Some Thoughts on Malcolm X

I've been a fan of Spike Lee's movies for a long time, and I still remember seeing his "Malcolm X" in the theater.

Though it may seem like an odd thing for a white guy, I left that theater an admirer of the icon of Black Power who would later choose the name Malik El-Shabazz, and earn the honorific El-Hajj.  

And it wasn't just the universalist El-Shabazz I admired, the one who had given up his anger and hatred against me and my kind, but, in part thanks to the brilliance of Lee's movie-making, I also learned to admire, and appreciate the necessity for, his time as "Malcolm X", when he would have been perfectly happy to call me a "white devil" to my face.

When you believe passionately that diversity is a strength and an enhancement to the quality of your life, when you feel that you are "one of the good guys" reaching out in friendship, the venomous rejection that X and the Nation of Islam were spewing out is very hard to take, even if you recognize the justice of the grievances that inspired it.  It isn't easy being told "We don't want you here" when you feel you are on the same side.

But I learned through Spike Lee and Malcolm X that the "white devil" message was not about me, and not for me.  In a way, it was none of my business.

It was about purging the internalized sense of inferiority, shame, and envy that had been instilled by centuries of domination and abuse. The truth is that equality is not conferred by others: it needs to grow and become firmly established within first.  Once it is there, others can accept it or not, but then that is THEIR problem.

Centuries of collective, and decades of personal, anger and hurt had to be vented, processed, and transcended before El-Shabazz could emerge, equal not because someone else (or some document) told him he was, but because he just was, and knew it as surely as he knew his own freely-chosen name.

Another important thing I admired about Malcolm X, and the Nation of Islam, were the discipline and focus they brought to their activities, and while the message may have sounded vitriolic, they stopped short of actual violence.  This is not a trivial accomplishment, and it makes all the difference.

Recently, it has come to my attention that I need to relearn the lesson that Mr. Lee and El-Hajj El-Shabazz were kind enough to teach me over twenty years ago.

In my larger professional community of software developers, there are new groups with real historic grievances, and they are getting to the point where they too want to sit at the table without having to apologize for who they are. I've been fortunate to work in environments with a lot of diversity, and I welcome more of it enthusiastically. 

But some of these aggrieved groups are working through the anger and hate built up from their long suppression, from the mistreatment they have received from our industry and society at large. And sometimes what they say and do makes me uncomfortable, seems to target me or seems to contravene the values of diversity as I understand them.

As I said, this can be hard to take.  But maybe I have to remember the lesson of Malcolm X: it's not about me, and it is not for me. In a way, it's not even my business.

Rather than taking offense, or speaking up, maybe the best thing I can do is LET them hate my male, white, hetero, cis, middle-aged ass. 

If it gets too much, I can look away, ignore it, bite my tongue, live my values in some other way.  Short of actual violence, or the genuine threat of it, maybe I need to let them express themselves, however they like, until they've worked it through.

Diversity is one of MY most deeply-held values, and no one said that living your values was going to be easy (actually, I'm pretty sure that it being hard and doing it anyway is how you know it really is a value). I will continue living that value, even if sometimes it is rejected by those I'm reaching out to.

Perhaps the best I can do is to continue to be a SILENT ally, and to be ready, when they have worked through all that anger, when they are healed, to welcome them as the friends, colleagues and siblings in the universal family that I already know them to be.

Truth, Sales and Leadership

Salesmen, politicians and chief executives are all cut from the same mould. Their fundamental job is to impress and make others feel good about buying what they have to sell.
As someone who has spent his career in product delivery, and who is sceptical by nature, I’ve had a mixed relationship with the sales and presentation types. I have all too often ended up on the hook when one of them sold unicorns when what we had in the barn was donkeys.
But, unlike many technically oriented delivery specialists, I have a deep appreciation for the value and necessity of presentation and sales. I understand the symbiotic nature of our separate disciplines. In the end, things only work out well when both roles are filled competently, and both sides need to remember their dependence on the other if they want to succeed.

