If you read any of my blog posts, you know about my friend and colleague [Chris](http://www.uhduh.com/ “Chris Cowan’s blog”), but I’m going to mention him again for a great post on [being lazy](http://www.uhduh.com/archives/2005/hello-my-name-is-chris-and-im-a-slacker “Hello, My Name is Chris and I’m a Lazy Dumb Slacker!”). His position: being a lazy slacker is what makes him good at his job. Could it be true? And how? This is one of my favorite debates and usually stirs up a very interesting discussion about common business practices in today’s knowledge-centric industries.
I read a great quote once from [Paul Graham](http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html “Paul Graham on open source and blogging”) that said:
>”The average office is a miserable place to get work done. And a lot of what makes offices bad are the very qualities we associate with professionalism. The average office environment is to productivity what flames painted on the side of a car are to speed.”
The point here isn’t that offices are necessarily a bad thing, but they are not always a good thing either as some people would have you believe. Many traditionalists will tell you that you need to get everybody under one roof and force them to sit in little cubicles from the hours of 9am to 5pm. And somehow that simple act will force people to be productive, or at the very least scare them into giving the company their “money’s worth.” This last point is debatable at best. It is more likely outright ridiculous.
In today’s knowledge-based industries getting your money’s worth is far more difficult than if you are producing a tangible product. Back in the industrial age, you could measure an employee’s productivity simply by counting the number of widgets they produced in a given time frame. Today, you can’t count the number of ideas someone produces or hours they are learning and get an accurate representation of their effectiveness.
Today is all about the end result. If you are a manager consider organizing your employee’s efforts according to an emergent management model: set a commonly accepted goal, give them the decision making criteria necessary to constrain their actions, and set up effective feedback loops, then … let them loose. If you do it effectively, you’ll see results that are borne from the greatest motivation in life, intrinsic motivation. Once someone finds it they will work 12 hours a day and give you better results than you ever dreamed of, and the best part is they’ll love you for it.
References:
[*Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software*](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0684868768/qid=1127451076/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-2192165-1305432?v=glance&s=books, “”) by Steven Johnson
[*Emergence: From Chaos to Order*](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0738201421/qid=1127451076/sr=2-2/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_2/103-2192165-1305432?v=glance&s=books, “”) by John H. Holland
