Comment by theonething
1 year ago
This never made sense to me. Being intelligent and hard working is (to me) obviously better than being intelligent and lazy. The latter just thinks great thoughts, but does nothing about them.
1 year ago
This never made sense to me. Being intelligent and hard working is (to me) obviously better than being intelligent and lazy. The latter just thinks great thoughts, but does nothing about them.
The idea is that the intelligent lazy person will find a simpler and better way to do things, while the hard working one just powers through doing it the usual way.
Like this story that makes the rounds once in awhile. Who knows how true it is but..
"Due to complexities in their manufacturing line, a popular toothpaste company would occasionally, accidentally, ship empty boxes to their customers.
Not only did the boxes cost money to ship, but when customers received the boxes they would often complain. Ultimately the toothpaste company began to lose customers who would seek out inventory for their stores from other, more reliable suppliers.
One day the factory gathered their top managers and creative minds and told them they would need to focus their efforts on solving the empty box problem.
After nearly six months and hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on research and ideation, the factory came up with what they thought was a fairly smart smart solution to their problem. They would add highly sensitive scales to the factory line.
Any time an empty box would reach the scale it would be weighed, the line would stop and a loud buzzer would sound, at which point a factory worker would need to walk over and remove the empty box. Problem solved, right?
Yet the company quickly ran into another issue: just a few months after rolling out the new scale system there were no empty boxes being reported. The scales weren't encountering any empty boxes at all.
Confused by the results, the factory manager traveled down to the factory from his city office to see what was going on. He noticed that by one of the supply lines, just a few feet before one of the new scales, someone had placed an inexpensive desk fan. The manager noticed that as boxes rolled down the line, empty ones would merely be blown off the belt by the desk fan.
When asked about the fan, an employee on the factory line standing nearby explained: "Oh that? We put it there when we got tired of hearing the buzzer ring."
Here is my insight, as it applies to managers in companies:
There is a certain type of manager who is "hardworking", which in this case probably means something more along the lines of overzealous. The overzealous manager enters the organization and starts puting processes into place that assume a bunch of "hardworking" subordinates rather than average subordinates, which most of them are (by definition). When the subordinates don't meet expectations and the process fails, the manager blames subordinates for not working hard enough, so he drives them harder, which then causes issues with morale, retention, etc. damaging the organization.
So, the "hardowrking"/overzealous manager believes problems can be solved by working harder, rather than trying to craft a process that realistically works for the average employee. The "lazy" but intelligent manager finds a way to get just enough done to satisfy business goals. The hardworking manager gets a lot done in the short term, but burns out the team in the long term. The lazy manager keeps their division humming at an unexceptional but reliable pace and keeps the business printing money.
A giant bureaucracy like the military is more concerned about reliable, predictable, fool-proof plans and execution than brilliant and gallant leadership that could backfire in the wrong circumstances. So the quote is kind of about the priorities of a large organization.
I always thought being intelligent and lazy was superior. Why waste my time doing something if I don’t have to? You can ‘clever’ your way out of a lot of hard work and get the same results.
It's important that he's talking about military officers, not random people chilling at home. There's a minimum level of results necessary if you want to avoid eventual assignment to latrine cleaning duty, and laziness drives efficiency in achieving those results.
By lazy, he meant simple. Imagine you are in charge of conscript soldiers who have been given the bare minimum of training. Your plans and orders should consist of step1, step2, and step3 and no more.