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I never read Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (I bought the discounted version: Four Habits of Semi-Effective People). People I respect have good things to say about Covey. While I can no more remember all seven habits than all seven dwarves, all fourteen (habits and dwarves) seemed both useful and unthreatening when I first encountered them.

Covey has another book, Principle Centered Leadership. I don’t go in much for this kind of book, because its central thesis – that adherence to ethical principles is a prerequisite to leadership – seems more the stuff of pamphlets than of treatises. Still, I have no argument with Covey, who promotes old-fashioned virtues in eloquent fashion. Virtues are Good Things (to use the technical term).

I do, however, take issue with the people who heard about Covey and, harking back to Jordy LaForge, thought, “Being ethical can advance my career? You know, it’s crazy enough, it just might work!”

Here’s an opinion: It’s not ethics until it hurts. If you’re not taking a personal risk, not sticking your neck out, then you’re not sticking to your principles. You’re just enjoying a string of good luck.

The sorriest facet of this whole phenomenon is how it turned ethics and principles into management fads. Empowerment, which certainly has an ethical dimension, became a fad as well. The experts told us all to empower employees because of how much more profitable it would make our businesses. Regrettably, accounting systems have no way to determine whether empowerment creates profitability, so the fad has started to wane.

Here’s a different perspective: you have no choice but to empower your employees. They already have the power to wreck your organization, and there’s nothing you can do to stop them.

Employees can respond to requests for help with indifference, inflexibly quote policy in response to service problems, produce the minimum defined in your performance standards, and live down to your carefully crafted job descriptions. So long as they do their jobs as you’ve defined them your employees are safe, until the whole ship of your organization sinks to the bottom.

None of the tools available to managers can stop this kind of empowerment – not procedure manuals, job descriptions, performance reviews, or disciplinary processes. The more you try to keep employees from messing up, the more you make their failure inevitable, until the whole situation becomes completely ridiculous.

Don’t believe me? Look at the Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) and Federal Acquisition Requirement Specifications (FARS). These two sets of documents detail how the government must buy information technology. FIPS and FARS try to make the process idiot-proof. Great theory. The paradox? FIPS and FARS are so detailed and elaborate that to learn them you have to be smart enough to not need them in the first place.

Empowerment is a good-news-bad-news proposition. The bad news: You have no choice about empowering your employees. You can’t prevent their wrecking your things. The good news: you can successfully structure your work environment so employees help your organization thrive.

The better news: it’s a whole lot simpler this way. Specifying goals and principles is much easier than dictating behavior. With few exceptions, employees want to succeed. If you’d only tell them what that means … how you define success … they’ll help you get there. They may not do things the way you’d do them, but that’s okay. Different golf pros have different swings, but they all hit the ball very well (and much better than I do).

Far too often, empowerment became a numbers game. Cost-justified by decreasing the manager/worker ratio, empowerment programs reduced interaction between managers and staff. Mistake. The point is to change how they interact, not to reduce the amount of contact.

At its simplest and most profound level, empowerment is about a change in perspective. Managers who don’t believe in empowering their workforce try to keep employees from failing.

Empowering managers help their employees succeed.

“I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.” – Bilbo Baggins, on the occasion of his eleventy-first birthday, in J. R. R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings.

Just once, a scientific approach would be nice. Just once.

The pundit class’s reaction to the imminent demise of Hostess and its tasty collection of bad-for-us products has been anything but scientific. Because instead of enumerating the possible causes and evaluating each on its merits, they’re mostly engaged in the popular pastime of starting with their one-size-fits-all solutions and working backward to ammunition in the form of bits and pieces of data that reinforce their panaceas.

Hate unions? Hostess’s unions didn’t accede to the company’s most recent requests for concessions. See ­– it’s the unions’ fault!

Except that the unions made significant concessions to Ripplewood Holdings, the private equity firm that bought Hostess in 2009. And, while the union was making these concessions, executive compensation was more than doubling. According to the best available information, three executives alone accounted for more almost $2.5 million in executive compensation increases. And the company’s top executives will share another $1.8 million in bonuses for successfully liquidating its assets.

(Reminder: My consulting company, IT Catalysts, has a long-standing service offering: We’ll wreck your company for half.)

Also … had union members agreed to work for nothing, the only impact would have been on price. Does anyone seriously think Twinkie sales are down because Twinkies cost too much?

Then there are those who figure greedy private equity firms are what cause companies to fail. It’s all Ripplewood’s fault. After all, it extracted significant management fees following its acquisition. That theory, though, doesn’t stand up to Ripplewood’s decision to stop taking them when the business didn’t turn around. All in all, Ripplewood invested a bunch in the attempt, and it’s taking a bath on its failure.

Innovation! That’s the problem. Hostess didn’t innovate, so as consumer tastes changed, Hostess didn’t change with its customers, who now want healthier fare.

Well, maybe. Certainly, there hasn’t been a flood of new Hostess products over the past decade or so. But on the other hand, there hasn’t been a flood of new beef products either, and despite plenty of evidence that eating lots of red meat is bad for you too, Americans are still eating lots of steak and hamburgers.

Here’s a theory I haven’t read anywhere: Hostess sales declined because Hostess stopped advertising its products.

When I was a kid, Wonder Bread built strong bodies twelve ways, Hostess Cupcakes and Twinkies were all over the airwaves, and when Hostess introduced its fruit pies, everyone in the country knew about it.

I can’t remember the last time I saw an ad for a Hostess product.

Sometimes, what kills a company is nothing more complicated than ignoring the fundamentals. Using advertising to build and maintain demand for your products is as fundamental as it gets.

My point in all of this isn’t to explain why Hostess failed. Without a doubt, it failed for more than just one reason (a horrible thought for purveyors of panaceas).

Or, it failed for just one reason, by definition. Namely, it failed because of bad management. That’s the definition of bad management, isn’t it — management that leads to business failure?

Why does this matter to you? No, not you as a junk food consumer. You as an IT leader. The answer is, I hope, clear: A failing or broken organization is only rarely like a car with a flat tire, where you can make just one patch or replace just one bad component and everything will be groovy a week later.

Pushing the analogy a bit, a failing or broken organizations is more like car with a tire that gradually went flat, starting to lose air five thousand miles ago and out of air a few thousand miles later. Had the owner fixed the tire at the first sign of trouble, the fix might have been easy, but after driving on a bad tire for a couple of thousand miles, the car will require a major overhaul, and the flat tire will be the least-expensive line item on the repair bill.

Organizations, that is, have lots of interconnected moving parts (we’ve identified 150 for IT alone), so when an organization is failing, any attempt to find the root cause, to fix the organization with a single change, is a fool’s errand. Turning the organization around will rarely be as simple as fixing just one broken element. That’s as true for a failing IT organization as it was for Hostess.

My opinion: Any CIO who doesn’t understand this point is a Ding Dong.