While drafting Saturday's post, I knew I was missing one of the hyperlinks that I wanted to include. Naturally, I didn't run across it again until this morning's news-cruise. The irony was that reading it was the seed of wanting to address the topic of bottom-up innovation being squashed by top-down management.
I'm sorry to admit that I have signed non-compete agreements. The first time I was too naive to know that they are a legal joke here in Wisconsin. Or at least were--I'd have to double-check now. The second time, I had a lawyer ready to rock, should it come to that. (It didn't.)
But it just floors what intellectual fastidious remains in me that these ridiculous things haven't been outlawed at the federal level, upheld by the Supreme Court and notarized by God Almighty. They're Just That Stupid. I'm not saying that employees can't walk out with intellectual property and damage their employers. It's happened to firms for which I've worked, although the real damage has been that the, errr, "spinoff" company has absconded with clients, sometimes under false pretenses. But with other more legally viable options available, the use of non-compete agreements only further cements my opinion that "management science" is an oxymoron.
C'mon: Don't you find it just bit ironic that you can walk down the bookstore business aisle and find rows upon rows of dead trees breaking down "success" into seven habits or one-minute parables or six sigmas or whatever the paint-by-numbers meme-du-jour happens to be?
Yet, just as most people want the miracle pill in place of nutrition and exercise, you'd never sell a leadership book that says "Retain only the best employees and don't give them any motivation whatsoever to to elsewhere." Why? Because it's a "waste" of manager and potential co-worker time to spend hours vetting the top applicants. Because too many managers would rather try to isolate or ignore a "problem" (or even sub-optimal) employee than fire her/him. Because too many people--particularly managers--have been convinced that if they just tweak the reward/punishment mechanisms enough, they can close all the productivity and morale leaks and operate on auto-pilot.
Long story short, non-compete agreements are a cop-out. Just like threatening to fire people for discussing salary information. Or waiting until a downturn to remove the dead wood. Or hiring outside talent rather than growing it from within.
And so I hope that the Massachusetts Legislature sets a trend to remove one cop-out from the business play-book. For good managers--and there are many--won't miss it. Everyone else has one less excuse to suck. And that can't be anything but good news.