To Impress or to Be Impressive

If at this point you aren’t sure which side of this proposed divide is your natural home, let me propose a simple way to decide: which do you think is more important, to impress or to be impressive? If you don’t understand this distinction, let me rephrase: would you rather be famous and admired for something that you didn’t put a lot of effort or skill into, or be amazingly accomplished at something that no one knew about you?
Now some of you are I’m sure objecting that these are always or usually the same thing: accomplishment and skill, and recognition for that accomplishment and skill generally go hand in hand.
But the truth is that it is rarely the case that the two go together naturally. Are the best singers and actors the biggest stars, and vice versa? Are the most successful politicians most often the smartest and most qualified decision-makers? Is your average CEO the biggest expert in the business he is running?
This isn’t a complaint that the world isn’t fair. On the contrary, I think there is a good reason why things work this way. Impressing people requires that you present yourself in terms that they can understand, evaluate and appreciate. Being impressive requires honing your abilities and understanding beyond the experience and comprehension of most people, to make distinctions and to have perceptions beyond what is evident to a non-expert.

When Sales or Fulfillment Goes Bad

Each of these sides has its obvious pitfalls, and to understand these, all you have to do is think about the negative stereotypes of these two groups.
The bad salesman or politician is full of hot air, with plenty of promises that never get kept. The bad salesman is convinced he could “sell snow to the Eskimos”, the bad politician certain that he could finesse over the most egregious scandal and get away with breaking every promise.
The bad expert (let’s use software developer as an example) is disdainful of the buying public, mystified that they don’t see the deep technical skill that went into solving several difficult and subtle challenges but are instead impressed or put off by trivial details, such as the colour choices on the main screen. The bad software developer is convinced that good software will always sell itself, and sales and marketing are clueless bozos who soak up money and accolades that rightfully belong to the technical geniuses.
Both of these stereotypical bad guys are wrong: they desperately and inseparably need each other.

Commanding Officer and Executive Officer

To illustrate the symbiosis of these two callings, I will draw on an example that has literally been battle-tested over centuries. It is traditional in the military for there to be two command roles for every unit: Commanding Officer (CO) and Executive Officer (XO).
The CO is the external face of the unit. It is his job to represent the skills of his unit up the chain, to convince the command hierarchy to give his unit more resources, and to cheerlead and praise his men for their accomplishments. Ideally, he should be loved by his men, and they should feel proud and honoured to serve under him.
The XO is the internal manager and disciplinarian of the group. It is his job to push, prod, terrorize and manhandle his men to improve their skills and achieve their mission goals. He must be the first to observe and criticize any short-comings and ruthlessly punish any breach of discipline. He is the expert in building the best possible soldiers. Ideally, he should be respected and feared, at best grudgingly liked, and made fun of when the men are absolutely, positively certain that he can’t hear them.
With such radically different profiles, you would expect that these two officers should not work together very well, right?
But the truth is that, if both men actually understand their roles, they should be working in perfect collusion with each other. The XO should be feeding the CO with good things about the men that can be praised, and let him know when the men are achieving their best and can’t be expected to give anymore. The CO will let the XO know if any bad reports are coming in from outside the unit and share his fears of how the unit might fail in upcoming missions.
The two roles are distinct, and require different focuses, but they must be done in perfect concert to achieve maximum effectiveness in the situation. Such dual leadership roles can and often are performed by a single person in non-military leadership situations, but there is something to be said for the collaborative specialization of individuals dividing up the areas of responsibility. Even if you find yourself with both roles, you have to find some way to separate them in the minds of others so that they don’t contaminate and undermine each other.

Truth and Presentation

I think we would all agree that the ideal situation is the one where things both seem good and are good, but where the downside is also known and managed. Being aware that some aspects of the truth (possibly not the most important ones) need to be highlighted for the sake of presentation is important for experts to understand. Keeping in mind that finding and fixing negatives is essential for quality products and that it is in everyone’s interests to not diverge too far from the truth in presentation is vital for sales to understand.
A well-packaged truth can only come about when both perspectives work together and respect each other.

The Importance of Mental Models

Many years ago, my wife and I were in Paris, staying in a quaint Left Bank hotel that did not provide an iron and ironing board. My mental model of a hotel is that it should provide these, free of charge, and preferably one to each room: I like having wrinkle-free clothes, even on holiday. However, as we will see, I’ve learned that my mental models are not always adequate representations of reality, and that in order to solve my problems, I may have to construct a new mental model. We decided that the solution to our problem was to buy a compact travel iron to solve the problem once and for all.

To Find an Iron in Paris: How Hard Can It Be?

