I had an extremely stupid boss once. He owned the company which he inherited from his dad. The company manufactured and sold stage lighting.
I was a salesperson. Dumb Bob had one rule for his salespeople. That rule was “never say no to anything”.
Now maybe there is some truth to the idea, but Bob took it pretty literally.
Which meant that if someone called and said “Do you sell and install carpeting?”, we couldn’t say no - even though the call was most likely a wrong number. It was a fellow salesperson that got into trouble for that call and I think she was told she was supposed to draw them out and find out if she could interest them in some quality stage lighting fixtures instead.
The real trouble came when someone called or came in with a very specific technical question, something dependent on the dimensions of a fixture or the specific capabilities of a controller. Especially when what they were looking for was highly non-standard and probably didn’t exist. Some of the promises he wanted me to make regarding product performance were just so wrong I couldn’t do it.
I left.
I few years after I left I was in another job, pricing and selling lighting packages for architectural lighting projects. At one point I got a specification that included a controller made by Dumb Bob’s company. It didn’t seem appropriate for the project so I called the lighting designer.
She explained what she was trying to accomplish. She told me about how hard it was to find a controller that did what she needed and how she thought she was out of luck until she called my old company and spoke to Dumb Bob. I had to break the bad news to her and she was practically in tears.
I ended up sourcing an appropriate part for her, but it was way more expensive. I called the manufacturer of that part and told them the story and got her a huge price break so she didn’t have to go back to her client and tell them about her mistake. It was the least I could do.
I briefly worked for a small company that had two dumb owners. They both had been unsuccessful salesmen who thought they’d do better if they owned their own company. They didn’t know a thing about the actual work we did or how to evaluate prospective employees. So a few of us who were good at our jobs pulled the rest along with us.
These owners soon became legends in the industry. One of them tried to use a computer mouse as a foot pedal. The other interrupted a major computer backup by unplugging the computers. They also told us to work more slowly, since they billed by the hour. And one of them brought in a very graphic video of his wife giving birth, encouraging us to pass it around.
One day, the other three member of my shift were out sick, and I had to handle everything myself. I was doing ok until the owners decided to “help.” They micromanaged everything, though they had no idea how anything worked. I finally had to yell at them, “If you really want to help me, just stay the fuck out of my way.”
They eventually went out of business. There was only so much we could do to save them from themselves.
I was a technical writer for about twenty years before I went back to school for another career (I’m now a lawyer). I never had a dumb manager, but I did have a number who were engineers (who are definitely not dumb), but who had no idea what to do with, or more importantly, how to deal with, the English, history, journalism, and language majors who were in their employ as technical writers.
My favourite was the engineer-manager of our tech writing department who was giving me my annual performance review. She claimed that my writing skills were lacking, and would be happy to recommend me for a raise if I could provide proof that I had enrolled in a technical writing course at a nearby community college. It took place at night, so I wouldn’t miss work.
It sounded familiar. “Is that the one that runs Tuesdays and Thursdays from 7 to 9 pm?”
She replied, “Yes! You’ve heard of it then. You must have been looking into it already. Great! Just show me the enrollment papers, and I’ll make sure you get that raise.”
She was rather taken aback when I told her, "I know all about that course. Because I’m the guy who teaches it."
I got the raise without providing proof of enrollment, but not until after she called the college to make sure that I was, in fact, the instructor. She also scaled way back on trying to edit my documents–she knew she had nowhere near the capabilities I did.
I’ve had weird bosses, but only one who was “not that bright.” He was the definition of failing upwards.
He was affable and nice enough to his subordinates. And he knew a lot of the industry buzzwords and trends. He’d work somewhere for a while, then the company would restructure or fall under, and so he’d interview for the next level up when it was time to look for a new job. And he’d say enough of the right things and had enough of the right experience that get the job until the cycle repeated itself.
But, if you worked for him, after a while you’d realize that he doesn’t know things. And not just the technical things, he didn’t know the managerial things either. Nor did he really understand the buzzwords that he’d pepper into conversations. He’d try to cover up that he didn’t really understand what was going on by asking for more information…in a meeting to be held in a month… if there was time.
Most people just ended up working around him.
I think most people in Corporate America are pretty dumb. Let’s be honest, unless you are working at some place like Google, McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, NASA, or some cutting edge Silicon Valley startup, chances are your company isn’t hiring the best and the brightest in the first place. Not like they are hiring stupid people (for the most part). They are just hiring run of the mill people. And they aren’t hiring them to put a man on Mars or develop a new high frequency trading algorithm to rip people off faster. They are hiring them to do boring, run of the mill, corporate bullshit work. And even if you work at one of those places, I would expect that organizational politics would render the smartest person effectively “dumb”.
