Types of Employees

Companies are full of people with different ratings on the intelligence and energy scales. Combine those 2 attributes and you have 4 possible combinations, says Shane Parrish:
-         Stupid and lazy: Companies handle them by breaking down tasks, creating processes and doing everything possible to “remove any need of judgment”. Sound familiar?
-         Stupid and energetic: This set is quite dangerous. Albeit not malicious, they often end up creating more work for others.
-         Intelligent and energetic: Obviously, every company needs such people.
-         Intelligent and lazy: This turns out to be the most interesting category; so I will discuss this at length.
A)    Such people can be tough to work with because they are very atypical: they delegate, don’t micromanage, and (shudder) question dumb ways of doing things.
B)    In addition, “they don’t run around with solutions looking for problems.” (Why do anything when doing nothing is an option?)
C)    Another characteristic of such people is that “they avoid unproductive things (think meetings, paper shuffling, busy work).”
D)   And unlike the intelligent and energetic folks, these guys don’t necessarily want to climb the corporate ladder. And so, unlike that other group, they have the “freedom to be different”.

Which category do you belong to?

Comments

  1. Ramiah KumarJanuary 13, 2017 at 6:07 PM

    Looks like crows have climbed the evolution tree pretty well - they have come out of their 'stone age' to 'straw times'! :-)

    Your usually punchy last line this time happens to be "Which category do you belong to?" Well, is anybody capable of making a choice? What one is, one is! But ask anybody - the answer would be of course, "I would like to be the crow with the managerial straw idea, not the stone throwing laborer!"

    Incidentally your blog is silent on the implication of the second adjective in "Intelligent and lazy". In what way laziness has 'contributed' to the 'formidable perhaps enviable nature' of this category of people? Possibly the graphics is the suggestion in this regard.

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