a brief parable

No actual information about Microsoft is intended in the following story...

It's March 31, 2009 and Bill Gates has officially left Microsoft in great shape. Their stock is up higher than ever, they’ve left their competition, Apple and Linux, in the dust, and Windows software is selling like hotcakes. 90% of the developed world is now using Microsoft software. Before Gates left the company, he developed a manual for all the employees, teaching them how to run the company and outlining expected employee behavior. This manual became an unexpected best seller. Employees and competitors from around the world began to study it, memorize parts of it, and change the way they did business based on its principles. There was some dispute about the meaning of some portions of the manual, and people would define themselves and the way they did business according to what they felt were the most important parts of the manual. For instance, some people thought you shouldn’t be working on a certain day of the week while others thought it was another day, and still others thought it really didn’t matter as long as your intentions were good. It became the norm for employees to gather together once every week to listen while part of the manual was read and an advanced employee would interpret the meaning for them. Even children were taught from the manual in separate meetings. Some employees enjoyed this so much that they would meet together one or two more times to study and think about the manual. It was a rich source of wisdom. The purpose of all these meetings, so the employees thought, was to become better employees and thus improve the company and its image. They reasoned that if they knew the manual very well and obeyed its precepts then their neighbors would want to become employees too. Their company, Microsoft, would look great to the whole world and people would come flocking in...eventually.

However, for all of their studying and memorization, most of them did not grasp the primary reason why the manual was created by Gates in the first place. Yes, he wanted his employees to understand and enjoy his manual and not violate its principles. But the manual had been created to help the company complete a specific task after his departure. It gave instructions about how they were to do this, to whom, and even promised that Gates would take over again when this goal was reached. There were nuggets of wisdom throughout the manual that you could apply in many situations, but Gates was really expecting that his employees would use what he had written to expand Microsoft’s reach to every part of the world, so that every person would be able to learn about their products and become part of the organization. The employees who loved to have meetings about the manual saw this, of course--it wasn’t buried within the text. So they created a new department within the organization to make sure Microsoft kept expanding. Meanwhile, they spent most of their budget on meetings together and creating new meeting rooms for themselves. It became widely accepted practice for employees to see it as their job to attend 1-2 meetings per week, read the manual every day, and take another job in the meantime to support their family and lifestyle. Expanding the reach of Microsoft into places where the company wasn’t yet known became an extra activity an employee could do if they received lots of extra training and were willing to go find employees to fund their efforts from leftover income. Microsoft’s profits leveled off and started to decline a bit. There were many needs to fill and very few full-time employees left to meet them. The best they could hope for, they reasoned, was for people to keep showing up for meetings. They couldn’t reasonably expect them all to keep pursuing Microsoft’s goals all week long.