DOG VS. MAN : Two High-Powered Management Experts Go Paw to Hand Over Workplace Issues

The search for good advice on management issues has people turning to experts of every stripe, from top university consultants to megalomaniacal cartoon characters. Two of them agreed to face off for The Times on matters both weighty and windy.

Warren Bennis is a distinguished professor of business administration at USC’s Marshall School of Business and a renowned management expert who has advised four U.S. presidents and consults frequently with top corporations and organizations. His latest book, co-authored with Times staff writer Patricia Ward Biederman, is “Organizing Genius” (Addison-Wesley).

Dogbert, a world-class consultant and best-selling author, has spent much of his life giving advice to gullible people with disposable incomes. His creator, Scott Adams, formerly a mid-level manager assigned to cubicle 4S700R at Pacific Bell headquarters, began recording his impressions of corporate cubicle life in the comic strip Dilbert in 1989. He is the author of the No. 1 New York Times bestseller “The Dilbert Principle” and eight Dilbert books, including his latest, “Dogbert’s Top Secret Management Handbook” (HarperBusiness).

*

Q. What are the biggest issues facing managers as we approach the 21st century?

Dogbert: The biggest challenge will be brainwashing the gullible employees into thinking there’s a good reason to work long hours of uncompensated overtime. I recommend calling this process “coaching” so they won’t realize it’s a bad thing.

Bennis: The most obvious is the incredible change going on in terms of technology and globalization. This affects all modern corporations today and has created great confusion. One of my favorite CEOs told me that if you’re not confused, you don’t know what’s going on. But we’re also getting into problems where the size of huge corporations today is going to limit creativity. It’s the bureaucratization of imagination.

Another big issue is the shareholder-versus-stakeholder debate. Are corporations responsible to shareholders or to the community, the workers and suppliers? “Chainsaw Al” Dunlap is a main villain in my view. The question is, how do you balance the needs of all stakeholders?

Then there’s trust, or what I call the Dilbert factor. Unfortunately, Dilbert has such resonance because of the deep and dangerous cynicism out there in the workplace. And I think that’s sad. Workers see the “vision statements” that most companies feature in beautiful Lucite plaques on their walls. Take Texaco. If you read their visions-and-values statement, it talks about how they support a multicultural, diverse work force, and yet this is a company that has been incredibly biased toward minorities such as blacks and women. When you get this glaring discrepancy between what’s going on in the workplace and what people see in vision statement, it leads to mistrust.

Lastly, and this is a global issue, there is a growing disparity between the haves and have-nots. The average CEO salary is 189 times more than the average work force salary, and that figure is a year old; it’s worse now. I call it the Brazilification of the workplace.

*

Q. How does a manager gather and keep the best people around him or her?

Dogbert: I certainly don’t recommend doing that. The best people will just whine about how underpaid they are. They’ll have lots of “suggestions” that don’t make sense to you. And they might see right through the “coaching” scam. It’s far better to surround yourself with losers. You can get consultants if you need actual talent.

Bennis: You’ve got to make sure--and most leaders don’t because they feel threatened--that you hire people better than you are. So you have to hire more secure people in the first place to be the bosses. But hiring the good people is the easy part. It’s not so much hiring new people as appreciating the people already working for you who are probably functioning at 20% capacity. You’ve got to create a social architecture that creates a culture of respect, caring and trust and gives people an opportunity to deploy their full talents. The reason people leave an organization once there’s economic sufficiency is because they want to go to a place where they can use their brain and talent to greater opportunity.

*

Q. Workers often complain that they get paid the same whether they work hard or just punch the clock. In such an environment, how does a manager imbue workers with a sense of ownership and loyalty to a job/project when they don’t receive this back from the company?

Dogbert: Try to convince the gullible workers that “work is its own reward.” I don’t know what that means, but it’s just crazy enough to work. Employees fell for the “empowerment” story, so this won’t be too much of a stretch.

Bennis: You don’t. Good companies insist on stock options and profit sharing, and enlightened capitalists know this. And before there’s any significant salary increases for the top brass, they make sure that workers receive a share. If you look at the Hewlett-Packards, Motorolas and Ameritechs, you’ll see that they understand that motivated workers make better workers.

