National Clothesline

My father was a baker. The summer after my first year in college, I turned down an assistant manager’s job at McDonalds to work for him until I returned to school.

Early during my apprenticeship, he sent me home because he was too busy to have a helper. Ouch. But he knew the business and human nature.

After two summers working for my Dad, I knew enough baking to get a summer job in Baltimore at a large bakery. There, I met Charles, who would become a lifelong friend. At that time, he supervised about 50 bakery workers, including me. Charles was the best manager I had ever seen, part Tom Sawyer, part father, and part brother.

After law school, I ended up primarily a management labor lawyer. I had never really managed anyone myself, but here I was giving advice to managers on how to handle employees. I knew the law, but I really had no knowledge of human nature other that what I had observed working with Charles and my father, and a couple other managers at Sears and a bread factory I worked at in Syracuse. I felt like I needed to read some books on management, which I did. What a waste.

I am currently reading three books: The Management Myth by Matthew Stewart, The Billionaire’s Vinegar by Benjamin Wallace, and The End of Overeating by David Kessler. I think those three books are as good as any management books I have read, and I recommend them heartily to National Clothesline readers.

Oh, did I mention, the last two are not really management books, and the first says that management books are a waste of time? Read on.

The Management Myth is a wonderful book attacking the concept of corporate consultants. Those are the people you hire to tell you what you are doing right, doing wrong, and not doing at all.

I once worked for a law firm that hired a famous consulting firm whose recommendation was to get the attorneys to bill more hours and collect that money with greater urgency. It was like me telling a drycleaner to take in more shirts and provide an incentive for customers to pay in cash, then charging $5,000 for the advice.

The author of Myth was a consultant, hired out of college for $75,000, whose time was charged out at $500,000 a year to “consult” on topics he never learned before. He was taught, like a psychic doing a cold reading, to talk to clients about their businesses and state the obvious in a way that impressed that client. “Do you realize that 80 percent of your income comes from 20 percent of your customers?”

It was like a psychic saying: “I sense that you are a very patient person who can sometimes be driven to lose that patience, am I correct?”

“Yes, you really understand me.”

The other two books discuss aspects of human nature. The Billionaire’s Vinegar is about the wine trade in old vintages that took place in the 1980s and 1990s, much of which turned out to be counterfeit. Understanding what motivates people to want and bid on these bottles, and what allows counterfeiters to flourish despite overwhelming evidence that the wine in question is fake, will make you a better manager than reading any book in the business section of Barnes and Noble.

I was especially drawn to the sections of the book dealing with the counterfeiter who sued anyone who suggested the wine was less than what he represented it to be. He reminded me of employees who should be fired, but who manage to keep their jobs by aggressively challenging their employers with excuses and suggestions of discrimination.

The third book explains in neurological and psychological terms why people overeat. It also has fascinating (and scary) disclosures of how the food industry fosters overeating by designing easy to eat food high in fat, sugar, and salt, which stimulates the pleasure centers of the brain where reward and addiction reside. You will never eat a blooming onion again once you read this book.

But it will make you understand your employees and customers. And if you do that, you will understand management. You do not need to read books by famous corporate managers, whose success is more a result of luck and randomness than genius, when there are better books that explain why people do what they do.

Every person in the workforce is different. Some work to live, fewer live to work. Some think they are smarter than you, and only a couple may be correct. But the ones who are smarter may not be risk takers, and risk takers succeed more dramatically than people who play it safe. Hard work and ambition will generally pay off, but many of your employees are interested in only two things: collecting a paycheck and doing as little work as possible.

Try to understand your employees, employing principles of philosophy and psychology you have learned yourself over the years. If you treat the good ones well, keep the competent ones under control, and eliminate the incompetent ones before they have a chance to drag you down, you are a better manager than almost anybody but Charles and my Dad. Keep up the good work.