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Contributors
John Mark Reynolds- Contributor
John
Mark Reynolds is the founder and director of the Torrey
Honors Institute, and Associate Professor of Philosophy,
at Biola University. His
personal website can be found at www.johnmarkreynolds.com and
his blog can be found at www.johnmarkreynolds.info.
 The
Procedure Man
He Has His Place, But Not At the Front of the Pack
[John Mark Reynolds] 3/30/04
I once worked for a major home electronics retailer. Bigger
retailers were beginning to cut into our core business, which
was occasionally reduced to selling batteries and fuses. Little
help was coming from the home office. Our store was aging with
a dated look and products five years behind the times in an industry
that measured change in minutes. What did come from the home
office? Procedures. Lots and lots of procedures. We had books
and books of studies.
Problems? You have problems? The home office would either rebuke
my poor manager or send us a procedure for dealing with problems.
Our problem was procedure. To put it bluntly, we were being driven
crazy by the bane of any organization.
Who is this being?
He is Procedure Man. He sits, usually with yesterday’s
hair cut and a pained expression on his face, watching for
disorder. He creates notebooks. Reams and reams
of paper used. Files filled. Meetings held. Studies. Studies
of studies. Give him an idea and he will study it to death.
Storytelling, vision,
and rhetoric are anathema to Procedure Man. He loves charts
and footnotes. He knows ideas will fail
and has hundreds of examples. The people in the company who worry
him are the “loose cannons.” There are no loose cannons
on his ship. He is also looking for a missing quart of strawberries.
Michael Eisner is Procedure Man. Eisner loves milking a proven
idea to death, but hates bold risk taking. A new theme park?
Sure, if you fill it with off-the-shelf rides and a theme (California
Adventure in California) so sleep inducing that only a room full
of Procedure Men could love it. If Walt Disney -- the man and
not the company -- had been a Procedure Man, there would be no
company. Can you imagine a study that would have showed a market
for a full length animated movie on dwarves? Disney damned the
bankers and the procedures and created an industry.
This is not a phenomenon unique to animation. IBM thought hardware.
The men in the white shirts and black ties knew how it had always
been done. Bill Gates knew the future and software. Bill Gates
won. Only by throwing out Procedure Man did IBM survive.
Another feature of
Procedure Man is that he favors short term profit over creativity.
Procedure Man slavers to be the darling
of Wall Street. He thrives on the “big deal” consummated
after much paper has been consumed discussing the big deal. He
acts because a study tells him too. He may not be human, but
he can always, always, always justify his actions.
Of course, a few Procedure Men are valuable to any company.
They should be hired to sit with pencil in hand keeping the world
safe from innovation. Procedure Man can prevent crazy ideas from
destroying stability. As long as he is not the boss, his decisions
can spur innovation as people find ways around him. Many a dot.com
died by having too many brilliant people and too few Procedure
Men.
California state government is presently chock full of Procedure
Men. Our state prisons are horribly run, expensive, and full
of shocking evil. Prisoners are raped. Money is wasted. However,
there are ever-multiplying procedures to prevent these problems.
There are ever more studies on the problem. One can only pray
that our current Governor -- a leader, not a Procedure man --
will cut through the forms and give us a better system. Just
do it. Any person with common sense could design a better system
than the insulated levels of government paper pushers have produced.
Fire them all. Remind them that they exist to serve the people,
not the other way around.
This would be funny
if it were not funny. Watching the Bush administration be simultaneously
attacked for being “cowboy” and
being “too slow” is a hoot. Procedure Man -- Dick
Clarke in this case -- is there with a pained expression explaining
how his memos were ignored. Procedure Men hate it when their
memos are ignored.
But leaders don’t
have time to write memos. They lead. Bush has probably never
written a memo and would not know a footnote
if he saw it. But then neither did Henry V or Abraham Lincoln.
If we lose the War on Terror, it will be because Procedure Man
will have won first.
Jesus Christ faced Procedure Man. Christ would heal a man born
blind. Anytime. Procedure Man was upset that this was done on
the Sabbath. That was against policy. Had Jesus filled out the
right forms? Had he asked for the right permission? How dare
he? Perhaps we had better hand him over to the Roman Procedure
Men to end this reckless disregard of rules.
For you see, in the end, Procedure Man is very cruel. He places
his studies and rules in the way of people. He forgets what his
company, or organization, school, or church is there to do. He
does not recall that one person is more important than any program
or policy. And therein lies his -- and our -- ultimate downfall.
Here is hoping that
Procedure Man can be put back in his place as a supporter in
our culture. May George “Damn the Details” Bush
be allowed to win the War. After that, Procedure Men can write
all the nit-picking histories they wish. CRO
copyright
2004 John Mark Reynolds
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