The term idiot procreation doesn't mean male and female I-Bosses get together at trade shows and mate. Idiot procreation refers to the strange yet universal phenomenon that occurs as naturally and frequently in organizations as cancelled bonuses. A glimpse into the I-Boss's day will help you understand how their population grows. As I travel around the country attempting to save organizations from themselves, I sometimes arrive too late. Between the time I receive the panicked telephone call, article my flight, and pull my rental car in the parking garage, the entire organizational population is likely to have crossed over into the I-zone—a state caused by the fusion of neurological synapses, usually following an attempt to apply logic and reason to an Idiot Boss's thinking and behavior. Those who are suddenly and unexpectedly adrift in the I-zone have not become idiots. Their mental faculties have merely been disconnected from their power sources. The experience is similar to typing away at your computer late at night when the power goes out. Everything is instantly dark and silent. In the I-zone, your brain goes dark and silent along with everything else. You become one with the power failure. It's an internal virus from which few recover. Imagine being in good health and of sound mind and body as you arrive for work. You present your I-Boss with the brilliant mid-range plan you stayed up for three days and nights rewriting. He looks at it with a blank expression and asks, "What's this?" A voice inside your head screams, It's the mid-range report you asked me to do over again for the third time, you idiot! "Why are you wasting time on this instead of doing important work?" your I-Boss continues, oblivious to the voice inside your head. Your inner voice tries to scream again, but nothing comes out this time, even inside your head. A pop-up window on your mental desktop reads: This program has committed an illegal operation and will be shut down. It's too late to do anything but watch your sanity disappear. Everything goes quiet and your internal monitor screen winks out. I often find people in the I-zone: Weary workers, shoulders slumped, bags under hollow eyes that have peered once too often into the corporate abyss. Standing among these zombies as they wander aimlessly through sterile corridors, I wonder how much sooner I would have needed to arrive in order to prevent the wholesale destruction of gray matter, broken souls, and irreversible nerve damage. There is no sound to accompany the macabre scene except a low moaning that doesn't seem to come from anyone in particular. It's like the poorly looped soundtrack from a "B" movie.

As I stand in the hallowed halls of American enterprise, a mob of moaning, walking corpses parts around me like the Red Sea. I can't imagine how they manage to avoid running into me as I stand there. They must have Flipper's sonar, I think to myself as I slowly shake my head and wonder what might have been. The lifeless expressions worn by the zombies is the opposite of the perpetual smile so many I-Boss's wear. I've never been able to figure out how perpetual smilers manage to bite and chew their food, much less talk, without moving their jaws. Just then, I feel a slight tug on my sleeve. I turn and there is a ghostly looking young woman, once vibrant, now gaunt and sallow. "Why do they make idiots into bosses?" she asks, staring off into space. Her voice is monotone and scratchy, as if someone pulled the ring attached to the string in her back a hundred times too many. Her cavernous eyes search the angles where the walls meet the ceiling as if the answer to her question might be written near that junction of horizontal and vertical surfaces. I've been here and done this too many times to hazard a quick response. I just wait. As I suspected, she doesn't wait for an answer to her first question before asking a second. "Why do Idiot Bosses multiply like rabbits?" Her voice is still raspy. This time she looks at me, but I realize she is sensing my presence more than actually seeing me. I step slightly to the side. Her eyes don't follow. Suddenly, the door swings open to the men's room. Her Idiot Boss strolls out in a limber, almost cavalier manner contradicting the moaning masses around him. "Hey, Dr. John," he calls out to me, zipping his pants at the same time. The ghost person releases my sleeve and wanders back into the river of walking dead. How can he be so glib? I think to myself. He must see these people. Why doesn't he acknowledge them?

