There is a madness going on in this modern world of business. How do we want to call it? There is a race to get things done and to be faster. But the madness is not the fact that we want to become better and richer and more beautiful and that we want to have an easier life. Human beings are like that and, lucky enough have all the capability to reach it.

The madness is that it has become a common work attitude to chase for success in a way that does not really create progress – it only appears to. And everybody runs the race as if this really worked and as if it was the best that we can do. How do we call it? The race for the shortest shortcuts? The run for the longest lists of done tasks? The way forward for the best ways to keep people busy with what keeps them busy? The competition about who can execute the most things with the least questions about the purpose? The crazy speeding game? No… we will call it: The Flying Hamster-Wheel.

Why do we call it like that? Because it is about busy activity that is not much better than a hamster running in a wheel – so much running for not much real progress, or even rather more damage done. And, because, by a peculiar miracle, these hamster-wheels can fly – I mean, they can’t move forward, and the do not have any solid base, but they can move upwards in the career and in the hierarchy. And, another really funny thing: They can reproduce whole systems of hamster wheels once they have started to fly upwards.

Translated into real-world, business language: The Flying Hamster-Wheel is a very widespread phenomenon in many organizations where a way of working that does not produce real solutions and no value for the customer, but a lot of ‘done tasks’, makes eager, busy people look like very dynamic and successful, loyal employees. And these employees are promoted, to become managers – the hamster-wheel starts to fly upwards – and these managers make sure, the rest learns to follow the same way of working (however, of course not everybody will fly in that game, only those who are the fastest turning hamster wheels). These are the key characteristics and ‘results’ of the Flying Hamster-Wheel.

Last but not least, the very best about the Flying Hamster-Wheel is: This game is not just for fun or virtual: At the end you can buy cars, houses and yachts with it, yes, you even can gain considerable popularity with it (to be more correct in terms: public visibility) – provided, of course, that you become a master in following the rules…
So, how does that work? The Flying Hamster-Wheel is a game. A game has rules, here they are – read carefully and follow eagerly and you will see how beautifully this works:

1. Rule No. 1: Make always sure that your list of tasks is the longest and the fastest to close tasks as ‘done’ and the fastest to add new tasks. (Most important expert recommendation in the game: Do not think too much, do not ask difficult questions, do not listen too much to people who do the work – that is time that you don’t have if you want to follow rule No. 1. Recommendation No. 2: ‘No time’ is an argument that always works if people ask you to do something that is not compatible with rule No. 1)

2. The goal is always to quickly execute every task given by your manager – no matter if in reality we would rather need to solve a complex problem, need to gain agreement or need to develop people or build new organizational capability.

3. You must not ask questions about if the task makes sense or about what is the purpose or how that is related to customer needs and customer value. At least, not too much (do not ask real good and tough questions).

4. Do not look left or right what others are doing and how your activity might affect them (except for the case that you need them to work for your tasks)

5. Do not bother around with proper logic and with getting real data and quantification. That’s simply too much time and not quick enough (also complicated and difficult to understand for many).

6. To replace missing logic and data, give your opinions and common-places. Or pull something halfway similar and plausible out of your subjective experience. Or refer to the high importance, urgency and the attention of senior management.

7. Do not ask what has happened, or how much, or where and when (also called ‘evidence’) – instead, be creative with what you guess might be good ideas of ‘solutions’. In general, be generous with fast conclusions.

8. Replace all unknowns with your opinions, assumptions and conclusions.

9. Never document your assumptions and data-base in decision proposals.

10. A solution is best if it is an action that can be taken short term, within you area or direct influence, must not cost too much and – see next rule

11. The management system must not be questioned or changed. If, by violation of this rule, somebody brings this up: They need complete and perfect evidence that the management system is wrong, but you and your managers do not need any (objective, quantifiable, real) evidence that the management system works

12. Accept that solutions and analysis must be simple and fast. Nothing is complicated in business, thus, your action and your solutions should be simple, too. Otherwise you are the one who causes the problem with the problem. And by the way, how do you want to follow rule No. 1, if you don’t stick to simple things?

13. Accept all excuses that are driven by the motivation to maintain comfort zones or power fiefdoms

14. Accept all excuses that come up to avoid being consequent with logic, research/investigation and about why we can’t do the necessary work needed to get data, understand other viewpoints and in order to understand the whole system. Accept all excuses that are rooted in the inability or missing will to look into new, modern approaches to solve problems.

15. If you feel, that the excuses of employees and mid-managers are not acceptable, blame the people for what the problem is and refer to their responsibility, commitment, motivation and to fast execution needed.

16. Demonstrate quick, straight-forward and strictly executed action plans. Do not change the plan if reality shows contradicting evidence – you do not have time to redo things or to look back.

17. Do not listen to people with different views. They are just the ignoramuses who impede your great solutions that would be needed.

