Technical Notes

Don’t insult employees

Over the last few years I’ve worked with a few different styles of CEO.  Some were great.  They cared about employee morale and worked to solve problems created by problematic career middle-managers.  They inspired employees and worked to help everyone realize their contribution to the company’s success.  Other CEOs I’ve worked with didn’t have a handle on issues in the company.  They almost gleefully stifled creativity and smothered morale.  I’d like to share a tragic story about one of these CEOs.

I was doing some work for a startup where I got to see the CEO warm up for his series B funding pitch.  He wanted to do the actual presentation he would give investors with an audience.  He invited me, the developers and some people in marketing to the practice talk.  He wanted us to think like the investors and ask some difficult questions about the company, product and business plan.  When asked about the kind of people he needed to hire for his plan to work the CEO quoted General Erich von Manstein to illustrate his point.

There are only four types of officer. First, there are the lazy stupid ones. Leave them alone, they do no harm. Second, there are the hard-working intelligent ones. They make excellent staff officers, ensuring that every detail is properly considered. Third, there are the hard-working, stupid ones. These people are a menace and must be fired at once. They create irrelevant work for everyone. Finally, there are the intelligent lazy ones. They are suited for the highest office.

The CEO claimed to the the fourth type of person, intelligent enough to make the big decisions and lazy enough to delegate the actions to someone else.  I’d like to think I work with reasonably bright people so I didn’t have a problem accepting his claim.  Moving on to the dumb and stupid, the CEO said he would never work with someone he classified as such.  They are a waste of capital and management.  They produce no results.  I tend to agree.  I never accept work from someone I deem waste of my time.  The stupid and hard-working produce results but leave so many problems in their wake that the intelligent and hard-working have to clean up after them.

The intelligent and hard-working are the people the CEO needs to bring his business plan to life.  His argument, though, was poor.  He claimed the intelligent and hard-working aren’t actually intelligent.  If they were intelligent they would be intelligent and lazy making the big decisions.  The intelligent and hard-working, he argued, are just smart enough to not create a mess of problems while they work.  They’re nothing more than worker bees who know enough to listen to his direction and not smart enough to make a decision, develop an idea or even communicate with other people like he could.  He only wants to work with the intelligent and hard-working because they were the ones that would do his bidding but they are not smart enough to question him.  He said this in a room full of people he worked with, his employees.

I looked around at their faces.  Some were shocked he would so openly insult them.  Some were disgusted by what he said.  Others showed disappointment.  Disappointment in I don’t know what.  Maybe they were disappointed in themselves for coming to work for a man that thought so poorly of them.  Either way the company morale plummited.  No one missed the implication of the CEO’s words.

Perhaps he is a very bold man.  Or he might not have realized what he said until it was too late.  Either way he seemed unfazed by the fact he deeply insulted everyone that worked for him.

The company failed.  Series B never materialized and he laid off all of his worker bees a few weeks after the warm-up talk.