(or why Manolo mistakes motion for progress)
Tuesday. 08:47. Manolo gets in before everyone else. I know because he sent me an email at 06:12. And a Slack message at 07:38. And he commented on three Jira tickets before 08:00.
By the time I walk in, he's already in his second meeting.
—Jose, did you see the deck I sent you last night?
—Manolo, it's 47 slides.
—Yes, I did it after dinner. I was up until eleven.
He says it with pride. Like someone showing you a war wound. Look, sacrifice. Look, commitment. Look, forty-seven slides nobody is going to read.
Manolo's calendar is full. Always. Monday to Friday, 30-minute blocks with no room to breathe. If you ask him how he's doing, the answer is always the same:
—Swamped.
And he says it like it's an achievement. As if being "swamped" were a synonym for being valuable. For contributing. For mattering.
But I've spent ten years sitting two meters away from Manolo. And I've noticed something.
Manolo doesn't decide. Manolo calls meetings to decide. And in the meeting it's decided that more information is needed. And another meeting is called. And in that meeting it's decided to form a committee. And the committee meets. And asks for a deck. And Manolo makes it. Until eleven. With 47 slides.
And nothing changes.
Melvil Dewey invented the decimal system for organizing libraries in 1876. But before Dewey there were librarians who were extremely busy. They moved books from one place to another. Stacked them. Rearranged them. Counted them. Constant activity. Perpetual motion.
No book reached the right reader any faster.
Manolo is a pre-Dewey librarian with access to Slack.
Nassim Taleb calls it "naive intervention": the compulsion to do something, anything, to justify your existence in the system. The doctor who prescribes because not prescribing looks negligent. The manager who calls meetings because not calling them looks absent. The CEO who restructures because not restructuring looks passive.
Every intervention has a cost. But the cost of non-intervention is invisible. It doesn't show up on any dashboard. Nobody congratulates you for the meeting you didn't call. Nobody gives you a bonus for the deck you didn't make. Nobody promotes you for letting the team work in peace.
—Jose, this quarter I've had 340 meetings.
—And how many decisions have you made?
Silence.
—Manolo, I'm not asking how many meetings you've had. I'm asking how many things have changed in the company because of something you did.
More silence.
Peter Drucker said it seventy years ago: there is nothing so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.
But Manolo hasn't read Drucker. Manolo has read the subject line of an email that mentioned Drucker, forwarded it with an "interesting, read it when you can," and moved on to his next meeting.
Manolo's problem isn't that he's lazy. It's exactly the opposite. Manolo is the hardest-working person in the company. And that's what makes him dangerous. Because nobody questions the one who works a lot. People question the one who's absent, the one who's late, the one who says no. Never the one who's in every meeting, answers every email and makes 47-slide decks on a Tuesday at eleven at night.
The man who works too much is the perfect employee in a company that measures effort instead of impact. And most companies measure effort. Because measuring impact is hard, uncomfortable, and forces conversations nobody wants to have.
—Jose, I think the team needs more ownership.
—Manolo, the team had ownership. They lost it when you started showing up to all their standups.
There's a concept in ecology called an "engineer species": organisms that physically modify their environment. Beavers build dams, corals create reefs. They transform the ecosystem.
And then there are organisms that simply take up space. They consume resources. They move around a lot. They look important because they're visible. But if you remove them, the ecosystem doesn't change.
Sometimes it improves....
Manolo is a very visible organism in the ecosystem.
—Jose, I'm off. I have a call in five minutes.
—About what?
—A follow-up.
—On what?
—On the plan we defined last month.
—Has anything changed since the last follow-up call?
—No, but you have to follow up.
—Manolo, following up on something that isn't moving isn't management. It's surveillance.
Manolo has stopped listening. He's walking toward the meeting room. Laptop in one hand. Coffee in the other. Calendar full. Sense of purpose.
At 23:00 I'll get another deck.
48 slides this time.
Thanks for reading.