Finnegan seemed ecstatic. “Focus,” he exclaimed. “I like that word!”
I was eager to continue. “They were very puzzled. I could see that. They were looking at each other, and some were shaking their heads. But, the funny thing is, within seconds, some of them seemed to be nodding as if they understood.”
“Did they now?” Finnegan asked. “And which ones were nodding their heads?”
“Well,” I said hesitantly. “To tell the truth, it was the bad workers, the ones who had never been very good at carrying out my program.”
“Oh yes,” Finnegan said, as if making a mental note. “The bad workers. The ones that didn’t go along with the program that had led you to the point of business disaster.”
“Yes,” I said. He was, after all, merely stating a fact. “And. . .that was it. I went back to my office, put my feet up on my desk, said to hell with the rest of my schedule and began to try to figure out how I could do things badly. After all, we were all in this together, and I wanted to try your methods myself. First of all, I wanted to see if they would work. Second, I wanted to see if I could understand them.”
Finnegan clapped a hand on the table enthusiastically. “You know, I knew immediately when I laid eyes on you that you would be an apt pupil. I said to myself, “If ever there was a man capable of bad work, that one is!”
I felt strangely humble. “Why, thank you very much,” I said.
I basked in his praise for a moment, then came to with a start.
“But let me tell you what happened next,” I said. “For a couple of days, my workers seemed a bit at sea, as if they didn’t really know what to do. But as time went on, I noticed that they were relaxing more and more—the bad ones, in particular—and becoming more playful. Let me give you an example. We have a very rigid way of answering customers who call to order cookbooks. I started this system to make sure we were always polite and that things got done just so. It was something I learned in the Marines. . .”
“A magnificent organization!” interjected Finnegan. “Of course, they always kill their customers.”
“Yes, I suppose they do,” I said, “but let me tell you what happened. I caught one of the order-takers, a sloppily dressed young man, joking around on the phone with a customer, taking much longer to fill the order than we usually do. I almost chastised him, but then I remembered he was supposed to be doing things badly, and kept my silence. Well, he kept joking and chatting with the customer, and in the end, he took a larger order than usual! I thought perhaps this was a fluke, but I noticed several of the other order-takers were following his lead, and at the end of the day, orders for cookbooks had risen!”
“Humanity beats conformity,” Finnegan said, almost to himself.
I barely heard him, though, because I was continuing excitedly, “And that wasn’t all. I caught one of my staff writers, a woman who has no technical knowledge at all, goofing off and ignoring an article she was supposed to be writing. Instead, she was doodling something on a sheet of paper, some technical drawing with lines and numbers.”
“Did you speak to her about it?”
“I did!” I replied. “You would have been proud of me. I gave her a huge smile and said, ‘You are doing badly. Good for you!’”
Finnegan clapped his hands. “Good for you!” he replied. “Without even any specific instruction, you have grasped another of my principles: Do things badly with enthusiasm!”
“That’s an excellent idea, even if I say so myself,” I countered, laughing. “Now, what do you think she was doing?”
Finnegan leaned back meditatively. “Well, I would say she was trying to do something she’d never done before because she hadn’t been encouraged.”
“That’s right!” I said. “She was trying to solve our problem of having pages fall out of our books.”
“Excellent!” Finnegan enthused. “But let’s review. What exactly has changed in your workplace?”
I thought about it. “Well, people have eased up, especially the workers that I thought were poor workers. They are trying new things, new approaches,” I said cautiously.
“What about your good workers?”
“Well, they are having a harder time accepting change, I think. They seemed more puzzled than the bad workers by the idea that they should do things badly.” I looked at him. “Why is that?”
“It’s quite simple,” said Finnegan. “Like many bosses, you think workers are ‘good’ if they do what you tell them, even if you are forcing them to take a mediocre approach. Day in and day out, they follow the program, never thinking for themselves.” He shook his head. “That is not good. When conditions change, the businesses they work for fail, and they are thrown out of work, wondering what happened. Furthermore, they have a hard time finding work in other fields—because they are so used to being told what to do, they don’t trust their own ability to explore.”
I was trying to follow this. “And why are the bad workers more adaptable?”
“Again, simple,” replied Finnegan. “People who do rotten work often do so because they don’t like the boss and think they are getting away with something. They can actually be quite inventive in thinking up reasons why they didn’t come to work on time, or didn’t finish that job on deadline, or left parts of it out. Their poor performance is a creative endeavor.”
He paused to make his point. “But they carry out that endeavor only to get back at the boss for being an idiot. If you give them permission to do things badly, their motivation to perform poorly goes away. Especially if you show them, as you did, that the business will go down, and take them with it, if they don’t exercise all their skills. When that happens, their natural drive to do things well takes over.”
