card warned.

This is the most extreme example I have yet seen of a HR department infantilising the workforce and meddling in matters that should not concern it. In my experience, even the youngest child has a perfectly good way of working out whether it is dehydrated – which does not involve going to an office loo with a yellow colour card. If it feels thirsty, it demands a drink.

The yellow card, though insulting and generally laughable, must at least have been cheap to produce. A more expensive sign of the return of managerial bone-headedness comes from a still larger and better-known organisation. During the last month, this company has flown its entire global senior management team to the US for a whole week to be drilled by consultants from the California-based Institute of the Future in the 10 key skills they will need to prosper.

The first of these was a “Maker Instinct”, defined as an “ability to turn one’s natural impulse to build into a skill for making the future and connection with others in the making”. As it is impossible to know what this skill actually is, it is hard to know whether one possesses it or not.

Future leaders are also required to have “Bio-Empathy”, which is an “ability to see things from nature’s point of view; to understand, respect and learn from nature’s patterns”. At least one can understand the words – but the sentiment is quite up the spout. Most patterns in nature are things one would pay top global managers to disrespect and disregard.

Flies are sick on their food before they eat it. Pigs eat their own babies when they become stressed. Indeed, if you stand back from the last three billion years, the animal kingdom has done a prodigious amount of brutal Darwinian suffering, with weaker species tortured, killed or left to starve to death. Is that our corporate future? I hope not.

A third trait is called “Quiet Transparency” or the “ability to be open and authentic about what matters to you – without advertising yourself” – which is the weakest of the lot. In the future, successful managers will need to go on blowing their own trumpets just as noisily as they do now.

During five full days, not one of these senior manager dared to say: why are we doing this? Or: this is total crap. Each of them lay down and took it all like a lamb; the Americans doing so in good faith, the Brits in rather less so.

The latter were too cowed to say a word during any of the sessions, but after too many drinks in the bar at night, some of them dared to roll their eyes a little.

Why this is so shocking is that it is not any old company. This is a much respected and feared multinational with a reputation for hiring the best and the brightest, who, if they thought about it for five minutes, would surely conclude that leadership traits for the future were the same as the ones for the present. These involve: setting the right strategy and then executing it, which in turn demands some well-known traits including intelligence, decisiveness and toughness.

In reading this, you will see that I have not named either of the companies. This is because although the bear market in bullshit may be over, the bear market in courage is not. Fear and paranoia are even more part of corporate life as they were a year ago. Each of the people who told me their stories begged that I dropped no hints as to their company’s identity. They knew that to be found out would result in a public execution.

As unemployment is still rising, neither of them was in any doubt as to the first leadership skill for the future: the ability to hold on to your job. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009)