MGMT Minute: The Lazy Engineer's Guide to Modern Management

Read time: 1 minute

The very first words I heard on Day 1 of engineering school:

"A good engineer is a lazy engineer."

This sentence's wisdom has repeatedly revealed itself to me over 30 years.

• Simple scales, fancy fails

• Results matter more than effort

• Genius is in picking the right problem

And managers are learning this lesson as we speak.

Managers may not have always known they were organizational engineers, but AI is waking them up to this reality.

• We need to solve problems with both people and code

• We need to think rigorously to maximize AI

• We need to build systems

The managers who win in the next 5 years will see everything as a system to be continually optimized.

Let's take sales as an example:

Systems have inputs and combine people, processes, and technology to transform them into the desired outputs.

The output of that "factory" can be measured by a handful of metrics:

• Quality

• Cost

• Volume (or throughput)

• "Morale" (of the team)

• Sustainability (can it produce over time)

So let's say we have a sales goal of one million in growth next quarter.

How does thinking of this as a factory outperform simply giving the sales team their quotas?

The Factory Already Exists

Giving the sales team their quotas is a factory, whether the sales manager thought of it that way or not. There is almost always value in making the implicit design explicit when leading a team. It's why sports teams draw up plays.

You Can Have Anything, Not Everything

An organizational engineer will benefit from being clear about the optimal mix of outputs:

• What if those new sales aren't profitable?

• Are we just looking at new sales, or does retention matter?

• Is it ok if the service team quits because sales overpromised?

Defining the mix is valuable because it lets you test every change against those variables.

• Does sales training improve close rates?

• Can AI create tailored pitches to get more calls?

• How about AI looking at transcripts and updating the CRM?

When the experiment improves the output, keep it. When it doesn't, roll it back and find a new one. Those who do the most test and iterate cycles tend to win.

AI Is On Everyone's Team Now

Finally, AI is now better than most of us at some things. And it's never going to be worse. Here's an easy way to think about where AI has the most IMPACT:

Green is where you should start with AI.

But you can't understand AI by reading about it. You have to get your hands on it. You have to see the benefit of a better prompt. You have to get frustrated by its inability to generate a full glass of wine (seriously, try).   

As an organizational engineer, you must learn when and how to delegate work to this new team member.

• Pick the correct tasks

• Structure the right, repeatable prompts

• Know what excellent looks like to catch the lies

91% of managers have asked their teams to use AI.
Only 15% of managers are using it consistently themselves.

AI can help you be a lazy engineer.
But not embracing it might soon make you a former one.

Lead on,
Dave

PS - We only preach what we practice. That's why we're upgrading the MGMT Accelerator to include AI in every module. Same foundational leadership concepts, supercharged with AI.

As leaders are asked to do more with less, we're making it possible.