To The Lazy Ones!

World War Two was in full swing and Churchill wanted some ideas. The story goes he asked his military and scientific establishment for the trouble makers, the difficult ones, the people they put far away from everyone else because no one knew how to use them.

Churchill wanted these people because he knew they pushed boundaries, they didn’t conform to conventional wisdom. They needed out-of-the-box thinking to win in a war of this size and scale.

This idea of finding innovative thinkers confused as troublemakers isn’t specific to Churchill.

The Lazy Ones

There is a quote from Bill Gates “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”

Gates suggests that the “lazy person” will find the most efficient way to solve the problem because they prioritise their energy over everything else.

I have talked about similar ideas here, here, and here.

Energy

Shouldn’t that be the goal? How do we do X with the least amount of resources? Isn’t that what operational efficiency is meant to uncover? Isn’t that exactly what the sustainability movement is saying.

What is the least amount of energy we need to deliver the x amount of value?

The Truth

Is the Churchill story true? I don’t know. I heard it in a history podcast from some good researchers so maybe, but I can’t find anything to confirm it.

Is the Bill Gates quote real? Probably not. There is nothing that said he said these words. There is an article published in 1920 ‘Popular Science Monthly’ by Frank B. Gilbreth Sr who said something similar.

In 1947, Clarence Bleicher testified to the senate and said “When I have a tough job in the plant and can’t find an easy way to do it, I have a lazy man put on it. He’ll find an easy way to do it in 10 days. Then we adopt that method.”

The Takeaway

They are mislabeling lazy with efficiency. Why work harder when you can work smarter?

As the leader of your team, you want to utilise the misfits and their unconventional thinking. If the idea frightens you, then figure out why before dismissing it.

Did they miss out some fundamental truth or did they ignore a poorly understood assumption?

As G.K Chesterton said in his book Heretics – “Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.”