18. Make sure your first results come up within the same month. Make sure your recommendations can be executed and finished within a maximum of two months. (And of course, if you want to become a real master: The shorter, the better – see rule No. 1).

19. Do not bother about how you measure if your solutions work. Implementation is success.

20. If you hit granite and nothing moves or things dissolve in missing responsibilities and missing collaboration, either refer to rule number one or to rule number 15 and 13. Then simply drop it from your list and do not talk about it anymore.

21. As soon as you have a made recommendation and you have the decision from your management: Make sure, your solutions become known as great success and considerable cost savings (if applicable, if not, you will easily find some benefits by turning into positive what does not work today). It does not matter that the real benefits and cost savings cannot be known yet.

22. Make sure that the cancellation of your solutions later is not reviewed, not published, not communicated. Or make it look as if this makes sense as part of another great, new solution that you just have invented (see rule No. 12: keep it simple ).

23. If people dare to surface problems and issues that have to do with anything that you have to do with, quickly refer to, either: The good things that work. Or: That life is not perfect. Or: That we need to concentrate on the things that move forward, in order to move forward.

24. Make sure your success and busy activity is valued (rate yourself and your activity with extraordinary/clearly exceeding expectations; do not bother about any doubts and self-criticism; if criticism, questions and doubts come from your manager, always quickly and firmly refer to the long list of done tasks and busy time that you got by always following rule No. 1)

25. How you name people who are asking for evidence, for logic and who point to all the unknowns or to the need of a holistic consideration of the business: Either ‘academic’ or ‘theoretic’ or ‘overanalysing’, ‘interesting ideas, but unfortunately not possible in our business/our area’ or ‘strong analytical skills but weak in drive for success’. Or simply refer to the fact that life is not a perfect place and full of constraints and the need to move forward.

26. Trust in these rules and do not question what this does in the long run to the business, the customer and the others (who do not know how to play this game). The purpose is rule No. 1. Enjoy your flight. There will always be enough people on the ground who manage to even make ground-hamster-wheels move forward by some centimeters

27. If somebody comes with new approaches that you do not understand or that are incompatible with rules 1 to 26, refer to the fact that you made a career with your rules and that thus, obviously, your rules are the better ones. Your rules are the real truth if it comes to talk about practice and outcomes.

28. Don’t worry: In average it takes about 40 years for a great new startup to grow big and complicated and to go bankrupt within one year by application of these rules.

29. Do worry: Are you in the last year of the 40 years? Then it is time to look for a new employer, where more people with your good competencies can be found than in your current company. Refer to rule No 1 and, in case needed, to No. 27 to market your skills.

30. Do not surface any important issues or problems that you notice. Other people will raise them if they are really important and if they really should need attention.

31. Do not move if question comes to what you can do to help others complete their tasks or to take responsibility for a difficult, risky leadership task to work on some old, deeply rooted problems with work and management culture. Just wait, it will go away. Remember: These are not tasks on your list, but somebody else’s.

32. Remove your mirror from the bathroom-wall. Or do not look too closely at the guy who looks back at you every morning.

33. Questions about this list of rules? Please remember rules No. 3 and 5

As you can see, this is a fairly long list of things that you need to do – not just by hazard this roughly corresponds to the average, typical length of a task-list of urgent tasks of a person who successfully practices the ‘Flying Hamster-Wheel’.

As you can easily understand, this will keep you quite busy – but don’t worry, just stay calm, trust the rules and carry on. You will see that many of them are surprisingly easy and quick to follow and this will help you to avoid a lot of difficult, cumbersome detail and investigation work and, above all, a lot of brain-strain-creating reflections.

These rules are a very good protection against depressing self-doubts, they help to avoid self-critical reviews of your own approaches and painful, time-costly phases where you need time to let your brain settle and work out all the found evidence and to figure out what all the unknowns and open questions and complicated systemic considerations would suggest as a next, effective and meaningful step or next question to ask.

Also, by sticking to these rules, you make sure that you will not waste your precious time to develop others – these rules help to focus on your own outcomes, their number and speed and their visibility – well known key factors for your personal success and career. Also, always remember how much all these rules help you to be the best in following rule No. 1.
We wish you a lot of fun and as much busy activity as possible and a great vertical flight in your Flying Business-Hamster-Wheel.

P.S.: Please consider if you want to donate some Euros to the author of these lines. Certainly, your manager will understand that this should be an important task on your list, because the creation of this very valuable list of success rules for the Flying Hamster-Wheel will make you the perfect, faster-turning task-executor. You will be a dream-employee for every manager who knows to play this game. Again, remember rule No. 1 and do not think about it for too long. Just do it.

