
Management by laziness - frisco
https://medium.com/@maxh/management-by-laziness-b4a7e00dc808#.qj0gxqfud
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quanticle

        I’ve found that paradoxically I sometimes get the fastest, highest quality 
        progress by asking what’s the minimum control input I can give to be 
        successful?
    

There's an analogous concept in auto-racing. The fastest drivers are the ones
who steer the least. That is to say, any steering input necessarily slows the
forward speed of the car. So it's important to find the _line_ or path that
allows you traverse the track with a minimum of steering.

The same thing applies to management. Every interruption or rebalancing of
priorities for your team causes a shift, and that shift takes time to effect.
During that time your team is operating at less than full efficiency, as some
of their mental effort is going towards learning the new system or figuring
out the new priorities rather than actually delivering the end product for the
customer. The fastest teams are driven by managers who apply the minimum level
of input to keep the team on the right path, but then back off once the team
is heading in the right direction.

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renman
This reminds me of a brilliant observation by military leaders in the past:

The clever and lazy you make Chief of Staff, because he will not try to do
everybody else’s work, and will always have time to think. The clever and
industrious you make his deputy. The stupid and lazy you put into a line
battalion, and kick him into doing a job of work. The stupid and industrious
you must get rid of at once, because he is a national danger.

More on the history of this quote here:
[http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/28/clever-
lazy/](http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/28/clever-lazy/)

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mettamage
This reminds me of the following: I was brainstorming about startup ideas with
a very good friend of mine a while back. Somehow I noticed that while we were
making progress it was a lot slower than I was used to compared if I do it
alone. And my communication with him is very good (when we play hints we
sometimes need 2 words when we're on the same team), so it was kind of strange
to experience this. The next day I decided to think about startup ideas alone
and I thought up a lot more. I also felt that the quality of ideas were a bit
higher.

For me, when I think about it, it has something to do with the sub-conscious
perspective that I take. Perhaps I tend to have a bit more of a tunnel vision
when I am with people. Maybe more people have this when they are in the
presence of other people. I don't know if this is because of the presence of
other people or perhaps communication goes inherently slower with someone else
than with myself (bottleneck: speed of sounds vs. speed of neurons).

It makes me curious about searching for papers about the presence of other
people. I only know about Milgram's experiments on this.

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r0s
For me the hardest part of management is letting go of control, especially
when the habit of asking the lead for advice is necessarily ingrained in
junior developers.

What works for me is getting in tune to my annoyance and identifying
opportunities for eliminating some task I'm doing that the junior dev should
be in charge of. (peer code reviews, for example)

~~~
hgh
You might appreciate this article about passing the buck back to your people:

[https://hbr.org/1999/11/management-time-whos-got-the-
monkey](https://hbr.org/1999/11/management-time-whos-got-the-monkey)

~~~
ashkulz
That's an amazing and very relevant article, thanks for the link!