He rapped a knuckle on the table, as if to illustrate the vigor of that natural drive.
“Being told they can do badly has taken the pressure off them. Now, in this freed-up atmosphere, the creativity they spent on undermining you they now spend on doing an excellent job. They have a stake in what they are doing, and perform outstandingly!”
I was trying to absorb all this, but at the same time, something was nagging at my memory. “You said something right after I told you that my order-takers were no longer behaving like Marines,” I said. “What was that?”
Finnegan smiled and repeated what he had said.
CHAPTER FOUR: Humanity Beats Conformity
“HUMANITY BEATS CONFORMITY,” FINNEGAN SAID.
“That certainly has a ring to it,” I replied, “and I think I get what it means in one way. That you shouldn’t do things robotically, time after time. But I sense that it means more than that.”
Finnegan, for the first time today, savored his Ethiopia Sidamo—black, no cream or sugar—and set the cup down very carefully, as if its placement on the table were of great significance.
“You are entirely right,” he said. “In fact, Humanity beats conformity is the key to the success of doing things badly. It applies to both the psychology and the practicality of the matter.”
I, too, had a drink of coffee. I was also enjoying the Ethiopia Sidamo, black, no cream or sugar. It seemed that as I was falling more and more under Finnegan’s influence, I was beginning to share his tastes.
“When you refer to the psychology of the matter, what do you mean?” I asked.
“Simply this,” replied Finnegan. “Often when we are young, or starting out in a field of endeavor, people tell us we are doing things badly. Now, this is undoubtedly true. In fact, hardly anyone who tries something new does well from the very start. But the message we get is that doing badly is a negative thing. People belittle us, criticize us unduly, bring us down. Suddenly, we go from having fun and doing things badly—and making progress here and there—to doing the very safe things that we find we do pretty well from the starting gun.”
He propped his chin on the “Y” between his right thumb and forefinger, as if bracing himself to consider things more deeply.
“And the real
ly damaging thing is that we are being led along a pathway that the person in charge believes is correct. `Do it the way I did it. Don’t take chances. Play the percentages.’”
Finnegan reflected. “There was a time when that worked reasonably well, when you could expect to work all your life for the same company, plugging away at something you were reasonably competent at, even if you hated it.” He sighed. “Now, that’s all gone. Anyone who doesn’t take risks in today’s economy is in big trouble.”
“And taking risks means doing things badly?”
“Indeed it does. In an industrial economy, there may well be `one best way’ to do many tasks: shoveling coal, inserting a part in an automobile, laying bricks. The efficiency expert, Frederick Winslow Taylor, was the prophet of that approach. But in an economy based on service and information, the human factor takes over to a remarkable degree. Each human being may accomplish things in his or her own special way. But finding that special way often means stumbling along for a period of time.”
“Explain.”
Finnegan took my denseness with good grace.
“Doing things badly is a method of exploration, and it can have surprisingly powerful results,” he said. “A writer often finds the best way to write a story by just jumping in and writing whatever comes to mind, letting all the ideas and scenes and bits of dialogue flow across the page. If she finds she’s on the wrong track, fine. She stops, takes a deep breath, and starts all over from the beginning. Now she knows she is on the right track, because she has a powerful sense of the wrong way to go.”
“I don’t quite understand,” I said.
“Think of it this way,” said Finnegan, “You are traveling through a forest and you have two paths you can choose. It happens that you choose the wrong path. You can start along that path and poke along, worrying, wandering a little way off, then coming back to the main way, never really sure if your direction is correct. Or you can rush boldly along that path—doing the wrong thing with all your energy—until the landmarks show you clearly that you are traveling the wrong way. Then you can return to your starting point and strike out with confidence on the correct path.”
I sipped coffee and thought about this. “That’s a very clear metaphor,” I said. “But how does it apply to doing a job?”
Finnegan thought for a moment. “Well, I can tell you of one very clear instance in which it applied to a job. When I was a young man, working for a large international concern, I was stationed in New York City. Some of my friends and I used to like to spend Friday nights drinking at an Irish pub a few blocks from Little Italy. Well, one night after we had imbibed a bit too much, we were very hungry. So we wandered a few blocks and found a small pizza establishment that had only one employee, an elderly Italian man who spoke English very badly.”
“Strange,” I said. “I never would have taken you for a drinking man.”
Finnegan was patient. “This is when I was quite young, as I told you. It is a time of life when one naturally gravitates toward doing things badly.”
“Ah, yes,” I said. “But you were telling me about Italian food.”
“Actually, I was telling you about an elderly Italian man. As it turned out, he did everything at the pizza place: cleaned it, took the orders, and cooked the food.”
