Benchmarking 'Mankind When Unmanaged'

David Maister presents the following figures in his talks (available here). They are a guess at categorising types of people as they are currently behaving within a professional service firm:

• Dynamos 23%
• Cruisers 60%
• Losers 17%

He presents his own definitions but the only one that isn’t particularly intuitive is his definition of ‘Loser’ where he recognises that we can all be losers at some type in our lives.

I would suspect that many people would suggest that this is a good guess of the percentages in each category for their organisation.

The really interesting thing is that David is, during this talk, is trying to make a ‘case for management’. He says ‘those numbers are probably about right for mankind when unmanaged’. So if these figures seem about right for your organisation then you a performing like an unmanaged organisation! Your management function (nothing personal here – jus the system itself) is not meeting the case for management presented by David.

Using the analogy of giving up his own smoking and over-eating habits David says ‘If you leave me to find the energy solely on my own the odds that I will do it purely because it’s logical and purely through self-discipline are in fact quite low’.

What an interesting question. How does your management system compare against the benchmark of ‘mankind when unmanaged’?