Somewhere in the middle of new employee orientation, more years ago than I shall admit, I suddenly jerked awake when the briefer very slowly enunciated that “It is a fireable offense for employees to discuss their salaries.”

Tom Peters once insisted that in a capitalistic society, where we reward according to performance, why not post the scores? The answer, quite obviously, is that we often don’t reward according to performance, despite what we say. What companies get from such a policy is mistrust, with rumor replacing fact.  As the WSJ reported in an article today (paywall), even ostensibly well-run companies like Apple would sometimes rather play games than build a more powerful organization.

The article makes an important point: Don’t kid yourself — people will find out the truth. And some of the better performers will feel betrayed.

Like many readers of this blog, I come from a military background, where you can look at people’s uniforms and know to within a few dollars a year how much they make. And not coincidentally, the best military organizations make a fetish out of building Einheit.

In Boyd’s framework, Einheit is what defines the organization: We strive to improve it within our organization, and one of your primary goals is to destroy Einheit in your opponents. If you build an environment where internal politics flourishes, you’re doing your opponents’ jobs for them.

As the Journal article observes: “So one way for employers to head off internal politics: Be even more transparent.”  It would seem logical. Showing that you have nothing to hide is a step towards building trust.

Surprise.

You may recall that he did not like programs like “employee of the month” for a couple of reasons. If they truly recognized superior performance, then your small group of superior performers would win every month. And if you ensured that “everybody had a fair chance” at winning, then you’re rewarding poor performance.

New research at Washington University in St. Louis confirms this, and adds another point: employees will game the system to give themselves the best chances of winning. So you end up rewarding those who are good at winning contests, not necessarily those who contribute to achieving the organization’s objectives:

• “The researchers show that two types of unintended consequences limit gains from the reward program. First, employees game the program, improving timeliness only when eligible for the award, and strategically calling in sick to retain eligibility.
• “Second, employees with perfect pre-program attendance or high productivity suffered a 6 percent to 8 percent productivity decrease after program introduction, suggesting that awards for good behavior they already exhibited de-motivated them.”

Note that “timeliness” is a performance metric and like all such metrics is susceptible to gaming.

What the second bullet indicates is that programs like this destroy Einheit.

John Boyd coined the term “OODA loop” some 25 years ago, but it’s always fun to watch a pundit, particularly a business guru, breathlessly discovering this amazing new strategy.

Here’s the latest one I’ve found, “What a Fighter Pilot Knows About Business: The OODA Loop,” on Forbes.com.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a firm believer that anyone who writes about the OODA “loop” and credits Boyd (as this article did) is doing good work. Once people start down the path, a few will look deeply enough to make Boyd’s framework a powerful strategic tool.

Having said that, how much trouble would it be for authors such as this one, to Google “John Boyd” and learn a little about what he actually wrote?

For example, the article insists that:

4. Action refers to business process management (BPM). The right actions may require workflow or process orchestration, whether manual or via software, to control the flow of work and to trigger the execution of human (or automated activities) at the right time.

Does this, perhaps, give you a top-down flavor? People are “triggered” and presumably sit around with their thumbs up their you-know-whats in the interim. Boyd, by contrast, is all about creativity and initiative.  For example, on chart 74 of Patterns of Conflict, he wrote:

A common outlook possessed by “a body of officers” represents a unifying theme that can be used to simultaneously encourage subordinate initiative yet realize superior intent.

Nobody in an organization run according to Boyd sits around waiting to be “triggered.”

Oh well. As I said, anybody who spells Boyd’s name right is doing good.

[If you’d like to know what Boyd actually wrote about the OODA “loop,” I modestly recommend my paper, “Boyd’s real OODA loop,” available on our Articles page.]

Ester Dyson, Internet entrepreneur and venture capitalist, reinforces the point about physical proximity building Einheit:

So, yes, online work can make a lot of sense in many situations, but when you are trying to fix a broken corporate culture, you need the commitment, human engagement, and creative interaction that happen most consistently in a physical workplace. In the end, it is up to good managers to decide who can work where, and to make meetings short and useful.

It’s an interesting article, especially since Dyson doesn’t work in an office:

Personally, I come at this from the opposite direction. As an independent angel investor with no real day job, I don’t have an office to report to every day. But I would miss the companionship of people working around me – even if they do not necessarily work with me.

And she confesses that same of her viewpoint may be colored by personal interests:

And the benefits of human contact and interaction are why salespeople still call on customers instead of using Skype, and why Meetup (which supports organizers of face-to-face meetings; I am on the company’s board) changes lives in ways that Twitter and Facebook rarely do.

She makes a good point about salespeople, many of whom, ironically, work from home: Face-to-face contact is very high bandwidth because  voice tone and body language are often better indicators than the words themselves, particularly if you’re trying to sense when it’s right to pop the closing question. And Skype, Facetime, and Google+ still only give you a window, still filter something essential out. You can still look much deeper into a prospect’s emotions in person.

Anyway, I guess that all-in-all, I’d have to give Mayer the benefit of the doubt. In a turnaround, you have to do something dramatic. Check out The Turnaroundby Dean Lenane on our Articles page, for some examples perhaps more in tune with Boyd’s framework. If you have the same system / culture, then people are going to act in pretty much the same ways and produce pretty much the same results. The question is whether now that she’s shattered domains, as Boyd might put it, she can build a new snowmobile at Yahoo! Time is of the essence because what she has right now is a potentially poisonous stew containing lots of resentful work-from-homers.