173 – Professional Lazyboys

Lounging around is healthy and vital, but it’s no map to successfully helping, teaching, and leading other people. The professional lazyboy is sneakier than the professional naysayer and, in his own lazy way, he can be much more dangerous. Call him out—of his comfortable seat, that is.

He lounges in his office. Laziness is his answer to everything. “That’s easy, no problem,” he answers as if on cue. Some things are, in fact, very easy, but he confuses easiness as a strategy unto itself.

The way to stay big is to be big, but the professional lazyboy has no strategy to become big. He sits atop a brilliant structure someone else built, but he gives no credit for the building and only takes credit for managing the decaying momentum from the pioneers who already left.

If business were a train, he would think the engine the biggest problem. Momentum is a given, to be taken for granted, never the resulting indication of good stewardship strategy. Therefore, in his mind, the engine is just a silly gimmick to fool those unpolished, badly-dressed, uncooperative fools who founded the organization that he perfected. Though the money and customers are dropping, that’s from the economy, stupid! If he hadn’t sold-off the engine to get rid of that obnoxious noise, the organization would be in worse shape because no one can read with that annoying whistle blowing and the dirty engineer hauling coal around the train!

Never learn and understand the inner workings of your company if you can just pay someone to do it for you. The way to innovate for the future is to follow the proven strategies widely published in periodicals, reviewed by journals, old enough to have made their way into college textbooks, and implemented by college graduates who studied those strategies half a decade ago. That’s cutting edge! Never do anything that everyone else isn’t already saying to do, otherwise you’ll never find your niche.

Find the formula. Pay for bulk production en masse. Money can solve all your problems, but never say so. It’s an easy formula, after all. People have already been doing that for years. Don’t change what works. Laziness triumphs!

Proverbs 26:1-16