By then, he's on me, extending his hand for me to shake. Yech. "We haven't seen you in a long time," says he, referring to a brief appearance I made five years earlier to help develop a corporate communications strategy. Before the strategy could be implemented, the company's earnings hit a bump in the road, top management panicked, and all extravagances were cancelled, especially those they needed most. "Too long," I say flatly, scanning the morbid scene around me. "What do you mean?" he asks innocently. Instead of amusing me, his sheer stupidity invokes an angry response. I feel as if he is taunting me, trying to bust my chops intentionally. Nobody can be that stupid, my inner voice snarls. "Didn't you call?" I ask aloud, trying to sound genuinely curious. I am curious. If you're going to receive payment for your consulting, it helps to know who hired you. "Oh, yeah," he recalls. "I did call you. People were really starting to go bonkers around here after I decided we needed to quit wasting time on meaningless activities. But you can see they've quieted down." He held his arm out in the direction of his office. We started walking. "Define meaningless," I query. I think I know where he's going with this, but I want him to say it in his own words. "I ask people to do certain things and they act like I want them to kill their mothers." I could see he was close to connecting the dots. That's what good coaches/consultants/counselors do. We help our clients put two and two together so they not only understand they have four, but fully appreciate what four means and where it came from. The hardest part in helping idiots connect dots is getting them to realize they need at least two dots before they can connect concepts. Idiots have no problem connecting one dot. They'll draw single dots all day long if left without adult supervision. It makes them feel busy and useful. More importantly, they never have to deal with the complexity of contemplating how two dots relate to one another. God forbid if you ever ask them to consider triangulation. Their heads would explode. I had to help this man find at least one more dot if I was to do him any good or help restore brain function to at least some of his staff.

Despite how cynical we consultants tend to become over time, we really do want to help our clients. We come in the door with a genuine desire to leave things better for having been there, regardless of the money. The money is nice and it helps make the Volvo payments, but I can honestly tell you the desire to make things better than they were before I arrived has nothing to do with money. By helping bosses get better, I make life easier and more fruitful for their team members. Yet, despite my optimism on the way in the door, I often leave feeling utterly defeated. I tend to like and trust people on the front end until proven otherwise. About eight out of 10 times I leave wanting to hire a hitman. As I conversed with this IBoss, my inner voice said, call Guido. Inner voices can bring good or bad news. When I was practicing mental health intervention as an intern registered with the California Board of Behavioral Sciences, my supervisor modeled true cynicism. Supervision sessions for mental health professionals are the most politically incorrect powwows imaginable. Although the imperative is to facilitate emotional growth and healing, the tension and mental exhaustion resulting from treating mental health clients can push those of us teetering on the edge the rest of the way over. We let off steam by making cynical remarks about our clients. No psychologist will ever admit to any of this, and I never taped a supervision session, so you'll just have to take my word for it. I remember my supervisor, in describing a schizophrenic she was treating, asking rhetorically, "Why do the voices always tell them to kill, to hurt themselves, or to live under an overpass? Why don't the auditory hallucinations say, take a bath, get a job, and pay your therapist?" She got out of the business shortly after that. While walking and talking with this I-Boss the voices inside my head were saying, Find the nearest janitorial closet and lock yourself in before you kill him or jump out the window. Then a second inner voice joined the conversation. You know you're in trouble when multiple inner voices appear. Which is it? my rational inner voice demanded. Do I kill him, kill myself or crawl under one of these desks? If I jump out the window first, I won't kill him, and I won't have that on my conscience for the final three seconds of my life. But would I really regret killing him as I fall to my own death? Or would the final, homicidal act of a desperate man be a gift to the world he leaves behind?

