Grown Up Stuff

I'm listening to a teleconference where people are saying that they don't like a new database because its hard to use. The answer is that we can't change it, though we can humbly beg that the owners of the database change it. We don't think they will do it.

And I'm reading this on the Fast Company web site. And even though the content is what I'd call business fantasy, I'm making comparisons between it and the teleconference. As you might expect, the folks on the telecon don't come out ahead. In the BF, they're talking about improving incrementally, making what they do, and how they do it, better, constantly. On the telecon, they're talking about getting approval, and making sure that managers are shown as the owners of the documented processes, and moving all of the processes into a common database.

The thing is, both are parts of reality in business. People write about the first kind because they're sexy. No one writes about the second kind because they're boring. I'd like to think that it's possible to get rid of the second kind, or have the dull people -- you know, like auditors -- be the only people who bother with it, leaving the jazzy, creative stuff for the rest of us, but that doesn't seem to be the way the world works. There's much more of the humdrum, dull things than there are of the jazzy, exciting things, and it seems the nature of large organizations to be able to take even the truly invigorating concepts and encumber them with barnacles until they collapse -- all in the nature of the corporate icons of 'standards', 'procedures', and so forth. Not to say that those are bad. Just that: has anyone ever leapt for sheer joy at the issuance of a new Corporate Instruction? Has anyone gone in to the office early, or stayed late, because they were so jazzed by the possibility of reading a new Standard, implementing a new Guideline, following a new Process? I strongly doubt it.

I don't question that the company in the BF probably has its own corp of nitpickers -- people who worry about the accurate encoding of items on expense reports and time cards; people who insist that the employees' cars all be parked head-in, and not the reverse; people who insist that the documents in a new database all be written the same way, with the same font, and the same spacing; people who collect, collate, summarize, and forward status reports. But somehow the organization manages to come up with concepts that are worth writing up in Fast Company, too. I wonder: is it only possible to find that magic if you look at the organization in the abstract, distilling out just the magic and leaving the daily drudge behind, just for the purpose of the presentation? And: is it possible that the bigger an organization gets, the better its ability to generate drudge, and the worse its ability to generate magic, becomes? As it becomes more 'adult', does the experience of being part of it -- the line staff, not the folks in charge, though maybe some of them, too -- become less delightful, less something that invigorates? You know my bet.

I bet this, too: if what I'll call the application of magic (has a ring to it, doesn't it?) is going to happen to me, in my life, it has to be because I made it happen, at the personal, micro level. I suspect that, barring an overwhelming concentration of interest and resources from above, thats the only way. The organization's not going to do it. It can't.