Don’t Do Stupid Shit

It’s somewhat surprising how effective a management principle of “don’t do stupid shit” is. Don’t managers need to be brilliant and wise? Maybe it helps, but just staying away from stupid shit actually works pretty well.

Stupid shit can sneak up on you, so a principle of staying away from it is more active and less passive than you might at first think. Many lousy organizational structures come from accreting things together without stopping to clean up and realize the organization has gotten into a total mess. Often this comes from taking the easy, less disruptive road on lots of little decisions without realizing how all those compromises have left the organization in an indefensible form.

The same process often happens as lots of technology decisions tend to diverge throughout an organization and result in an unholy tangle. Letting a thousand flowers bloom doesn’t look as smart after a year or two when you start paying the overhead costs of all those divergent technologies and realize how much harder it has become to move forward.

The other way this principle drives action is that often the organization (or key members of the organization) already knows the right thing to do. So one of the best ways of avoiding stupid shit is actively listening and soliciting input from your own people so they can help you do the non-stupid thing that the organization already understands is necessary.

For the more complex decisions, forcing yourself to gather, coalesce and actually write down the issues and choices can help you separate the smart from the dumb decisions. It ends up being far easier to hand-wave a nonsensical path when talking or trying to think things through in your head than when forced to put it in writing.

Especially when doing the smart thing involves joining or fragmenting the organization or picking a single choice from a set of competing options, the manager is often the only person that can push the organization out of its suboptimal state.

Sometimes these decisions can be hard — there is always an activation energy involved in making a move. I always found it a powerful incentive to not want to be the one responsible for the stupid shit. Some motivation comes from trying to do great things and some comes from avoiding bad things. They can both be powerful forces.