At home in Toronto, the obvious place to buy a small electrical appliance would be at a large department store, so we thought that the first place to look for our quarry would be at a well-known Parisian department store a healthy walk from our hotel. When we got there, we wandered around a bit, but couldn’t see an appliances department, so we asked a saleslady where we could find such a thing. (We are both fluent in French, so we had a leg up on most tourists in such a situation.)

The saleslady was polite and helpful, but bewildered that we would be looking for an iron in her store: in her mind this clearly wasn’t the kind of place you shopped for such things. It was as if I had gone into a sporting goods store and asked if they had a fresh produce section.

Another faulty mental model: in spite of being two adults with years of experience fending for ourselves, able to speak the local language, familiar with Paris from previous trips, it dawns on us that we are simply lacking the competence to perform the simple task of buying a travel iron in Paris.

What the Heck Is “Darty”?

Luckily, when we asked our friendly saleslady where we might purchase an iron nearby, she offered one word: “Darty.” We weren’t sure if this was the name of a street, a neighbourhood, a local shop-keeper or a store, but she pointed us vaguely up the street, and off we went. Along the way, we found a small shop whose sign indicated that they sold electrical supplies, and we thought this might be what we were looking for, but in fact this store only sold light bulbs of every shape and variety, all stored in rows of wooden drawers mounted like a library’s old card-catalog on the walls. My mental model of the world did not contain the possibility of such a store, so I was mystified and delighted: if I ever need a light bulb in Paris, I will now know where to go.

After wandering around in circles through the figure eight streets, repeatedly asking reservedly helpful passersby for directions, and being vaguely pointed, sometimes in contradictory directions, we finally found a fairly large store, set back from the street with a sign proclaiming it to be “Darty”. At last!

Making a Purchase: What Could Be Easier?

Once we entered the store, it was clear we had found the right place. There were rows and rows of various kinds of home appliances and electrical gadgets. Not all of the logical groupings were readily apparent to me: for example there might be electric fans and electric razors in the same shelving island. Each item had a single display model, out of box, on a shelf with a small card with a number next to it. After some wandering around, we did find a small row of irons, one of which was a compact travel iron.

Now for our next challenge: how to buy one? There were no boxed models to pick up and take to the sales counter, just the floor model and the little number. We stood their looking and feeling clueless for a while, until a saleslady spotted us and asked if we needed help. Saved! Now, we thought, she will get us our item, process our transaction and our quest will be over.

We indicated to her the travel iron we had selected. She took out a little paper form, filled out the number of our item on it, handed it to us, and cheerfully bid us good day. Another perfectly good mental model crushed by a cruel Gallic world! I sheepishly asked where I was supposed to take the form. She pointed vaguely across the store, saying there was a counter.

Sure enough, we crossed the store and found a counter with several clerks standing around. We handed one of them our form, they processed our payment, gave us a new stamped form, and bid us a somewhat perfunctory good day. I waited for a moment, expecting our iron to appear, in spite of the fact that our clerk seemed to have completely lost interest in us. After a few moments, I asked where my iron was. They pointed vaguely in a new direction across the store, and we traipsed off, ending up among rows of televisions sets.

The sales guy there took pity on us, despite my mild irritation that I had already paid for my iron, but did not yet have it in my hand (another mental model). He explained that we actually had to leave the store, and walk half-way down the hall of the indoor mall it was in and we would be able to get our iron there. I’m starting to feel like a sucker: they’ve taken my money, but they are now telling me to leave the store with just a little stamped form and someone down the way will give me my item? Riiiight! Nonetheless, we followed his instructions, finding a little kiosk down the way, unmarked and unattended. After a few moments standing there, dejected and simmering, an attendant appeared, took our stamped form, and handed us our boxed travel iron. At last!

The Joys of Travelling

Now you could take this story as a mockery of the French way of doing things, but the American tourists I’ve seen loudly berating French workers for their bad customer service have got that angle covered.
In fact, I love these kinds of experiences, though they can be distressing at the time, and they are exactly part of the reason I travel. I want to have my mental models challenged by a different culture.

There is a perfectly good system at work there that Parisians navigate every day, I just didn’t understand it, but now I do, and having done so, I’m now just a little bit more competent at how to get needful things done in Paris.

Working with Systems Is Working with Mental Models

Though you could just read this as an amusing anecdote about travel, my real purpose in telling it is to apply it to thinking about useful systems. Doing software development, or managing a team, or running a business are all about navigating, manipulating and improving systems. To work with a system effectively, you need to have a good mental model of that system.

