Contributors
John Mark Reynolds- Contributor

John Mark Reynolds is the founder and director of the Torrey Honors Institute, and Associate Professor of Philosophy, at Biola University. His personal website can be found at www.johnmarkreynolds.com and his blog can be found at www.johnmarkreynolds.info.

The Procedure Man
He Has His Place, But Not At the Front of the Pack
[John Mark Reynolds] 3/30/04

I once worked for a major home electronics retailer. Bigger retailers were beginning to cut into our core business, which was occasionally reduced to selling batteries and fuses. Little help was coming from the home office. Our store was aging with a dated look and products five years behind the times in an industry that measured change in minutes. What did come from the home office? Procedures. Lots and lots of procedures. We had books and books of studies.

Problems? You have problems? The home office would either rebuke my poor manager or send us a procedure for dealing with problems. Our problem was procedure. To put it bluntly, we were being driven crazy by the bane of any organization.

Who is this being? He is Procedure Man. He sits, usually with yesterday’s hair cut and a pained expression on his face, watching for disorder. He creates notebooks. Reams and reams of paper used. Files filled. Meetings held. Studies. Studies of studies. Give him an idea and he will study it to death.

Storytelling, vision, and rhetoric are anathema to Procedure Man. He loves charts and footnotes. He knows ideas will fail and has hundreds of examples. The people in the company who worry him are the “loose cannons.” There are no loose cannons on his ship. He is also looking for a missing quart of strawberries.

Michael Eisner is Procedure Man. Eisner loves milking a proven idea to death, but hates bold risk taking. A new theme park? Sure, if you fill it with off-the-shelf rides and a theme (California Adventure in California) so sleep inducing that only a room full of Procedure Men could love it. If Walt Disney -- the man and not the company -- had been a Procedure Man, there would be no company. Can you imagine a study that would have showed a market for a full length animated movie on dwarves? Disney damned the bankers and the procedures and created an industry.

This is not a phenomenon unique to animation. IBM thought hardware. The men in the white shirts and black ties knew how it had always been done. Bill Gates knew the future and software. Bill Gates won. Only by throwing out Procedure Man did IBM survive.

Another feature of Procedure Man is that he favors short term profit over creativity. Procedure Man slavers to be the darling of Wall Street. He thrives on the “big deal” consummated after much paper has been consumed discussing the big deal. He acts because a study tells him too. He may not be human, but he can always, always, always justify his actions.

Of course, a few Procedure Men are valuable to any company. They should be hired to sit with pencil in hand keeping the world safe from innovation. Procedure Man can prevent crazy ideas from destroying stability. As long as he is not the boss, his decisions can spur innovation as people find ways around him. Many a dot.com died by having too many brilliant people and too few Procedure Men.

California state government is presently chock full of Procedure Men. Our state prisons are horribly run, expensive, and full of shocking evil. Prisoners are raped. Money is wasted. However, there are ever-multiplying procedures to prevent these problems. There are ever more studies on the problem. One can only pray that our current Governor -- a leader, not a Procedure man -- will cut through the forms and give us a better system. Just do it. Any person with common sense could design a better system than the insulated levels of government paper pushers have produced. Fire them all. Remind them that they exist to serve the people, not the other way around.

This would be funny if it were not funny. Watching the Bush administration be simultaneously attacked for being “cowboy” and being “too slow” is a hoot. Procedure Man -- Dick Clarke in this case -- is there with a pained expression explaining how his memos were ignored. Procedure Men hate it when their memos are ignored.

But leaders don’t have time to write memos. They lead. Bush has probably never written a memo and would not know a footnote if he saw it. But then neither did Henry V or Abraham Lincoln. If we lose the War on Terror, it will be because Procedure Man will have won first.

Jesus Christ faced Procedure Man. Christ would heal a man born blind. Anytime. Procedure Man was upset that this was done on the Sabbath. That was against policy. Had Jesus filled out the right forms? Had he asked for the right permission? How dare he? Perhaps we had better hand him over to the Roman Procedure Men to end this reckless disregard of rules.

For you see, in the end, Procedure Man is very cruel. He places his studies and rules in the way of people. He forgets what his company, or organization, school, or church is there to do. He does not recall that one person is more important than any program or policy. And therein lies his -- and our -- ultimate downfall.

Here is hoping that Procedure Man can be put back in his place as a supporter in our culture. May George “Damn the Details” Bush be allowed to win the War. After that, Procedure Men can write all the nit-picking histories they wish. CRO

copyright 2004 John Mark Reynolds

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