Opinion

General management views

Finance | James Brooke Turner | 29 Jun 2008

James Brooke Turner looks to 19th century Prussia for tips on HR management.

“I judge my officers according to four categories. The officer who is industrious and intelligent is suitable for senior staff positions. Some use can be made of the man who is idle and unintelligent, as he can be driven. The officer who is hard-working and stupid is a danger to himself and his fellows, and must be dismissed at once. But the officer who is indolent and intelligent is suitable for the highest command, as he has the spare capacity to deal with all unforeseen situations.” Or at least so said Colonel-General Baron Kurt von Equord-Hammerstein, chief of the Prussian Imperial General Staff in the 19th Century.

Steven Covey in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People uses a similar model that sets urgency against importance. It uses a matrix with four quadrants to analyse time use by employees. Tasks that are both urgent and important are in quadrant 1. Quadrant 2 activities are non-urgent but important things – the ones that never seem to get to the top of the to do list. Quadrant 3 tasks are urgent but unimportant (a common use of time) while tasks that are neither urgent nor important are described as quadrant 4 tasks.

People often refer to their not having enough quadrant 2 time for the valuable but least performed activities that require intel-lectual space and real thinking time. Oddly, this section comes in the chapter on time management which is third in Covey’s book. Presumably only quadrant 2 people get time to read that far. Covey’s book describes how we can make ourselves more effective at achieving our personal goals. However, it will not make us into more effective employees if that is not one of those goals.

It would be terribly cruel to put Covey in a room alone with Corinne Maier. Her book Bonjour Paresse (Hello Laziness) provides a very alternative definition of success in employment. These include bon mots such as “opposing the system simply makes it stronger”; “never accept a position of respon-sibility for any reason – you’ll only have to work harder for what amounts to peanuts”; “be nice to people on short-term contracts. They are the only people who do any real work”. My personal favourite is “make a bee-line for the most useless positions (research, strategy and business development) where it is impossible to assess your contribution to the wealth of the firm and avoid on the ground operational roles like the plague”.

While the book is hilarious, particularly for its overdue cruel deflating of some corporate values, it comes from a troublingly cynical stable. Its leitmotif is clear: “You are a modern day slave. There is no scope for personal fulfilment. You work for your pay-check at the end of the month.” It reminds me of the first piece of employment advice I was given: “If we were meant to enjoy our jobs we wouldn’t need to be paid.”

Maier must be wrong in her clarion call that there is no scope for personal fulfilment at work. It is usually because work offers some fulfilment that people have difficulties adjusting to retirement, so quite possibly it is the reverse that is true (I understand that it’s the decision-making we’ll miss). What Covey’s quadrants offer are ways of under-standing how we can make ourselves more effective for our own ends – a personal target. The Colonel-General’s statement describes how people can be made more effective for the benefit of a whole, not just the individual. In reality we work for a combination of reasons: financial, social or group, and personal. Good employers recognise these needs and how to harness them to their own.

I’ve no idea about the veracity of the Colonel-General’s statement – it was provided to me by a friend from another charity. However, it is worth remembering that for good or ill the army really understands what success is, and has mastered human resources like no other body. What other organisation can train a person so well that they will be prepared to perform so unnatural an act as to kill another person while risking their own life in the process? The answer to that lies in another fascinating book, Keegan’s The Face of Battle.

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Who's Who: James Brooke Turner