Bystander effect - do not expect someone else to lead the Y2K charge in your company - Editorial

Looks like cake. But it sure smells like meat. Ex-meat."

Comedian George Carlin does a great routine about those Mesozoic morsels that skulk behind the milk in everybody's refrigerator. A few weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal ran a startlingly explicit middle-column piece on the festering leftovers that clog the office fridge -- and in doing so, the newspaper exposed the universal distaste for dealing with the late lunchboxes.

You work in an office; you know all the responses that your colleagues give for not suiting up and pitching in. Not my job. Not my turn. It's someone else's grub. We'll get around to it. Tomorrow.

People are like that. Psychologists even have a name for it: It's called the "bystander effect" -- the trait that allows everyone in a crowd to assume that someone else will rush forward to do CPR on the guy felled by a heart attack. It's the same big group shrug that allows everyone in a corporation to believe that someone else will soon step up to champion the year 2000 cause.

Well, I hate to break it to you, but you're that Someone Else. Have been all along.

The year 2000 issue is an unexploded bomb of such power that it demands extra-mile responses from just about everyone in your organization. Take a look at two of the articles in this issue: The lighter piece on procrastination, and the replay of a "moot court" trial, set sometime late in the year 2000, in which a CFO and a year 2000 program manager are defending their company against a shareholder lawsuit. The former piece ponders what it is about the human condition that allows people to shut their eyes to Godzillas like the year 2000. But as the latter story makes very, very plain, there is no longer any excuse for not knowing, and no longer any kudos for using delegation to masquerade as real management.

Now being exercised liberally all across America, those two lethal "D-words" -- "dunno" and "delegate" -- are already undoing the fortunes of many great enterprises. Too many senior IS managers are hopelessly ignorant of what procedures should be in place to -- just to cite one little example -- ensure that end users understand the impact of the year 2000 problem. Too many others have no clue out how to lay out processes for things like inventorying the home PCs of the company's telecommuting staff, or ensuring that users practice clean management after testing and compliance. In the worst cases, those lost IS souls don't even know what they don't know.

And too many of their corporate masters -- the highly compensated executives who should be sponsoring year 2000 initiatives -- are secure in the knowledge that they've done what all great managers should do: They've delegated the problem. But their delegation has too often become a shrugging off or responsibility: "My E-mail message clearly told him to get it done!' The real managers are those who never lose sight of why they get the big bucks -- and of why they're ultimately held accountable. They check in with their project managers, demand (and get) project reviews, find and use their own ways to benchmark, run checks and balances, and bring ... their intelligence and experience to bear to prioritize, and re-prioritize their year 2000 tasks.

Put another way: There are givers and there are takers in this world. The givers make the world go around. Their 110% is what lands great inventions, wins wars, sparks revolutions, brings crucial projects in on time. If there are more givers than takers on your year 2000 program, and if that ratio is higher at your company than at any of your competitors, you'll come through smiling.

Now go get the mops and sponges. For the ,next eighteen months, it's your turn to clean the office fridge -- before something truly horrible escapes from it.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Wiesner Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group