Porn Guy

There was a time when I was addicted to porn. And not just the normal whip me- whip me, wait, is that strawberry jello? kind, either. I was into the rough stuff. Management Porn. You know the kind. In Search of Excellence. Quality Management. Six Sigma. Those guys. I really thought it was possible, I really thought it could happen in my lifetime. Oh, I cold-turkeyed, over time. I learned that there are nuggets of good ideas but vast festering slagheaps of bad ones. Actually, the bad ones are easy to spot. It's the ones that sound like good ones, but really aren't unless you know the reasoning behind them, the logic that informs them, unless you have the time and care and insight to know why they work, when they work, and what to do when they don't work -- and they, guaranteed, won't work, all the time, sometimes, even, most of the time. People keep getting in the way, you see. Damned people. Don't they read the script?

So over time I stopped thinking that such things were possible. It was, oh, something like the awareness of people now that despite his brilliance and dogged determination in multiple areas, Barack Obama's not going to solve all of our problems. Not even all of our big problems. Sometimes, not even small ones. Management as a tool for bettering life? Get a life.

Yet the core contagion, like something lurking in a scriptwriters heart for a remake of Alien, or Predator, must still be there. Because this morning, I was reading the On Leadership column in the Washington Post, where I came across this quote in their analysis of the actions and inaction of the people running Facebook:

Consider a moment of decision for Union General George Meade during the Civil War. On June 28, 1863, he commanded a corps of some 10,000 soldiers in the Army of the Potomac as it pursued the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia during its move northward toward Pennsylvania.

And I thought Yes, I can see that. Though the actions of a Union general one hundred and fifty years ago might seem irrelevant to this question, the underlying concepts of management, of managing people and events, are constant: people live and die, but their core nature doesn't change; if you understand them there, and why they acted as they did, you're well on the way to understanding them now....

Oh, god. The contagion lingers.