Competition
A finely honed f-Law peels away the pretence, to reveal a simple but important truth about why organizations - and the people running them - often don't work as effectively as they should.
If you can come up with a new f-LAW, we'd like to see it. Submit your f-LAW to us below and we'll try to publish it.
The best will appear on this website, previous submissions are below. The very best, will be included in the next edition of Management f-Laws, with an endorsement from the authors. The very, very best will win the 2008 f-LAW trophy (closing date December 31st, 2007).
Entries will be judged by the publishers.
The 2007 trophy was presented to Robert Goodsell for his winning f-Law at the London launch of Management f-LAWS: How Organizations Really Work in January 2007. Read his and other submissions.
f-Laws submitted by our readers
Here are the best of the f-Laws submitted by readers for our 2007 competition:
f-Law: Work is like sex: people spend most of their time talking about it or thinking about it, rather than actually doing it.
Commentary: As an internal efficiency and effectiveness consultant, I have observed time and time again management teams that spend all of their finite time on a deliverable in planning and talking about work, rather than doing the actual work itself. I'll often ask managers to see their MS-Outlook calendar to see how much work is scheduled on their diary. The majority of their diary dates are meetings to talk about current work, talk about future work or talk about work that occurred in the past, but little work is accomplished by them in their "work" day. Good managers not only have work scheduled in their calendars, but inevitably it forces them out of their offices to where the work is, and gets them asking their subordinates how they can help, now they are actually doing work. The U.S. military uses a rule of thumb for all planners to abide by. A maximum of 1/3 of time can be used for planning and meetings, and the remainder must be work/action.
Kenny Cote
f-Law: The content of the conversations in the C suite are a good predictor of an organization's future performance.
Commentary: The basis of this f-Law is that a healthy boardroom has three levels of conversation:
- the visionary, where are we going
- the operational, the metrics and performance of today's operations
- a focus on capability building, a focus on what has to be valued AND nurtured in the organization. These can be the tangible like the production capability, a unique development team, a sales channel or the less tangible like the ability to retain and grow the knowledge base of a knowledge business.
The essence of the law is that all three levels have to be present - experience shows that the third category is the most likely to be absent - and that these companies will only stay as they are or that they will stagnate.
This is illustrated by those shallow assertions so often confidently stated about becoming number one in a market, or achieving certain a certain very large revenue target, or delivering a major improvement in sales per employee. These targets are typically developed at a strategy away-day and then promoted and published through the business at town hall meetings and CEO breakfasts. Then, when the conversations in the C suite are analysed they are just about the month's sales figures, the problems with the logistics stream, over stocks and production failures. There is a silence about the logistics system that is needed to deliver the productivity figures, the development capability that has to be resized to deliver the new products or indeed anything else that changes the effectiveness of the organization.
Robert Goodsell (Winner of the 2007 prize for the best new f-Law submitted by a reader.)
f-Law: If leaders invested as much time in the hard graft of implementing change initiatives as they do on considering the options and choices before making a decision then the corporate world would be less littered with failed change initiatives.
Commentary: Leaders are obsessed with seeing 'hard' assessments of change initiatives - what are the options - what are the costs - what are the risks - all in the belief that the more that is done at this stage the lower the risk of failure and the higher the chance of success.
This misses at least three key points. Firstly that there is unlikely to be a 'right' answer, secondly the 'law of diminishing returns', and thirdly that the success of a proposed change depends at least as much on the passion and effort with which it is implemented (including that of said leaders) than the upfront 'right vs wrong' analysis.
Many leaders seem to believe that their prime job is to make the important decisions, implicitly assuming that their 'teams' will then just make it happen, fundamentally missing the point that their ongoing investment of time, energy and engagement is critical; with the level of leadership 'investment' required being directly proportional to the scale of change required.
Tony Williams
f-Law: Managers who create problems and then find near term solutions to these problems, are often promoted to executive positions
Al Viswanathan
f-Law: 90% of managers believe that they are "well above average managers"
Al Viswanathan
f-Law: Most managers believe that with an MBA they have the ability to manage anything, without the need to have domain knowledge (subject matter knowledge)
Al Viswanathan
f-Law: Most managers believe that people can be operated like machines
Al Viswanathan
f-Law: If you're not fired with enthusiasm, you'll be fired with enthusiasm
Commentary: Often said, seldom done.
John Wilson
f-Law: The importance of a document is in inverse proportion to the amount of time senior management spend continually re-editing it
Jean Davis
f-Law: Your status in management is directly related to the percentage of your staff on stress medication
Commentary: Anything less than 40% and your not "managing".
Mark Buggy
f-Law: If at first you don't succeed, hire consultants and fail in style
Commentary: Anyone in the public sector has seen this happen before and will see it again.
Mark Buggy
f-Law: The grander the concept the meaner the detail
Commentary: This f-Law is being illustrated daily as we start to work in our new building!
Bill Rea
f-Law: Given any two numbers, they will be different
Commentary: This is related to Dr. Deming's Theory of Variation, and how managers commonly react to the random variations in the month-to-month numbers, rather than seeing that the system is stable and predictable. A good example is in Dr. Deming's Red Bead Experiment.
Steven Prevette
f-Law: Only the bottom line matters
Commentary: "This shocked the conscience of this court, and I dare believe it shocked the conscience of any reasonable person."
So said Judge Leo Glasser, Federal District Court in Brooklyn, when sentencing the ex-CEO of Computer Associates to 12 years in gaol for accounting fraud and obstruction of justice.
Honestly, are you shocked? No. After Enron and Worldcom, this is not news any more. Everyone seems to be doing it because of the f-Law that only the bottom line matters. Because of this f-Law, CEOs and senior management are always urging their people to do what it takes to maximise profits. This is not just in terms of damaging the environment or using child labour, but also in that everyone is urged to doctor the books, spin the messages and so on.
CEOs and CFOs are doing all this because they live in a distorted reality in which their worth as human beings is defined by their bottom-lines. So instead of a bottom-line first policy, we need to have an ethics-first policy.
Chetan Dhruve