Lazy & Smart

"Men are basically smart or dumb and lazy or ambitious. The dumb and ambitious ones are dangerous and I get rid of them. The dumb and lazy ones I give mundane duties. The smart ambitious ones I put on my staff. The smart and lazy ones I make my commanders." Erwin Rommel, The Desert Fox

To give you a visual, I created the image of the quadrants shown above. Another variation on this idea exchanges the word "ambitious" with the words "hard-working" and "industrious," which provides a slightly different set of conclusions. Anyone that is smart and works hard is an asset to any group or company. These are the people that get things done, and they do it well. In terms of a business, you want plenty of these employees. They make excellent programmers, middle managers, technicians, mechanics, etc. In fact, I previously wrote about this here more than a year ago and praised this combination highly.

The combination of dumb and ambitious leads to people that strive for power and control, that want their voices to be heard. However, they don't understand the responsibility of this kind of role. Once they are heard, their decisions tend to lead towards bad consequences. And as they try to achieve their goals, they tend to step on a lot of people along the way without realizing it. That's part of the reason that The Desert Fox said that these people are dangerous.

The combination of dumb and works hard is a little different because there are a lot of people in this position. These are people that follow orders without too many questions. They'll complete the work but they will make a lot of mistakes along the way. Fortunately, they keep working hard to fix those mistakes. Unfortunately, they have a tendancy to introduce new mistakes even as they fix the old ones, so the cycle repeats incessantly. As I say, this is fairly common. (I'll mention the solution to the first part of this equation below.)

The combination of dumb and lazy is handy for menial work but this is usually a dead end. Not much work gets done, and what does get done isn't very good. Within a company, this type of person should be moved into a position in which their particular strengths are valuable. Being dumb doesn't actually mean stupidity. It just means that the person's talents and strengths are not well suited to their role, or that their role is too restrictive to allow them to put those abilities to use.

For example, a person might be a terrible data entry clerk because they do not pay attention to details. From the outside, the person might seem dumb because they keep making so many mistakes. However, this same person might have wonderful interpersonal skills and once they're moved to a position that involves direct contact with customers they might seem "smart" all of sudden. They can instantly remember names and conversations with people from months before but place a stack of black-and-white numbers in front of them and it becomes a grey blur to them. It's like picking the song that best suits a certain kind of voice.

Dealing with laziness is a different matter. In many cases, people are not actually lazy, they're just not motivated. Some people respond to constant encouragement and recognition and they falter when they feel ignored. Some people prefer little supervision of any kind and they become energized in trying to succeed on their own. Some people like competition, some compete only against themselves, and some do not like to compete at all. This aspect of motivation is one focus of the Strengths Finder test that I mentioned here before.

And finally, there's the combination of smart and lazy. At first, that one seems like it wouldn't be too valuable. Sure, sure, it's fine if the person is clever but what will they ever accomplish? The stereotype in this case depicts the professors and eggheads in universities and think-tanks, just coming up with ideas but never really doing much with them.

Au contraire, says The Fox. These are the very kinds of people that you need at the top. This could be the best type of leader of all. This kind of person doesn't want to work too hard or too long, so they put their brains to use to figure out better and easier ways to do it. It takes a creative mind to look beyond the basic requirements and find a better solution, whilst a smart person that works hard is much more likely to push ahead with the task and simply avoid mistakes.

Laziness can be the result of poor motivation, but it can also be the motivation to do things in a better way. Properly understood, "lazy" is sometimes just the flip side of "efficient."

If you want to look at that a bit more, the first link to Rommel gives general Wikipedia information. Granted, the guy was a commander in the Nazi army but even Winston Churchill begrudgingly gave him respect, even as they fought. (And yes, I do think that The Desert Fox is great nickname.) For another perspective on this within the business world, you can also check out this blog, which offers it's own opinions about these ideas.