Action!

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Action!

My Big Boss at FAO was French. You would not expect a Frenchman to teach his staff valuable lessons in the skills of management. Yet, he taught me everything I was later to teach to my students.

Was my Big Boss a god Manager? Probably not. Neither was I.

Did he invent management? Probably not.

So what made him such a great Manager?

My Big Boss had one quality very rare in Top Brasses, the capacity to learn. Most Big Bosses seem to believe that they are the Creator of Heaven and Earth, that therefore they have nothing to learn but much to teach, that they are above rules as they created the rules and that their assistants are a bunch of idiots. Opinion which they have a tendency to voice a bit too often and too loudly.

The advantage of working in agriculture must have been that you can never feel that you are great or the greatest or above the rules, start thinking like this and next month you will have to deal with the pigs dying by the hundreds or the wheat crop getting all mouldy and black.

My Big Boss had come the long way, like most of us in agriculture. He had the great capacity to listen and to learn from the advices given by specialists or simply by life. More than that he did something which is so very rarely heard or seen, he practised what he had learned.

When my Big Boss was not yet “The Big Boss”, his Master, Dr Richardson, taught him American management. Then FAO continued the training by sending him to seminars. He could have kept what he learned for himself to appear Greater and Wiser than us, instead of what he wanted us to acquire and transmit the knowledge given to him.

My Big Boss being French you could expect him to work according to the French Management System; he must have done that when he was younger, but at FAO he worked according to sane management rules.

This sentence does imply that the French Management System is not sane, does it not? Well, it is not sane seen with the eyes of an outsider. My father, having had his training in Sweden, could never get to grip with the French Management System.

By the way, what is the French Management System?

Like all systems, it has lots of meetings. In the best of all cases, the objectives of the meeting will be outlined in a preparing note (read by nobody). Meetings are preferably held after working hours if you want difficult and sensitive issues to be discussed or during the hottest working moment of the day.

During the meeting, the participants have one major objective, explain to other participants why they (the others) have understood nothing and explaining to them why you, you have understood everything and that now, if they would please stop interrupting, you are going to explain everything.

In the French Management System, the meeting seldom goes beyond the second or third point of the Agenda. Incidentally the FAO Management System guarantied the interest and participation of the attending members by putting as last point of the agenda:

<< In which town shall we meet next time? >>

In the French Management System, no notes are taken. If you ever tried to minute the meeting, could you really write down that participant “A” shouted at participant “B” while participants C and D were flirting and E and F discussing the new car model?

In the French Management System the meeting ends when the participants are so exhausted that they do not care about anything anymore.

Then the participant troop out, the only participants really concerned by a decision meet for an after meeting drink, they decide to act as they had planned before the meeting, and off they go and everything works very well. Any idiot who would have the imbecility to try and have a resolution agreed upon by the participant would run into huge management problems as a consensus of idiocy cannot lead to a good decision. So, in France the French system works very well.

My Big Boss taught us to keep very simple note cards.

On the note card you would find

Subject

Responsible officer

Date

Decision taken

Reporting date for results.

Not much, but enough as it had the nearly unknown line “who is supposed to do what at what time”.

When my Big Boss said Action?

That meant that we should agree on what to do, who was doing it and when it should be done.

Before adopting this system, about the time I joined his group at FAO Head Quarters, my Big Boss was using anti depressants and sleeping pills as he would wake up in the middle of the night remembering something he had forgotten to take action on.

With this very simple system, he was able to sleep and not to worry.

In the group of assistants to the Big Boss, I believe that I was the only one who absorbed the teaching and applied it. The other participants considered it as superfluous. It is really the advantage of the little brain that knowing its limitations,that it has the capacity to absorb from others knowledge and methods. Having a rather limited brain, I used others brains.