I am running trough the long floors of the big main building of our global company headquarter. The building where the power, the core competencies and the best knowledge of our business is at home. The building where this great success-story has been lived in the last 15 years. I have come here from my subsidiary office location to meet some people live. And I am now running from one meeting to the next, from one contact to the next and I ask myself: „Why didn’t you do it on the phone? Why didn’t you look more carefully how far the meeting locations are away from each other, and in which building they are? Now I am running…and still can’t be in time.“ The simple excuse: The problem is not the live meetings. The problem is that they postponed it several times and my original setup with enough walking time in-between was destroyed. The better, more relevant answer: I didn’t do it on telephone by intention. Because I wanted to be able to see their faces, when I ask my questions. I wanted to see, if they react with incomprehension, if they are puzzled, embarrassed or rather open and interested.

Was that really necessary? Worth the running around?
50 steps and a minute further down the floor my anger replaces that question with a more valid, more important question: „Why the hell at all do I have to run around between a total of meanwhile 8 different contacts to get answers to a relatively simple question? A question that already the first two contacts, one of them is my own manager, should have been able to answer. Directly, immediately. For the sake of the problem analysis that they gave to me as a task.“
The question is about what damage resulted from the fact that we slightly missed a certain KPI once in the last period. The question was asked because it was said that this caused problems and losses and I am now trying to get more data and some specific cases about this damage. In order to find causes and effective solutions to make sure we won’t do such damage again.
As they were not able to answer that question (that after all, this question tries to capture, what the problem really is, that I shall work on), I had talked to the boss of my manager, which had assured that this was indeed a very important KPI and that we get a lot of trouble if we do not meet it. And he gave me two names that could tell me a lot of stories and cases that would illustrate, why this was so important and how that was doing damage.
He was contact number 3. Meanwhile I am running to talk to contact number 6 and 7 – and number 8, out of my private network, waits for me in the neighbor building, then afterwards. Contact number 4 and 5 had first accepted my meeting requests, then redirected me to contacts No. 6 and 7. Note: They first had accepted and only when the date approached, 3 hours before the time, they had changed their mind and suddenly found out that somebody else would be better to talk to me. Why do I get the impression, that they simply prioritized this down as they saw the meeting time approach? And I thought, I was working on a really important KPI and a really urging problem…?

Oh my dear, why didn’t I do it on phone…? Because it seems to be a delicate, difficult, sensitive question – that’s all I found out so far – besides the fact that my own business (another 7 contacts, however inside our area and in the hierarchy downwards) does not see this KPI as decisive for their business decisions. So I am running to find somebody, who can confirm the statement that this KPI influences decisions and results of my company. There must be somebody who can explain how that goes with the decisions and lost opportunities…and which these were, specifically (also called: facts). Funny enough, contact number 5 is sitting in the very same cubicle as contact number 2 – right in face across the desk. That feels like a strange, embarrassing situation (ask yourself if it was embarrassing for me or for them) and seems to me like a bad omen – and indeed, while I talk to that friendly, experienced and competent man I discover that he can’t answer my question neither. But at least, also he can confirm that the KPI of course is very important for the company and that missing the KPI can create a lot of trouble, effort and damage of this and that kind. However, he can’t give me one single real, fact based case, neither.

But, for heaven’s sake, I thought, can that be true? He can not really tell me what has happened because we missed it once, by some half percents. He and his colleague are working all day to make sure we meet that KPI as a unit and finally, I thought, above all as a whole company– but both can’t give me any concrete, real life case that really has happened as as consequence of missing the KPI. All I get are stories about stories of what absolutely can happen and is a risk. Finally, I am leaving the meeting with his promise to get another contact from him – and off I go running through the long floors to meet contact number 7.
And while I am running and blaming myself for my tight meeting arrangement, the word ‘Kafkaesk’ raises to my mind for the first time. Wasn’t it just like this in Kafka’s novel, ‘The Trial’? Somebody being brought from one official person to the next, walking through long floors, stairs up and down – without understanding the purpose and connection to real life? Or was that rather the typical old experience in government administration offices: ‘No this is not our area of responsibility, please go to room Number 138’ – maybe I am mixing up things. Anyways, both would not be a good way of working for my company.

Contact number 7 listens with interest to my question and background about why I am here, and, remarkably enough, she is the first one who confirms and agrees that my question is important to be answered, considering the type of problem that we want to analyze. In the next minute I discover, why that might be (before, nobody understood why I ask that question, really): Unfortunately she is just a tool-developer for the processes that my question is about – but she does not have insights and expertise about why and how her colleagues are doing their job with this process and the KPI and why really it is so crucial for our company.
Now I am definitively convinced to be in a chapter of Kafka’s novel (wondering:”What did I do why they are doing this to me?”). Why the hell did the contact named by the boss of my manager send me to another contact that can’t even say anything about what I need to know – because she is doing a different job? My question had been well explained, live on phone.