Many business executives would need to change their underwear if they ever knew what consultants are thinking about them at any given moment. "What exactly did you ask them to do?" I asked aloud, setting him up. "I asked them to rework the mid-range plan," he said nonchalantly. "Rework?" "Yeah, do it over again." "How many times had they done it before?" We reached his office, a glass-walled cell featuring a panoramic view of the entire floor, from the coffee nook to the copy room. "I dunno, two, maybe three times." "You didn't see any problem with that?" I asked, settling into an armchair facing his desk. The question was typical Socratic consultin coaching, leading the horse to water. But even so, I could tell this one stood a good chance of dehydration. "No, I didn't see any problem with it," lie answered honestly as he closed the door and sat down behind his desk. I had to give him half a point for that. Sitting down without incident that is. "But they had a problem with it." He motioned toward the sea of zombies moving methodically in all directions outside the glass walls of his office. In there, with the door shut, we couldn't hear the low-pitched moaning that gave the zombie parade its edge. The lack of a soundtrack made the sight even weirder than before. More than glass partitions insulated this I-Boss from his team members. At least he saw them out there. That was a start. That was a seed. I decided to go with it. "What makes you think they have a problem repeating the same task over and over again?" I asked, tilting my head toward the zombies. "Look at them," he said. "You would think I asked them to carry loads of bricks up 30 flights of stairs." This guy was a few bricks short of a load himself and he was starting to make me feel really uncomfortable. Being a professional, I breathed deeply, rotated my shoulders backward to loosen up the muscles that had been steadily tightening in my chest since he emerged from the men's room. I knew it was going to take awhile for his elevator to rise 30 floors, so I resigned myself to be patient and try to remember I am paid by the day. "Why do you think they look that way?" I continued, trying to point him toward the second dot that he needed to form an association. "I guess they would rather just be goofing off," said he. No dot. "Goofing off?" "You know." "I do?" "Wasting time." "Oh," said I. "If left to their own devices, your team members would just waste time?" "Yeah," he sighed. "What can you do?"

Y©u can stop thinking like an imbecile. I didn't actually say that. I just thought it. I can't speak for other coaches, counselors, and consultants, but I have terrifying dreams that my microphone switch will one day malfunction and I'll say aloud what I'm actually thinking. These dreams feel eerily similar to naked dreams. "What were they doing when you asked them to stop and rework the mid-range plan for the third or fourth time?" "I dunno," he said, getting a bit irritated. "Why the third degree?" Clients can get snippy with consultants if pushed too far. They're aware of who works for whom. I decided to press on anyway. I owed it to those formerly hard-working, formerly dedicated, former human beings on the other side of the glass. "This is important," I said. "Try and focus." Instead of raising his eyebrows at the condescending comment, he actually leaned forward and listened more intently. Cluelessness can have a silver lining. "Were they doing something you assigned to them when you asked them to drop what they were doing and rework the mid-range plan?" I was highlighting dots left and right. Still he couldn't seem to draw a line between any of them. "Probably," he said, leaning back in his chair. "What does that have to do with anything?" My horse had not only reached the water, he was standing in it. And still he refused to drink. I abandoned Socrates and took out my invisible Magic Marker. "It works like this," I began. It makes me feel like such a failure when an obvious line of questioning doesn't move a client toward enlightenment. Teach a person how to connect the dots and there is hope. Connect the dots for a person and he's still and idiot. "When you ask your team members to do something, that thing becomes a priority. They will jump into the task with intentions of doing a good job." I was referring to early career people before a long line of I-Bosses snuffed out their passions and turned them into hopeless cynics. "When you interrupt their work to shift their efforts to a new task, that diminishes the importance of what they're already doing." "So..?" "So, every time you ask them to do something and then ask them to abandon that task, they become increasingly cynical about the real importance of either task." "Cynical...?" "It's like the boy who cried 'wolf'," I explained in hopes that a child's tale would resonate with him. "Why did the boy cry 'wolf'?" "It's not why he cried 'wolf'," I said without moving my jaw. "The point is that the boy cried 'wolf' when there wasn't a wolf." "That was stupid," he scoffed. "Yes," I blurted out, barely containing my enthusiasm at the hint of a breakthrough. "It was stupid to cry 'wolf' when there was no wolf.