*

Q. Which books would you recommend that managers read to make them better at their jobs and why?

Dogber: Anything by the Marquis de Sade would be good. And I think Karl Marx had some good suggestions about motivating workers without the benefit of personal reward. That will come in handy.

Bennis: No management books except mine. Just kidding. In general, business people should read a lot more. I find it dangerous that many CEOs have no idea of the historical context of what they do. One book I recommend is “March of Folly” by Barbara Tuchman. It’s about the follies of decision makers who could have avoided disastrous choices. It uses historical examples such as the Trojan Horse, U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and George III and the loss of the American colonies.

Secondly, they should read any recent good biography, such as David McCullough’s biography of Harry Truman or Doris Kearns Goodwin’s bio of FDR.

I also recommend “Leading Minds” by Howard Gardner, a psychologist who teaches at the Harvard School of Education. He looks at 11 great leaders throughout history, people like Martin Luther King Jr., Maggie Thatcher, Eleanor Roosevelt, Harriet Tubman and Gandhi.

OK, I do have one management book. It’s called “The Connective Edge” by Jean Lipman-Blumen, and it discusses how to avoid the trap of the command-and-control macho style of management.

*

Q. How does a manager encourage freedom and creativity within a corporate structure that is filled with dress codes, set hours and other arbitrary regulations?

Dogbert: I recommend sending out a companywide memo giving them permission to hum silently to themselves any time they aren’t thinking. But make sure you give them a list of approved tunes, otherwise it will be chaos. And you might want to phase it in slowly by designating Fridays as “hum day.”

Bennis: You don’t. To succeed, corporations are going to have to become theaters of inquiry that release brainpower. They need to generate intellectual capital--ideas, innovation, imagination. Where rules and not values determine behavior, there will be little success. Law firms, for instance, are among the worst-managed types of firms in the world. If you’re a button-down, formal, rule-oriented organization, maybe you can manufacture widgets, but that’s not the way it’s going to work for most firms in the future.

*

Q. How does a manager imbue a mundane project with meaning and turn it into an inspirational mission that the troops can rally around?

Dogbert: I love it when you say, “imbue.”

Here again, we can rely on the gullibility of the troops. Let’s be honest--if they had an ounce of awareness they’d be working someplace else. So you needn’t knock yourself out coming up with an inspirational message. You can say things like, “Work harder or I’ll put you in charge of the United Way campaign.” That’s not inspirational in the classic sense of the word, but I don’t think we need to debate semantics.

Bennis: I’ll answer that with an anecdote. I was in a high-fashion store in San Francisco last week with my wife and our salesperson really impressed me. She was so excited about her job. I asked why, and she said that she loves the product and can put her heart into selling it. Secondly, she said they have a great team at the store, and then she brought her boss over to meet me. I recount this story because I think that in too many professions, managers need to do a better job of reminding workers what’s important and acknowledging them. I don’t want to be foolish about this. It’s probably not possible in every occupation. Can you give the gardeners at USC an inspirational talk about making the campus beautiful? Or janitors? There’s a sort of sadness about that question. But I do think that we can do so much better than we do by reminding people of the meaning of their work.

*

Q. There’s a lot of talk today about how good managers are good “facilitators.” What does this mean and how does a manager facilitate without losing control?

Dogbert: Actually, losing control is the very best way to get something done. If you act a bit nutty and irrational, the employees will lose any hope of arguing for a “better way.” Insanity is underrated when it comes to facilitating.

Bennis: There is a lot of talk. A lot of it is BS. But there’s an increasing intellectual acceptance of the idea that if we’re going to get the best out of people, we have to give them a lot of autonomy and a sense of being self-managed. This causes a frisson, a collective shiver down the backs of many executives, but that’s because they don’t understand reality, they don’t understand motivation. It’s a fallacy held by many managers worldwide that if you give workers more control over their own work, you’ll lose control. That’s one of the most dangerous myths I know. This idea of power as 10 units, that if I give you two, then I only have eight left, that’s BS. Because our fates are correlated. When people are more motivated, the manager actually gains influence.