Power of Mediocrity: Learning vs. Teaching, Doing vs. Managing
I’ve been reading Harvey’s How Come Every Time I Get Stabbed in the Back My Fingerprints Are on the Knife? lately. He contends that learning is quite different from teaching. In teaching, the student gives the teacher the majority of the responsibility for whether a change in state occurs. Thus, “if a student hasn’t learn, then the teacher hasn’t taught.” Learning, he argues, is quite different and the full responsibility of the student. His final examinations are quite “original” and, he says, quite successful as statements of the change in state that the students have accomplished: “most students have produced extraordinarily competent work. Some have produced work that is very incompetent. Very few have produced anything mediocre.”
Buckinghamd and Coffman found something similar in the Gallop data on management. In First Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently, they say that the difference between the actions of great managers and terrible managers was very subtle. They tended to do the same things but from a slightly different angle. The great managers had something, a talent, that the terrible managers lacked. The anomaly the found was in mediocre managers. Their actions had very little resemblence to those of the great or terrible managers. Apparently, mediocrity is different.
It strikes me that what I really want in my life is stability. Being great, succeeding, takes risk. Risk means instability. Great businesses always start with risk taking that pays off. Microsoft had several big risk-taking episodes, including the anti-piracy statement Bill Gates made to the computer enthusiast community back when it only produced Basic programming language, and the declaration to IBM that they had a disk operating system (DOS) product ready for IBM PC. Terrible failures always start with risk-taking that doesn’t pay off. Think Iridium, the Motorola consortium that put billions of dollars into a global satelite phone network, only to have no one want to use it when it came out. The risk didn’t pay off.
Stable companies, on the other hand, take as few risks as possible. Risk, by its very nature, means unpredictability: I simply cannot predict wth any certainty that something will work. Companies that started with risk-taking quickly turn risk-averse when they succeed. Kahneman says that we’re all risk averse about what we have, valuing the bird in the hand more than it’s really worth. Companies that are successful want to hold onto what they have more than they want to build more. (Microsoft seems to be an exception to this.) Their managers manage for predictability, which means mediocrity. You’re never going to burn bright when your goal is to not get your fingers burnt.