Do you know why?" "It was stupid because there was no wolf." "True," I said. "Can you drill down deeper and think of a bigger problem his actions might cause?" He hesitated for a long moment and pinched the bridge of his nose as he tried hard to conjure an answer. I waited. "I don't know," he sighed amidst a gush of air from his lungs as if a balloon had been untied. Slapping his open palms on his desk to signify his growing frustration he added, "This is stupid." I could see that his meter had expired. Giving someone an answer as opposed to helping him discover the answer violates centuries of Chinese wisdom, but I needed to catch a plane. "When the boy first cried 'wolf', everybody took him seriously and ran or hid. But, there never was a wolf. Finally, they became cynical. Then, when a real wolf appeared and the boy cried 'wolf', they didn't heed his warning." "Are you saying that I cry 'wolf'?" I touched the end of my nose with one finger and pointing at him with the other. "Are you're saying when I give my people something to do, I should let them finish it?" I repeated the gesture. Just when I was starting to think his elevator was out of order, it was moving again. "But what will I do?" "Do?" I asked. "If I give them assignments or let them choose their own assignments...won't that get boring?" "Boring for whom?" "For me." Just when I thought that I was leading him, he led me right into the heart of the matter. Although I credited him with opening an understanding previously hidden from me, I didn't offer to reduce my fee. But now at least he had two dots to work with. "Wow," I said. "What an epiphany!" "Epipha...?" he said blankly. "Never mind," I continued. "Boredom has you switching gears on everyone and frying their brains." "Do you think so?" "There's your answer." "Where's my answer?" "If you were engaged in the ongoing mission of the department, you wouldn't be bored and keep interrupting what people are trying to finish." "Engaged in the ongoing mission?" he asked. "Wouldn't that be micromanaging?

I went to a seminar once and they told us not to micromanage people." "It's a little late for that," I said aloud. That pushed the envelope, but I sped ahead before he could react. "Who reads the mid-range plan?" "The executive committee, I guess." "Has anybody ever come back to you and asked for an explanation of variances from the mid-range plan?" "No," he said thoughtfully. "Once they're finished and presented, they go up on the shelf and never get opened again." "Except when you get bored?" "Yeah, I figure it couldn't hurt to do a little tweaking." "Okay, let's connect the dots," I came right out and said. "You know the mid-range plan is an exercise in futility. Your team members know the mid-range plan is an exercise in futility. Yet, you ask them to keep revisiting it." "Not a smart thing now that you put it that way." "Right," I affirm. "That is micromanaging in the worst sense of the term. You're looking at your department as a bee hive that exists to amuse you." "I wouldn't say that," he protested. "You don't have to say it, I just did." I was emboldened by the rush that consultants get when we're on a roll. "What if I were to say you can macro-manage by becoming a trailblazer and clearing a path through the bureaucratic jungle so your people can be more productive?" "Really?" "Really. You will be entertained, even challenged. And your people will come back to life and do amazing things." "When can I start blazing trails?" "You already have," said I. The story I just told you is a fantasy. Real I-Bosses don't get it that quickly.

I always miss my flights. But they can get it, given sufficient guidance and encouragement. I've seen some radical turnarounds in my time. I've even been the catalyst for many of them. More commonly, however, I-Bosses are influenced by other I-Bosses, in which case bad behavior only gets worse, and the body count in their departments grows to staggering proportions.

This kind of thing keeps me humble. When I'm drawing on every ounce of creativity and influence I possess to teach some sorry sonof- a-goat I-Boss how to connect dots, I need to be mindful of where I came from and how difficult it was for me. As I said at the top of the article, sometimes flying into a righteously indignant rage just feels right, even when it's wrong. To paraphrase Sigmund Freud, sometimes an idiot is just an idiot. Apart from the question of where idiots come from, if you are serious about trying to successfully work for one, it's important to understand how idiots wind up in leadership positions. Just as idiots didn't intentionally set out to become idiots, neither did most Idiot Bosses intentionally set out to become bosses. It's important not to confuse I-Bosses with God, Machiavellian, Masochistic, Sadistic, Paranoid, Buddy, or even Good Bosses.