Some colleagues often say they are lazy. Usually they actually imply that, since they hate work, then they need to be overly efficient. Yes, they are essentially boasting.
On the other hand, I am genuinely lazy. Granted, I am overly efficient, and for a lazy person, I do work long hours, but my heart is not in it. I lack the deep perseverance needed to keep fighting unless it is absolutely necessary.
I have no qualms about leaving work at 5pm if I am tired. I even admit to having sometimes skipped work completely to go skiing instead. And I do not even feel guilty about it. Never mind that the right circumstances for that only recur every 10 years or so. My avowedly lazy colleagues would never own up to that.
And why not?
I surmise this largely relates to a macho subtext in the dominant corporate culture. We feign to be warriors, and warriors never betray weakness. They are never tired: they can spend 12 hours in a meeting room without ventilation and swear that their brains are still functioning at top speed.
Then I am not a warrior. I do not even share the basic trait of corporate warriorhood: I have no passion for action. Action, though, is the great goddess of managerial achievement. It is difficult to prosper in any turbocharged organization without being her devotee. Define the job of any leader? It will revolve around making decisions and, above all, taking action.
I remember a senior executive in the steel business, shortly after the onset of the 2008 financial crisis. He was detailing the shock measures that had been decided in order to cope with the economic tsunami that had taken us by surprise. “This crisis is of an entirely new type. We ignore its characteristics, we cannot predict how long it is going to last. But the worst would be to take no action.”
Action is not only a goddess, it is an antidepressant.
Faced with difficulties of any type, stakeholders will fume or panic until you can exhibit an “action plan”. Never mind if the actions in the plan are impossible to put in place, or if they bear no relation with the true causes of the issue. “The worst would be to take no action”.
Poor me suffers in those moments. I cannot help it: I prefer problems to heal alone, teams to take care of their own problems, and do nothing whenever possible. I actually believe that in many situations, the cost and the side effects of acting outweigh the potential benefit that action itself can bring. Call me biased toward inaction, but I am pretty sure that most of my colleagues are unduly biased toward action for action’s sake (Aktionismus, the Germans would say).
I may be a bit Chinese.
In
The Art Of War, Sun Zi demonstrates that triggering an offensive is the least efficient way to win a battle: by attacking, you consume your vital energy at an amplified rate. In addition, by doing so, you necessarily unveil your intentions. And you trigger adverse forces which, once put in motion, may never stop until they vanquish you. For Sun Zi, it is much preferable to ride the wave of circumstances when they are favorable to you, with the smallest effort on your side, and to wait away unfavorable straits.
Contrast that with our macho businessman-cum-warrior mythology, in which the most sacred and revered figure is that of the general brandishing his saber and leading the charge himself, at the head of the army! Behaving otherwise would not be fully honorable.
Definitely, I am too lazy for war.
