Hi, I’m Mike DeWitt. If you’re a person living in a developing (or developed) country. You’ve probably been in a public restroom with a contraption similar to the one depicted in this picture. These devices are supposed to use hot air to dry your hands after you’ve washed them. The instructions go something like this:
Step 1: Push button
Step 2: Rub hands together vigorously until dry
It has become an inside joke among victims of such devices that there is a Step 3: For men: “Wipe hands on pants”, and for women: “Swing Hands in Air and Open Door With Elbow Until You Find Some Tissue” because the damned things DON’T WORK. In many restrooms, some altruistic lad has taken the time and effort to scratch Step 3 onto the machine with a knife or key. Well done, sir!
I bring up this quaint point of everyday life, because I believe that many management ploys are a precise analogy (although more expensive by several orders of magnitude) of these ineffectual-for-the-customer-and-employees-but-cheap-and-easy-for-management fads. The latter have the following steps:
Step One: Hire prominent and expensive consultant to convince the board and institutional investors that you seriously intend to remedy unsatisfactory financial results
Step Two: Implement consultant’s recommendations regardless of corporate culture or business context.
After this step, the consultant usually exits, stage left, amidst a management celebration of the success of the initiative. Some time later, as with the hand dryer, the hot air stops flowing but your hands are still wet (i.e., the original problem hasn’t gone away). Managers and employees are left to pick up the pieces, which leads to:
