Clever bosses put it off, see if anyone notices

``Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped." -- Groucho Marx

It was Big Trash Monday. Once a month, the refuse department in my tidy suburb sends out crews who will haul away tree limbs, old appliances, and the like. I was out walking, serpentining around all the big-trash items, and noticed how many of the items were electronic, the mayflies of the appliance world. Looking at the TVs, stereos, and computers sitting on the curb, slumped on their sides or with faces like homeless drunks at dawn, I found it hard to imagine that a few years ago these gizmos were objects of pride and envy.

Funny how almost none of the products left by the curb were made here in the United States, but all were laid out to be buried here. Maybe the Minutemen along the border with Mexico should send a group off to the docks to chase back out to sea all the ships full of soon-to-be-junk that isn't worth repairing.

Then again, I'm as guilty as everyone else of buying an endless supply of ``bargains." In fact, it was my putting out a pile on my own curb for a Big Trash Monday that inspired an experiment. I don't have the self-discipline to simply stop shopping or buying, but I was able to make a deal with myself. Whenever I see something I want to buy, I tell myself: ``Fine. Get it. Just do one thing: Wait till tomorrow, and if you still feel that you have to have it, then go ahead."

I now buy maybe one-quarter of the items I would have bought, even though I walk away from every item feeling certain that I'll be back. The beauty of this system is that it takes just half the self-discipline, appropriate for a retail world where everything comes with a ``compare to" price. So much for the self-help tip of the week.

My business topic for the week is that there's one place where we could do with a bit more disposability, and that's the one place where things never die and never go away: management. What got me thinking was being in a meeting here at Mundane Industries when our head of H.R., Winslow ``Win-Win" Cheeseley, announced that it was time for the annual employee-morale survey. The room was full of employees who, upon hearing the news, sagged as one. It was a moment of deep-dish irony -- the mention of surveying employee morale sent morale plummeting.

Later, I learned that it wasn't just those of us in that room who are sick of employee surveys. In ``Measure of a Leader," by Aubrey and James Daniels, I came across this: ``The worst advice you can give to another is always be positive. We have been in many plants where the advice given to managers and supervisors following a poor morale survey was to be more positive."

As we were told by a plant manager: ``Every year when we get the morale survey results, I tell the managers and supervisors, `Don't let the sun set on your back until you fix everything you can fix on this survey.' " He then pulled out a chart showing the percent of favorable ratings on the survey, and those ratings were dropping like a rock." The authors go on to point out: ``What this manager didn't understand is a basic rule of behavior -- you get more of what you reinforce. By responding to complaints, he got more of them."

Every great boss I've ever observed has been obsessed with talking directly with customers and employees, with getting hot, fresh, first-hand data -- as one boss put it, ``opinions with the exclamation point still attached." So great bosses don't need surveys to tell them about morale; if there was a problem, they've fixed it before it became a statistic. With that in mind, I suggest a new basic rule : If you have to do a survey to know what employees' morale is, it's low.

More broadly, every management tool ought to have an expiration date. I'd like to propose a test: Just postpone the survey (or other management technique), and see if anybody misses it. I tried this with the e-mail newsletter I send out monthly (via dauten.com). I figured that I wouldn't bother with it any longer if nobody missed it. It took a couple of months, then people started making inquiries. That's when I knew it was worth doing.

In a world of immediacy, there's magic in postponing a purchase or a management technique. You either save yourself the trouble or appreciate anew what you've been doing. Does that make ``postponing" a management technique? If so -- Hey, wait a minute!

Dale Dauten is a syndicated columnist. He can be reached at dale@dauten.com.