Employ lazy people

Someone once told me that you should always employ lazy people because they will always find a better way of doing something by making it easier on themselves.  Having done a small amount of research (looking on Wikipedia) it seems that he was misunderstanding a quote attributed to a German World War One General called Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord.  He is reported to have had a system for classifying his officers in order to deduce which kind of work they were most suited to.  His belief was that ‘Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions.’

So it is not lazy people that you should employ but rather clever and lazy people – a big difference.  I’ve thought about this often and it brings a smile to my face thinking of how laziness could be a marketable characteristic but, whilst amusing, it has always left me somewhat skeptical.

Being clever is not enough, there are many such people in the world.  There are also a lot of lazy people and I guess we can all be lazy when the mood takes us.  What I query though is whether the coming together of the two ‘virtues’ is a winning combination.  Surely a clever lazy person will find better ways of avoiding getting the work done rather than finding better ways to complete it.

Do we not need people who are determined to make their work easier in order to get it done?  Are these people not hard working lazy (and clever) people?  An oxymoron if ever there was one.  So we really need to employ people who work hard to find ways of doing the job so that they can work less hard but who fill the time that they have created with new work, people who are dissatisfied with the ways that things are done, who are questioning and inquisitive enough and inventive enough to find alternative approaches.  So we really need to employ paradoxical people who are motivated by a desire to improve and who thrive on change but somehow feel that they would like to do less work.

I smile because I’m sure that person who said this to me never meant to be literal.  What they said was only meant to provoke thought and discussion.  General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord ascribed four conditions to his officers: cleverness; diligence; stupidity and laziness.  This would mean that there were only twenty four kinds of people (four factorial) assuming that any combination of characteristic could be exhibited.  His view was however that the characteristics usually came in pairs and so there would be only six kinds of people.  How dull would life be if this were true? 

His classification was a useful insight into human behavior and, no doubt helped him to manage his men but he was ultimately wrong.  Simple tools are useful to aid understanding but we should avoid making them simplistic.  After all, we humans are never that simple.