But don’t call it outside the box anymore, please. By now, the injunction to “think outside the box” has become inside the box airline-magazine management-guru cliché. Please, some of you should get back into the box, please, and take your quirky Power Points with you. What about thinking outside outside the box? Not outside the box but not inside the box again, either. Transcend the box.

I am sure some of you remember this classic puzzle. The first time you see the puzzle, learn the solution and hear the words “go outside the box”, it is very powerful. But after a few times, it sounds banal. And when you hear it from someone who is totally uncreative, you actively start hating the phrase.

Unfortunately, that is the fate of all such cute catchphrases or ideas. Most of the best ones have been ruined by overuse in popular culture. And others have been tainted by people who have forgotten  how human beings talk.

Things like, “Give your 110%“, “Work smarter, not harder“, etc. are good concepts, but are now hated management clichés because too many bad managers have used them to absolve themselves of their responsibility in managing projects better. This also goes for observations such as Parkinson’s Law and the Peter Principle. When they are misunderstood, they can be very harmful in the hands of a bad manager with too much time in his hand and very few brain cells in his head.

Incidentally, have you noticed that good managers tend to be the most productive and bad managers the most destructive when they are least busy? More time for good managers means that they have been able to delegate their tasks well and they have more time to spend at a higher level (learning, analysis and planning). A bad manager feels too insecure to be seen with free time and so they start micro-managing or implementing something without understanding it well.

Why do bad managers use hated catchphrases so frequently? I guess it has to do with intellectual laziness. Poor managers may work very long hours, but they all never seem to have any time to sit and evaluate whether they are doing the right thing. Using management speak makes them feel more important and wiser, giving them a false sense of control and correctness. Plus, the authority inherent in these phrases and ideas makes them very convenient to beat down ideas from the underlings.

On the same topic, some good stuff from Malcolm Gladwell (emphasis mine):

[...] “The Dark Side of Charisma.” [...] argued that flawed managers fall into three types. One is the High Likability Floater, who rises effortlessly in an organization because he never takes any difficult decisions or makes any enemies. Another is the Homme de Ressentiment, who seethes below the surface and plots against his enemies. The most interesting of the three is the Narcissist, whose energy and self-confidence and charm lead him inexorably up the corporate ladder. Narcissists are terrible managers. They resist accepting suggestions, thinking it will make them appear weak, and they don’t believe that others have anything useful to tell them.

You see, the thing is that your manager is driven by two things: intrinsic motivation and external pressures. If your manager was only driven by internal impulses, your product would be driven by priorities that make sense: greater product quality, better work-life balance, consistent processes, calm work environment, etc.

But internal priorities are not the only thing in real life. There are budgets and timelines that must not be exceeded, people that must not be displeased, reports that must not be forgotten, bugs that must never be visible and so on. These are things that have a direct relationship to the stability of your manager’s job.

Managers insulate you from those external pressures, sometimes knowingly, but sometimes unknowingly because they are just focused on getting things done that they don’t have the time to explain to you what is going on in their world. But just because you don’t know about it doesn’t mean that you are not affected by it.

It makes sense for managers to share some of these pressures with their team members and for the latter to try to gain an understanding of what the manager is up against. This helps them work towards not only the real goals of the project, but also the goals as defined by other stakeholders that cannot be quite put on some project mission statement.