T-Shirt for Your Slides

Two years ago, I happened upon a blog titled Positive Influence (unfortunately, the blog is now stale). The author is Jerry Pounds, a veteran management consultant. In my short interactions with Jerry, he was kind enough to send me his unpublished book called Praise for Profit: How Rewards and Incentives Are Demotivating America's Workforce. I didn't know what to expect from the book. After all, he was a management consultant and I was an engineer. We are natural enemies. But after reading just the preface, I was hooked. It is so refreshing to see the demoralizing management practices that we all instinctively know about put into such eloquent and powerful words.

The reason I bring up this book, almost two years after reading it, is a recent Dilbert-like e-mail that Mr. Halal and I received from our director. The director wants us to implement a way of doing things that both Mr. Halal and I think are huge time-wasters, filled with unnecessary overhead, especially given that we are already understaffed. When your designs don't work, do you spend 80% of your time making up slides tracking the most minute and insignificant detail, elongating bars on a Gantt chart, and creating executive overviews that provide no real insight, or should you really be spending that 80% working on the damn design. Sensing this resistance, the director tried to compare our project to the space program. We must leave no stone unturned, just like the space program, in ensuring we get every last detail correct. Perhaps someone forgot to tell him about Challenger and Columbia. The poor analogy aside (for I would love a billion dollar R&D budget), he tried to coax us from another angle -- bribery. In the e-mail, he states that he is willing to be "very supportive of doing something special" in order to help us overcome our inertia and engage in this "behavior shift", like "getting the team some T-shirts or something." I nearly fell off my chair laughing after I read this, especially when Mr. Halal suggested passing out key-chains instead (FluxCorp recently handed a corporate key-chain to everyone single fluxee worldwide...for what purpose, I don't know.)

Hilarity of the offer aside, both for its cheapness and crassness, the e-mail reminded me of Jerry's book again. In the preface of Praise for Profit, Jerry writes:

Is it necessary in today's business environment to publish a book that warns against manipulative motivational tactics? [...]

Are there any companies that still implement performance poker or Employee of the Month/Quarter/Year? Are managers and supervisors still standing up at company functions and singling out one or two individuals as top contributors, thereby creating envy, competition, and resentment among coworkers?

Are some companies still using stars, praise, bribes, coffee mugs, T-shirts, tickets, special parking spaces, and plaques as gimmicks to "pump up" performance instead of adapting their culture, policies, practices, values, and ethics to support the needs of their employees?

[...]

Unfortunately, the answer to all of the above is yes. [...] The infamous stick that was once the classic symbol of intimidating management tactics has been replaced at the end of the 20th century by the super-carrot. If one carrot will induce the donkey to move, why not hid a carrot behind every improvement, every good idea, and every contribution? [...] The merchandisers of motivation have managed to create the commonly held belief that people will not perform without the presence of a conspicuous payoff. As a nation, we have fully embraced the notion that praise, incentives, and rewards are the driving force without which our whole performance edifice would tumble down.

How true.

The irony in all of this is if the T-shirt scheme actually worked, our product probably wouldn't. The team would be spending a majority of their time making up slides rather than making sure of their designs' performance.

So what would you rather be -- insulted or ineffectual?