If you want to lead a team, one of your biggest challenges is to communicate your mental model of the undertaking you want the team to pursue. Only if all the members of the team share a mental model which is adequate to the task at hand can they work together to produced the desired end.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that to call yourself competent at some skill is to say that you have acquired an adequate mental model of that skill.

Humility Is the Path to Competence

As the iron-buying story illustrates, it can be frustrating and humiliating to be confronted by a foreign mental model. We are comfortable considering ourselves to be competent adults, knowing how to do things in the world, and being confronted with our own incompetence in the face of an unknown mental model can be painful.

This often leads us to disparage the people that have that mental model. For example, I’ve seen tech teams and sales teams run each other down behind their backs, each side thinking that what they do is complex and valuable, and what the other does is simple or over-valued. The fact is that each has invested a lot into understanding a complex mental model that underlies their respective competence, and it is easier to run down the other’s mental model than to accept their own lack of competence in the other’s domain.

My experience is that if I’m not getting the results I want, or if I’m having trouble communicating with someone else, the challenge is to discover the right mental model to make me competent at that task. The necessary ingredient, sometimes hard to practice, is the humility to abandon the comfortable mental model I’ve already mastered to be able to absorb the new mental model at which I am just a clueless newbie. Only by accepting my incompetence can I find the road to competence.

Captain Kirk Was a Lousy Tech Manager

Those of you who remember the original Star Trek series will remember the running trope of Captain Kirk asking Scotty how long something will take, and when Scotty responds something like “two days”, Kirk would respond with “You have two hours”, or some other ludicrously short period of time. Scotty would shake his head exasperatedly and go off to spin straw into gold (always making the deadline), while Kirk would get a smug, self-satisfied “There’s brilliant leadership at work” look on his face to let us know what a genius commander he was.

Years later on Star Trek: the Next Generation, Scotty made a guest appearance and confided to the engineer that he should never tell how long it would really take to do something: it turns out that the result of Kirk’s management style was to train Scotty to game the system.

Now sometimes good leadership requires pushing team members to pursue “stretch goals,” so that they continue to grow professionally and stay engaged with their jobs. But to make asking for the impossible into a routine part of every task assignment is just a bad idea. Scotty shows us why: it backfires, since the team member learns that honest estimations are punished.

The commanders in the next-generation Star Trek shows, Captains Picard, Sisko and Janeway, had much better leadership skills in this regard. They encouraged honest estimates and had open and respectful discussions with their team members about priorities and deadlines. It’s hard enough dealing with alien invasions and other calamities without introducing dysfunctional group dynamics into your own team through “heroic” Captain Kirk-style management.

Lessons from Confucius for Software Development

In my previous post, I talked about lessons from Confucius that I think are still useful in the modern world, but there is a field of endeavour that I think can particularly benefit from understanding the Confucian worldview: software development.

At first glance, it seems highly unlikely that Confucianism might have some application to software development. The Confucian values of respect for the past, harmonious social relations, decorum and moral leadership don’t have an obvious affinity for an industry that is known for its focus on what is new and shiny, and which is stereotypically populated by raging individualists with a disregard for social standards.

But it is worth considering that the Confucians represent one of the earliest groups of knowledge workers in human history. They were trained in specialized knowledge for specialized tasks in a complex society, and they had a sense that their specialized knowledge made them an elite group in society.

An important concept in Confucian texts that bears on this is junzi. Etymologically, it means “ruler’s son, prince”, but already in Confucius’ time it is used more metaphorically, often translated into English as “superior man”, “gentleman”. The Yiddish term “mensch” has a similar ring. It represents what every Confucian was striving to be.

In spite of its etymology, junzi is one of the earliest-known notions of elite status that is not derived from the happenstance of one’s birth, such as being the literal son of a ruler, or a free man of Athens. The kind of “superior man” we are talking about here is defined entirely by his knowledge and skills, and his savoir faire in using them. Confucianism is a truly meritocratic system of thought, and a modern IT specialist can easily relate to such an ethic.

A second consideration is the fundamentally social nature of software development. If it ever truly existed, the age of the lone genius changing the world with his software is over. Any non-trivial software development these days involves a whole team of people with different specialties and knowledge, and building reliable and maintainable applications requires that these people work together as an effective and harmonious community.

