The Next Management Revolution

It's time to throw Sun Tzu out with the trash.

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One year ago, I became the editor of a small newspaper. I had never managed a staff before; in fact, I had never even worked in an office, and the only people I'd ever been in charge of in any sense were the members of my immediate family. The very term "in charge" implies a military sense of duty, but I ran my small household on a more typically maternal model, relying more on the feminine arts of negotiation, persuasion, consensus building, and reward than on anything resembling force or intimidation.

In my new job, I found an office environment that was about as welcoming and friendly as an encampment of Confederate conscripts in the waning days of the Civil War. The long-established management style at the paper was based on aggressive, militaristic, alpha-male behavior. Staffers told me they were rarely praised (praise, of course, fosters weakness), they were frequently set against one another (divide and conquer), and rudeness and humiliation of one's inferiors were considered the prerogatives of rank (a periodic dressing down was good medicine). One young writer even complained that she had been made to fetch coffee for her female boss every day, a version of KP duty to be sure.

Still, finding myself suddenly in charge of several employees and a weekly production schedule, I dutifully took the advice of a friend who is a veteran manager and picked up a copy of the modern manager's bible, Sun Tzu's The Art of War. Everybody knows that the only valid model for behavior in the workplace is the battlefield, right? Look at the recent popularity of The Apprentice, wherein men and women alike slaughtered each other in the ring to win Emperor Donald Trump's thumbs-up -- a management model that isn't merely militaristic but downright gladiatorial.

Cracking open The Art of War, I expected to find kernels of wisdom translatable to the workplace; what I found instead scared me almost as much as the movie Heathers had back when I was still recovering from high school.

"All warfare is based on deception," I read. So much for the Good Fight. "Speed is the essence of war," I read later on. "Take advantage of the enemy's unpreparedness, make your way by unexpected routes, and attack him where he has taken no precautions." And my favorite, as a newly minted manager of a staff of six: "Throw your soldiers into a position whence there is no escape, and they will choose death over desertion."

I would never be a general. And really, I thought crossly, why should I be?

But it wasn't until the day I happened to spill mango juice on my favorite Brooks Brothers blouse that I happened upon the tool that showed me I had the power to be a brilliant manager all along, and that all the know-how I needed was to be found even closer than my own backyard.

While looking up the stain remedy (use detergent, but never soap, on tannin-containing stains like juice, coffee, or wine), I found myself falling headlong into a book called Home Comforts: The Art & Science of Keeping House by Cheryl Mendelson, a woman who, when she isn't practicing law or teaching philosophy at Columbia University, amuses herself by keeping house. Home Comforts, published in 1999, is a very serious book about cleaning, cooking, organizing, and generally generating a condition of domestic bliss, but Mendelson is no Heloise; aside from giving explicit instructions on how to do everything from balancing a load of laundry to filing an I-9 for your Swedish nanny, she waxes passionate and philosophical on her topic, freely quoting Homer and Witold Rybczynski as the occasion allows. Pulling my nose out of Mendelson's masterpiece after hours of immersion, I felt as if I had finally discovered my magic feather duster (I'd say secret weapon, but that would be militaryspeak), a book that seemed to contain a wise solution to every managerial problem.

In short, Sun Tzu's mean little book gathers dust on the shelf in my office, while Mendelson's 900-page tome serves me as the source of any and all managerial metaphors:

"Democracy made kitchens come to life again."

In this regard, our homes are far ahead of most of our workplaces. "In today's servantless homes," Mendelson writes, "where shining, sweet-smelling kitchens are equipped with the latest labor-saving devices, cooking has been transformed into an art that everyone can be proud to master."

Her words set me to thinking: The small company over which I preside resembles a tumultuous household far more than it does an armed encampment. And for my part, I vastly prefer rattling around the proverbial kitchen, cooking up ideas potlatch-style, to sitting in a conference room strategizing with my minions. Accordingly, wouldn't my goals as a manager be far better served by treating the office more like a kitchen and less like a war room and fostering a sense of egalitarianism and pleasure in the process as well as the outcome? The first of many culinary ahas.

"Learn how to make a meal without looking at a cookbook."

What Mendelson is saying, if I'm not mistaken, is that a recipe, or manual, is no substitute for mastery. Only through true mastery can you render a chore into a joy, an onus into an art form. Also, never accept conventional wisdom as to how a task should be performed. If you don't give someone a recipe but instead demand that he or she do the research, learn the skills, and produce an acceptable result, then you will never hear the words, "I was only following orders."

"In the old days, laundering was done on Monday, after the Sabbath rest, because it involved such backbreaking labor that you needed to be fresh and rested to get through it."

From Mendelson's treatise on laundry, I learned that by failing to schedule tasks properly, I was perpetuating chaos. She suggests that Monday is still the day to do laundry, as it is still the time when one is least likely to be tired. As a tired person who is always planning to do the laundry on Thursday but is inevitably too tired to do so when Thursday rolls around (it's easier to run to the mall for underwear), I saw the truth in this. I also saw that I was doing much the same thing in the office by continuing the policy of holding our weekly editorial meeting on Wednesday afternoons, after the paper went to the printer. We were always exhausted and had little creative energy to bring to the table, and by then it was really too late to make any meaningful changes to the next week's edition but too soon to think about the following week. So, acknowledging Mendelson's wisdom, I changed our "laundry day" to Monday, when everyone was fresh. Suddenly the meetings had meaning because there was time and energy to act on new ideas, move deadlines, swap out stories. The quality of our paper increased in proportion to the quality of these meetings, and our subjective experience of our workweek improved exponentially: We no longer felt at the mercy of our schedule.

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