Not long ago I was approved as a vendor for a company whose name
you'd instantly recognize were I dopey enough to make snide comments
about a new client. My new client outsourced its vendor approval
process to a company proud of its ISO 9000 certification.
The process began in August and completed the end of December.
That's how ISO 9000 got its name: It means your processes are certified to have at least 9,000 steps each.
Between us, my contacts and I jumped through a lot of flaming hoops.
Which makes little apparent sense. If bringing me in is a profitable
proposition, the company should have accelerated the process to get the
benefit earlier. Otherwise, someone should have rejected the idea right
away so we could all get on with our lives.
We should define terms. A flaming hoop is an activity that is
required, but does little or nothing to help evaluate an idea. The only
challenge in clearing a flaming hoop is going through the effort -
everyone willing to do so passes the test.
Flaming hoops are, by any rational analysis, pure waste, so why
would executives who are, in theory, rational and talented create so
many of them?
As an exercise in pure reason, make the hypothetical assumption that
flaming hoops aren't examples of the Dilbert or Peter principles ...
that executives have good reasons for erecting them and mandating their
use. Our challenge is to figure out their reasons using nothing but
logic and inference.
My hypothesis: It's an example of what I'm starting to call the Third Axle Alternative.
A third axle is what a motorist welds onto a car instead of fixing
the flat tire. It's someone adding a kludge because they aren't willing
to fix the problem.
Through the miracle of mixed metaphors, a bunch of flaming hoops is a third axle. Here's how I think it works:
The executives in charge at my new client don't trust their
employees' business judgment, and especially they don't trust their
employees to exhibit prudent spending discipline. That's my guess.
If they're right about their employees they have a big problem, and
it's a tough one to solve. The company would have to do much more than
replace its current employees with better ones ... and doing just that
would require a tremendous effort, for all the obvious reasons.
But it wouldn't solve the problem, because someone hired all of
these bad employees ... lots of someones. Leave them in place to hire
the replacements and the company will end up with bad employees again.
Better to fire everyone who helped hire such an untrustworthy workforce.
But wait! It's even worse! Someone hired the bad managers. Those
people have to go too. By the time the company has replaced everyone it
can't trust to display good business judgment, up and down the chain of
command, it will have lost so much institutional knowledge that it
won't be able to continue to operate.
And so the company welds on a third axle: Flaming hoops. Far from
being a display of inept management, it's a deliberate plan. Make the
process of spending sufficiently annoying and employees will think long
and hard before putting themselves through it.
The company hasn't fixed the problem, of course. It has the same
untrustworthy employees and the same bad managers it had before. What
it's done instead is to create what would be called in
Sarbanes-Oxley-land a "compensating control."
A third axle.
The fallacy in all of this is presuming the company has so many
untrustworthy managers and staff in the first place. Very few employees
come to work every day planning to fail at what they do, after all.
Even fewer come to work every day with malicious intent.
If employees don't know what constitutes a good business decision,
the root cause isn't that they're a bunch of losers. It's more likely
that nobody in management, from the CEO on down, has ever thought to
explain what they think a good business decision looks like, let alone
how to make one.
Whether it hasn't been a priority, or too many managers are the sort
of egotistical souls who figure the effort would be wasted on mere
mortals, or an endless stream of crises has never left the time, or
(and it's very common) it's because everyone "trusts their gut" and
can't explain how that works in any coherent way ... whatever the
reason, employees are (to layer on yet another metaphor) left in the
dark.
And then blamed for not seeing the light.