The Confucian junzi has a sense of noblesse oblige, a sense that the status conferred on him by his knowledge and skills requires that he use them for the betterment of his society and to achieve collective goals. He is willing to lead and mentor new members of the fraternity of knowledge workers, and does this not by pontificating, but by providing an example through good practices.

The very fact that these kind of values are not what most of us think of when we consider software development suggests that there is still much benefit and advantage to be gained by nurturing them in software teams, and a team lead could do worse than to study the Analects of Confucius to prepare for the challenges they face.

After all, Confucius and his followers have several centuries of experience organizing and training knowledge workers to draw on.

Lessons from Confucius

When I was in university studying East Asian studies, it was the height of the political correctness era. Of the three major streams of Chinese “religious” thought — Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism — Confucianism was considered to be the “bad guy”, representing everything that is authoritarian, sexist and hierarchical in Chinese culture.

By contrast, everyone loved the individualistic enthusiasm of Taoism, which extolled the virtues of the feminine, or the egalitarian austerity of Buddhism. Confucians, though, were the “dead white men” of Chinese studies.

So, while I got an early grounding in Taoist and Buddhist thought, it wasn’t until I had been in the work-world for some years that I came back to Confucius, starting by reading the Analects in translation, and later, in the original.

The Confucius I found was quite different from my pre-conceived understanding of him, and I was surprised to find that his outlook and advice were unexpectedly relevant to modern life. I also found an attitude quite different from the stern authoritarian stereotype I had previously accepted.

In fact, my surprise started with the first line of the Analects (translations are my own):

To learn something, and to review it now and again, isn’t it pleasurable?

I had, of course, learned as a student about the traditional Chinese respect for learning, but I had been left with the impression that the kind of learning that was meant was rote memorization in strict conformance to orthodox interpretation. But this primary source of Confucius’ personal thought starts off with a child-like enthusiasm for the simple pleasure of learning, a feeling I knew well. This attitude struck me as even more relevant for our modern world, where there is so much to learn and where knowledge and skills are the currency of our society.

Another traditional value of the Confucians I had learned about in my student days was often translated as “ritual”, but it seems to encompass politeness, observance of correct social forms and social hierarchy, as well as what we would think of as actual rituals. We used to roll our eyes at this, since we tended to think that these things are intended to suppress our sincere, individual feelings – that they are empty formalities intended to ensure conformity. But in another line from the Analects, I got another surprise:

Lin Fang asked about the basics of ritual. Confucius said: A big question! In ritual, prefer modesty to extravagance; in mourning, prefer sincere sadness to formality.

Confucius is genuinely concerned with the observance of social forms (and the social forms of his time and place sometimes seem very foreign to us), but he doesn’t recommend them as a replacement for individual feeling, but rather as a vehicle to allow the free expression of individual feeling in harmony with the functioning of the community.

This sense of communal harmony is underlined by the cardinal virtue of Confucian thought, often translated as “benevolence”. It is related to the Chinese word for “person”, and I can’t help but feel that the best modern equivalent for it is the Yiddish word “mensch”. Etymologically, “mensch” means “person”, but its full meaning is someone who has a strong sense of community, someone who can be relied upon to help others and who has the courage to stand up for what is right. This is a pretty close match with the Confucian principle.

Confucius is also very concerned with good leadership, and a recurring preoccupation of Confucians (and ancient Chinese thinkers in general) is how to be an effective ruler. Here is another representative passage from the Analects:

Ji Kang asked: How can the people be made to respect the ruler, to be loyal and take his advice? Confucius said: Ruling them with solemnity will result in respect; showing respect for elders and being kind will result in loyalty; promoting good and instructing the unskilled will result in persuasion.

Contrary to my early stereotype, Confucius has no time for the “because I said so” school of leadership. This is all the more remarkable when you consider that rulers in ancient China did have absolute power. His prescription for leadership is firmly in the “lead by example” camp. Those millennia ago, Confucius had already recognized that people can tell the difference between a cynical, self-serving leader and one who genuinely has the collective good at heart. He knew that the difference between genuine commitment and mere grudging compliance rests on this distinction.

So, my re-examination of Confucian thought not only changed my mind about its essence but actually showed me that there were values and lessons to be learned that I could apply to my life, personally and professionally.

A genuine love of learning, accepting social forms as ways of collectively expressing individual feeling, cultivating sincere feelings of communality with others, and leading by moral example: all of these ideas are still relevant in the 21^st century and, if practiced, can make a real difference in one’s life as a leader and as a human being.

