Be lazy if you want to get ahead
I know it sounds dubious. Yet the statement will hold true if we properly consider laziness.
Laziness
“Whenever there is a hard job to be done I assign it to a lazy man; he is sure to find an easy way of doing it.”
- Walter Chrysler
Let me start by giving credit where credit is due. Many years ago I was introduced to an alternate perspective on laziness through an eBook by Peter Taylor entitled “The Lazy Project Manager — How to be twice as productive and still leave the office early”.
It stayed with me, in part because of reference to a historical military model* used for classifying organizational capability, which I have adapted below for the modern enterprise:
The premise is self-explanatory. Each of us can find ourselves broadly assigned to a position in one of four Cartesian quadrants; if not by our own self-awareness then certainly by others who know us better than we know ourselves.
- Stupid — Diligent: dangerous; get rid of them. They are likely to keep the organization busy with unimportant matters.
- Stupid — Lazy: potentially a good candidate to make up the numbers (i.e. infantry or worker); often made more productive through a system of discipline (such as the military) and they may even come up with a good idea one day.
- Smart — Diligent: tending towards bureaucracy and suitable for detail-oriented work like policy, process, or program management.
- Smart — Lazy: leadership. Intelligent enough to find low-effort ways to get things done.
So there is no news here; many people have written about this concept.
Risk
I would now like to propose the addition of a new vector in the x-y plane: risk. The model can be updated as follows.
Firstly, we hope to stay in the smart side of capability when thinking about risk. However, in the above we can see that as laziness and smartness increase so too the possibility for organizational risk increases.
Integrity
“You’re looking for three things, generally, in a person: Intelligence, energy, and integrity. And if they don’t have the last one, don’t even bother with the first two.”
- Warren Buffett
Another thought piece on this theme suggests that ‘stupid’ people in organizations are not so much of a problem as ‘intelligent people without integrity’ who ‘…know the system, play politics well, and often end up in grey areas’.
Which leads to a third dimension and attribute for organizational capability: integrity.
Here we see that:
- Stupid, Diligent and Deceptive is a recipe for risk.
- Smart, Lazy, and with Integrity are attributes of a safe but efficient leader.
It is, after all, natural to be lazy
The animal kingdom is lazy. That is to say, each species tends to use the least possible energy to survive. No lion would expend energy frivolously. Most actions in the natural world are innately or systematically driven towards conserving energy. Even water flows from the mountains to sea, with the help of gravity, following the path of least resistance. Nature is efficient to be effective.
Lazy leadership
A smart and efficient (lazy) leader with moral substance can be very effective. They will seek the most expedient means for getting the job done, with a tolerance for risk and without compromising on personal or organizational integrity.
The busy-ness of modern bureaucracy can expend a lot of unnecessary energy (in the form of time, money, or resources) which can slow down the accomplishment of the mission. Regretfully, I sometimes see this in my own life.
I, for one, will continue to seek the ways and means to achieve more with less effort.
You might say I’m intending to be lazy to get ahead. By my own definition…
…I’m comfortable with that.
[*Taylor attributes the origins of the model to Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, Chief of the German General Staff for the Prussian Army. There is some contention about this. In any case the above is well known and certainly quoted among many military leaders through the ages.]
