Archive for November, 2008

Steven Krempl comes from a unique cultural blend – Hungarian and Malaysian.  His father started the first symphony orchestra in Singapore after escaping Hungary during World War II.  Without saying too much about his last two companies, he has many tales to tell.  He was in senior leadership at two Fortune 1000 companies in the last 10 years, and he has seen far too much fake work.

This is what Steven says about the Book:

“Fake Work provides a different view of how to get people impacting their organizational goals and results. Using many simple but painfully true and recognizable stories, the book unravels the numerous issues organizations face around having ‘extremely busy and hardworking’ employees who may not, in many cases, be impacting the bottom line.  The good news is Peterson and Nielson layout deceptively simple but effective steps to resolve this. If you are prepared to get to the root of ensuring everyone is contributing to results – then this is the way to go!”

After his last stint as an executive in a Seattle corporation, Stephen started his own company and is the President of Krempl Communications International.  Krempl seems like a good name for a company, and international makes sense if you come from Singapore, lived in Kentucky and Seattle, and work all over the world.

Steve Wilkinson makes an important point about helping clarify the lines between real and fake work.  We certainly hear a lot about fake work in education, and clearly many teachers don’t add the context for work for the students that Steve does.  Without it, students may interpret work as “busy work” and either dismiss it and do something else that is truly fake work or they do it without respecting the reasons.

Steve is also suggesting that people can be glib about busy work, what we would call fake work, and it is a mistake to just treat work of any kind with an air of arrogance.   Teachers have a responsibility to be clear about the results they are seeking, and students have a responsibility to ask about value and intent.

In Higher Education many times students feel they are participating in “fake work” when they are given something they deem as “busy work.” This is a phrase that represents work that has no value to students other than to keep them busy.  While I do not argue that, on occasion, some professors do ask their students to complete assignments just to take up time; often I think it is a matter of them not understanding the assignment’s relevance – how it leads to their ultimately learning.

Often students do not have the perspective to understand the value of the assignment or the value has not been clearly explained to the students.  For example, for one assignment, I require my graduate students to research a topic and to input the information into a database using a software program that is unfamiliar to them.  When I describe the assignment I always explain the reasons why I am having them do the assignment including my reasons for using the computer.

The topic I assign my students is relevant to their field of study, but my students are not computer scientists; therefore, they may question why I have them use a computer as part of their assignment.  Because the students are not computer scientists, and I have them use a software program that is foreign to them; I will often have them complain about the assignment.  These complaints are often expressed as the assignment being “irrelevant” (translation = busy work).  After hearing this, I will ask my students, “Was the topic relevant to your field of study?” The students will answer in the affirmative.  Then I ask, “What was irrelevant then about the assignment?” Most students will state that they don’t like computers or the software was difficult to use.  I then restate why I had them use the computer (as I did when I introduced the assignment), reiterating that they will encounter very similar situations once they are out of school where they will be required to use the computer and often with foreign software.

Once the students realize that the assignment was truly aligned to their learning, the assignment immediately becomes more meaningful and is not identified as “busy” or “fake work.”  The take home message is that all work that is meaningful must be aligned to the ultimate goals of the organization.  This holds whether in school, business, or home life.

Steve Wilkinson
Assistant Professor, Rockhurst University
Graduate and Professional Studies
Physical Therapy

The Worlds of Fake Work Characters and The Tom Sawyer Principal of Fake Work

In the coming weeks we will introduce you to a hierarchy of Fake Work characters—Fake Work players up and down the ladder of organizations who participate in, cause or enable Fake Work.  You should be able to recognize some or all of these characters in your organization. Do you have a “Fake Work Godfather” or a “Fake Work Peacock” in your organization?  Or, worse, are you one of these characters?  In their book, Fake Work, Gaylan W. Nielson and Brent D. Peterson discuss the many different personalities and behaviors that cause Fake Work. Let’s begin with a famous literary character who raises an important question about Fake Work.

Don’t Be Fooled by the Tom Sawyer Principle of Fake Work
Tom gave up the brush with reluctance in his face, but alacrity in his heart. And while the late steamer Big Missouri worked and sweated in the sun, the retired artist sat on a barrel in the shade close by, dangled his legs, munched his apple, and planned the slaughter of more innocents. There was no lack of material; boys happened along every little while; they came to jeer, but remained to whitewash.
. . He had had a nice, good, idle time all the while — plenty of company — and the fence had three coats of whitewash on it! If he hadn’t run out of whitewash he would have bankrupted every boy in the village.
Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it — namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement.
–Mark Twain, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”

In the United States, Tom Sawyer is a notorious figure from literary history who is infamous for his ability to get out of doing real work and, at the same time, make a profit off the backs of his friends. Tom’s at the center of a pervasive myth that suggests that real work is for suckers and that most people, if they could, would do whatever it takes to get out of doing real work.
Tom claims to have discovered a philosophical principle—that “Work” is whatever you are obligated to do and that “Play” is whatever you’re not.  And, at first glance, lots of people would probably agree with this.   Under Tom’s logic, work seems to be a form of constraint; whereas, play seems to be a form of freedom.  Obviously, therefore, play must be better because we get to do whatever we want.

“Don’t Tom Sawyer it” refers to a Fake Work truth that describes a common workplace mode of thinking called “The Tom Sawyer Principle of Work” that, essentially, devalues real work by falsely characterizing it as harder and more difficult than Fake Work.  This false principle inadvertently leads many organizations to create Fake Work hierarchies with casts of Fake Work characters who are responsible for generating and disseminating mountains of Fake Work across the organization.

Fake Work characters come in many roles, in every organization, at every level, and they have serious affects and cause costly and disheartening fake work throughout the organization.