Good to Great

I finally got around to reading the book Good to Great. I first heard about it in early 2002 in the introductory speech of the incoming president at an organization I was in the process of leaving. I was quite impressed with what he had to say about leadership and organizational greatness and made a note to read the book as soon as it came out in paperback. (Hardcovers use up too much shelf space, which is at a premium in my home, so I tend to avoid buying them.) Since it is still in hardcover all these years later, I gave up and borrowed a copy from my brother.

There is a lot of criticism of the book online (here, here and here), but I think most of it misses the point. It doesn’t matter if you are happy with the experimental model the book was based on, or if the companies profiled didn’t stay good stock picks forever after the book came out, or if the advice Collins gives boils down to “obvious” suggestions.

The best business books tell you in an organized and compelling way what you already know to be true from your own experience. No business book can predict the future or give you a sure fire recipe for success, and Good to Great doesn’t pretend to anyway, so why do the critics expect it to?

What I did find in this book was a well-written and thoughtful explanation of the only reliable strategy I know of to accomplish any undertaking: for a disciplined group of people to pursue a focused goal in a determined manner, while being willing to see failure.

Now one can say “Hey, that’s obvious!”. But unfortunately, the obvious is more often observed in the breech than in the practice. The path of least resistance in many organizations is to let ineffective or obstructive people stick around way too long, to let the day-to-day crises and tempests-in-a-teapot derail their long-term goals, and to rationalize or ignore failures.

If Good to Great manages to inspire people by reminding them to struggle against these tendencies and to set a higher standard toward greatness, I think it deserves its place on the best-seller list.

Dancing Monkeys

Many years ago, before I started my software development career, I had a job call-center representative for a national automobile association. This included a twelve-hour shift by myself on Sundays.

The Sunday shift was a bit of a grind. It could be a long, silent, boring wait for calls that never came, or if the weather was inclement somewhere on the other side of the country, it could be very busy handling a spate of calls all alone.

During the normal workweek, when there were a bunch of us working, we would pass the slow times doing paperwork. By Sunday, when I was often the only person in the building, the paperwork was usually all done, so to pass the time I took to listening to the radio. As soon as the phone rang I would shut the radio off and pick up. There was no doubt in my mind that I was doing my job fully and faithfully, in spite of the discomfort and difficulty of the job.

One Sunday, the Vice President of the company decided to come to the office to catch up on some work. At some point, he wandered back to the call-center where it was a slow day, and I was sitting there by myself listening to the radio. He may have greeted me, or asked me how busy I was, but he didn’t stay long and he didn’t say anything significant.

However, on Monday I heard from my boss that he had complained that I was listening to the radio instead of working.

This was my first significant experience of a phenomenon that I call “Dancing Monkeys”: the tendency of arms-length leadership to prefer situations where everyone “looks busy” or is “hopping to”, even when the expected effort would have no additional effect or might even be counterproductive.

There are many reasons for this phenomenon some pernicious and some benign. The pernicious ones that we will all have seen at some time or another is pure ego-tripping: “I’m the top monkey here, so you lesser monkeys start dancing!”

A common, more benign reason is lack of understanding of the work domain under observation. Software development is particularly prone to this one.
For example, more than once I’ve heard some executive complain that he stopped by the development team area and no one was typing, with the implication being that no work was getting done, since as every non-technical person knows programming is all about lines per minute of code typed.

Another common scenario is that inevitable day when, under some unforeseen deadline pressure, some executive asks the development manager when he is going to institute overtime to help meet the deadline. Because of course, as any non-programmer knows, there is no degradation to the quality of software development when the team is exhausted, since typing lines of code is a purely mechanical process.

To come back to my call-center job, effective execution of my duties required that when I got a run of long, stressful calls, I had the energy and focus needed to solve the clients’ problems efficiently and effectively. Anyone who has ever made a service call to a droning zombie service rep knows what happens when someone doing that job lets their energy reserve run down.

Listening to the radio helped me recharge between calls, kept my morale up on quiet days and improved my performance. Doing mindless, unnecessary busy-work would have sapped that energy and morale. Asking my boss to find work for me to do that was meaningful but would not interrupt my real work would have just increased her workload without increasing the efficiency or effectiveness of our department.

So that Vice President had to ask himself: was making himself feel better by getting a dancing monkey really in the best interest of his company?