After all, she is very sorry, but can’t really help. But isn’t it remarkable that she is the only one so far who confirms that it is logic to raise my question? What does that mean? Either she is free of bias, unlike the others, and does not need to defend a status quo of an established way of work against all good questions and logic – or we are both ignorants who just do not understand what this is all about. However, if we are really just missing special knowledge – why are 6 other contacts not able or not willing to explain with a real life case what this is all about?

Contact number 8, my private connection who had been doing that kind of job some years ago – gives me a basic lesson of what the whole KPI is about in general (in general!) and why it is important, in general. And what damage and efforts and risks it can generate, in general and in principle, and if we have many of these KPI deviations in many units. His basic lesson teaches me two things:
1) 70% of what he tells me was already understood, despite the fact that I am not a subject matter expert. I had imagined that there must be something complicated, difficult to understand in this area of expertise. But, no, this is quite straight and simple, a bit like I had thought for myself based on what I knew so far. I can think in logic and across several steps of cause and effect, that was all what was needed to understand enough.
2) He is the only one who has a halfway acceptable reason why he is not able to answer my question with facts and real cases about the damage caused: It is years ago that he has been working in the area where these KPI are being controlled and where he was part of the consequent decision and reporting processes. All the other contacts are right now today in the middle of all of that, with responsibility and up to date knowledge of daily business…
3) We have a problem with not one unit such as mine missing the KPI, but with the fact that either a large number of units or some few with much bigger weight than us are missing it at the same time. That was already said by contact number 2 some time ago – however without specifying any details about numbers and units – for reasons of sensitivity and confidentiality, as he said.
4) His ‘lesson’ and general explanations already help me to think a good step better about how, when and why the KPI might be important – or not.
Thus I now wonder why I did not at least get these insights from a not small number of 7 official contacts, before? And why do I get so much incomprehension for this question that none of them even is able to let me get a basic lesson? Probably my way of talking and asking plays a role. Admitted, it certainly does. However, what does it tell us that I must be very very skilled in talking to people and asking my question to get facts and knowledge out of one of 7 contacts? Shouldn’t that be rather quite plain and easy? And that still I only have general explanations and not one single real fact, so far? Considering that not I, but contacts number 1 and 2 said that this was a real problem and important and influencing decision taking and creating losses to our company?

It tells me that either I am really part of a Kafka-like story, where I am guilty of something that nobody can explain to me. Or that we all are simply chasing a ghost, and not a real problem. Or there is a real problem, but they are pointing to it in the wrong direction.
They are very busy and eager to fulfill their task in their little box of defined tasks. Everybody is relying on the next box that this somehow all together makes sense at the end. And that it is effective and efficient. Everybody trusts (=assumes) that the big bosses all up there in the hierarchy – or the big wisdom of management status quo – know the purpose of their tasks. They are showing-off with allures so important and serious and adult. But in reality they are just little wheels that are working fine and who do not have the job to ask for how the whole really works. And now I am the uncomfortably solid grain of sand that disturbs the whole works of wheels with my ‘stupid’ question about the purpose and about facts.

As if I was the problem here – I am astonished, even shocked that they are really quite unaware of the purpose of their own tasks, or at least that they do not see how foggy their stories about the purpose and the needs are. I am astonished and shocked that they are so free of any data and real cases of what has happened because one unit has missed a KPI. I always thought that this kind of blind and data-free task execution would be a black-and-white exaggeration, a management-book-story and fictive showcase. I thought the works of wheels was a drastic metaphor to make people see. A fiction in an old black and white film by Charly Chaplin. I thought I would never find it so well and clearly represented in reality. But here it is, in reality, just as meaningless as in Chaplin’s film. I don’t know what to say any more.

And it even is worse: They are not just blindly executing their tasks. They are even making other people more busy because they define the (one time) failure of not always perfectly executing their tasks as a problem (statisticians call it either ‘not enough data to conclude anything’ or ‘natural variation’). A problem important enough to have priority and to be worked on with many hours of very eager and busy detail ‘data’ analysis work. We are doing this, while we still don’t know if there is any real problem (a case, facts) with the missed KPI. However, what I can now definitely say after my run through the floors and the 8 contacts is, that THIS ignorance of purpose and lack of connection to business reality (= facts) and/or the inability to explain what is meant, is a serious problem and risk for my company. I found evidence as long and high as 8 contacts and hundreds of walking steps and so many precious minutes in meetings.

What a waste of time.

But at least, my health has benefited on that day – because I had to run about 2 kilometers through floors and a total of 8 stories of stairs upwards. Well, if that is fine for my company… so it shall be fine for me. However, maybe next time we do it with a jogging-outfit and somewhere outside in the sun, please? And who takes then care of keeping my company successful and my job safe and all of us prosperous and proud? The task executors in the Kafka-Chaplin house of boxes and wheels are not doing it.