“Let me guess,” I interjected. “He cooked food badly.”
“No, actually, he took orders badly,” replied Finnegan. “The menu was rich and complex, but it was something of a trap. One of us ordered linguine carbonara, another lasagna, still another pizza with pepperoni, anchovies and green peppers. I asked for spaghetti with meat sauce.”
“You mean, he couldn’t keep track of all that?”
Finnegan assumed a meditative look. “You know, he seemed to be taking it all down meticulously. But when the order arrived, all he served us was plain cheese pizza and green salad with Italian dressing.”
“I suppose you complained bitterly.”
“We did indeed,” said Finnegan. “But his English suddenly got even worse, and he seemed not to understand us at all.”
“I hate bad service. The only way to deal with it is to refuse to pay and walk out. I suppose that’s what you did.”
“Well, we would have,” Finnegan said, “but we were ferociously hungry, and drunk enough not to take ourselves too seriously. Actually, after a few vain protests, we tucked right into the food and devoured it all.”
“And it was—?”
“Delicious!” exclaimed Finnegan. I could almost see his mouth watering at the memory. “The pizza had the lightest, flakiest crust, with just a hint of firmness. The tomato sauce was spiced with a blend of flavorings I have never encountered anywhere else. The mix of cheeses was delightful, and the cheeses themselves appeared to be of the highest quality. The salad was crisp and icy, and the dressing carried the tang of lively, unusual herbs.”
“Well, you were lucky that the dishes he selected turned out to be good ones.”
Finnegan put a finger to his lips. “I don’t believe there was any luck involved. I always surmised that our bad order-taker was also bad, or at least mediocre, at preparing the other dishes on the menu. So he simply selected what he did best. Then he did it every day, for every customer, no matter what they ordered.”
I nodded. “Instead of doing what everyone else did, he played to his own strengths, and did something unique.”
Finnegan was nodding, too.
“Exactly. Humanity beats conformity.”
CHAPTER FIVE: Perfection is a Pitfall
ONE MORNING WHEN I MADE MY usual Starbucks run, I passed a woman on the way out I believed I recognized. Rather pretty, carrying herself with an attractive sort of confidence.
Though I was almost certain she was not a regular at the shop, I thought I had seen her there. Once I settled down with Finnegan, I asked about her, and he made the connection for me.
“That’s the woman who was asking me for advice the first time I saw you, a few weeks ago,” he said. “I recall you hanging back while I spoke to her, then leaving without approaching me. I had a feeling, though, that you would approach me at some point.”
“I recall her now.” I said. “Except she looks much different. Less frantic, more relaxed, even better put together. She seems to have lost some weight, and she walks as if she knows where she’s going.”
“I am not disputing you on those points,” Finnegan said. “In fact, you are seconding my own observations.”
I was listening, but carefully watching, too. I had begun to examine everything about him quite closely.
When I entered, he had been reading the slim volume I had first seen him holding. Now, making no particular effort to conceal the book, he slipped it into a side pocket of his coat. Preparing to do so, he inadvertently gave me a full view of its cover.
The title was right there in front of my eyes—even so, for some reason I couldn’t read it. The phenomenon puzzled me, but I quickly forgot it. Finnegan was speaking again, in a mildly mesmerizing way.
Once again, I was drawn into the flow of his conversation.
“Like all my clients,” he was saying, “the woman has given me permission to speak in general about her problems, and her success in overcoming them. So I don’t hesitate to tell you that she is making exciting progress.”
“Progress in her personal life, as opposed to business?” I said. “So Finnegan’s Way works there, too?”
Finnegan modestly inclined his head, as if the answer should have been obvious.
“Finnegan’s Way, as you put it, is an approach to life itself, not to business alone, so of course it works in personal endeavors.”
“And how has this lady applied it?”
“Very simply,” he replied. “By avoiding perfection.”
I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. “Isn’t that a little too basic? It would seem that avoiding perfection would be very easy.”
Finnegan took a drink of coffee as he ruminated.
“Fai
ling to be perfect is easy, that is true,” he said. “But that is not what I am talking about. I’m referring to consciously avoiding perfection. This woman is on the point of divorce because perfection has become her goal in many areas. She wants to be the perfect wife, have the perfect body, have the perfect relationship with her husband.”
I rolled this around in my mind, recalling the woman as I had first seen her.
“That puzzles me,” I said. “As I recall, when that woman first consulted you she was overweight and nervous and she seemed quite disorganized. Not what I would call someone who was obsessed with perfection.”
“Not true,” said Finnegan, waggling a finger. “That was exactly the case with her. She was so obsessed with perfection that she had given up. Her life had become chaotic, she was fighting with her husband all the time, and she had let everything go: her body and her life.”
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