It's all Greek to me

Okay, this one is a little esoteric.

Thousands of years ago the Greeks laid down the foundations of what we call logic. Logic is basis of how we think and draw conclusions in the Western world. In doing this, they identified several errors of logic that continue to bore first year university students to this day.

There are two, however, that should be of interest to business leaders. The Error of Construction and the Error of Division.

The Error of Construction tells us that you cannot assume that the characteristics or interests of the individuals that make up a group are also the characteristics or the interests of that group. Simply said, a company made up of all hard-working people isn't automatically making great progress. All the individuals may be hard-working, but they could be working hard on the wrong things or working hard against each other.

Conversely, the Error of Division tells us you cannot assume that the characteristics or interests of a group are necessarily the characteristics or interests of the individuals that make it up. So, a company may have a great business plan, but that doesn't mean that it has great managers or even great planners.

Now just because you can't assume, doesn't mean it can't be so. There are companies that make great progress and have all hard-working employees, but it means that this was thought through, planned for and managed to be that way. The error would be thinking that all you have to do is to hire hard-working people to build a great company. You have to give them structure and process, rewards and recognition, strategy and vision to link them to the success of the company.

Also, don't be surprised if a great decision for the company is resisted by its employees. One client decided that it would be easier to lock down the desktops of its workstations to better and more easily manage its computer assets. Overnight, all the pictures of family, handy little shortcuts, even where icons were placed disappeared in favor of a generic desktop. The next morning, management was faced with a minor mutiny by all the support staff. A change might be a good thing, but it needs to be planned, communicated, even adjusted and the transition needs to be managed.

Take it from the ancient Greeks. The challenges of management have existed for a long time.