How bad is your manager, and...

How Mad Is Your Employer?

By Matt Stephens
October 28, 2001

Having read through most of the stories on this site, you might think that your own employer is pretty sane in comparison.

It is very comforting to sit back on your swivel chair and chuckle about how unfortunate some of those poor bastards working for all those cowboy companies must be. "But not here," you may think. "Thank God [or personal deity] there's nothing like that where I work!"

Think again - it's human nature to be mad, as in 'not quite in tune with reality'. And beneath the surface of your perfect employer, madness dwells. If you think it's not there, it's simply because you haven't spotted it yet. If you're still convinced, then a good long retrospective gaze might be in order - you never know, you might even have become a cog in the big ferris wheel of madness, and you wouldn't know it because you're mad. Just like them!

Of course if you've seen crazy things going on, and recognised them as being crazy, and if you have despaired over such things, then that's okay. Read on, you're one of us after all...

See, everyone has wrong opinions about something; everyone has misguided beliefs, whether about something trivial or something more profound like "coding without a proper design is a good thing". That's fair enough: life is a complex beast, and you can't be expected to be 100% correct and robot-like about everything. But it's when people make decisions based on wrongness, or persistently behave in the wrong way, mistakenly believing that they are right, that they must be at least a little bit mad. Worse still is when someone either suspects or knows full well that they are wrong, yet persists in doing that wrong thing regardless. Often this can be put down to some apparently rational piece of reasoning, such as "it's a political thing", or "he's always done it that way". But it's still mad.

Anyway that's all very theoretical: let me give you an example.

A project manager has been asked to resource a project based on a hastily produced project plan. The plan was produced quickly so that the company would have something "concrete" to show the customer in the course of their tender for a new project. Of course, everyone in the company knows full well that the plan is absolute rubbish: it's a customer-facing propaganda document, i.e. complete, unsubstantiated lies.

"Produce on-line fulfillment system: 20 days". wtf?? Well, never mind, it fulfilled its purpose: the customer was duly impressed, and is going with your company. They are placing their trust, and their millions of dollars, in your ability to navigate a highly complex project and produce something that they can use, within the time promised.

But there's a problem, and it's an insidious one that higher management don't seem to want to notice: the live project is going ahead with that bullshit project plan. The one that has no meaning. The entire project MUST be completed in six months, yet no-one knows exactly what will be in the project yet. And the one, totally artificial reason for the six-month deadline is simply that that's what the customer was promised by your eager-beaver sales team.

To make matters worse, the plan is full of high-level guff that means everything and nothing. The project manager knows that the plan is rubbish, yet goes along with it - makes crucial decisions based on this plan, e.g. how many staff to allocate, whether or not to bring in contractors, and so on. Worse still, the project is COSTED based on this plan and the customer is given an up-front quote. Never mind that the final project will really take over 2 years to complete, and will cost five times as much.

By the time the project manager realises this, it is way too late. The customer is disgusted, higher management use the project manager as a scapegoat to save their own hides (but it needn't matter because the company is going under anyway). Of course that situation could have been avoided if the manager had simply faced up to what he already knew: if they are going to lie to the customer, they should at least be honest with themselves.

Put another way, if they really must have a customer-facing plan that is all sweetness and roses, they must also have an internal plan that tells it like it really is. Better still, just tell the customer the goddamned truth. If it means losing the contract to a less scrupulous company, then so be it. At least you can watch that company make an absolute arse of itself and make a horrific loss in the process. Phew, that was a close one - that was almost us, guys!

How many times has your manager proceeded on false assumptions? Whether trivial or company-changing, it is important to recognise insanity when you see it. Otherwise, bad management will be going on right under your nose, and you won't even know it for what it is.

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