The March 2007 Harvard Business Review has a fascinating article on how to manage really bright people in an organization. The authors are Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, and the premise is relevant I think to our nonprofit scene as well as industry.

By “clever people” the authors mean really clever people: programmers who develop new software, scientists who develop new drugs, university researchers on the fast track to the Nobel Prize. These employees don’t want to be led, need to see you as being outstanding in your field in order to respect you, are painfully aware of status but are not moved by titles and promotions, are easily bored, and love autonomy. Maybe all of your employees are not MENSA material, but my guess is that many of them fit this description in terms of the kind of workplace they want and need in order to give their best.

The authors argue that your job is to protect these employees from unnecessary bureaucracy, allow them to fail, provide political cover internally so they can do their work, and then watch them succeed. By the way, when they do, they will never thank you; instead, if you do your job, your employees will see themselves as the agents of all that they accomplish. So, the truest measure of your success managing these kinds of employees, whether they are scientists or social workers, will be in the quality of their work.

This weekend I took Cody for a walk in his favorite place — Redwood Regional Park, up in the Oakland Hills. Alright, it’s actually my favorite place to hike, Cody is pretty easy — anywhere with dirt will do. He is six months old, brown and furry. Mom was a fifty pound yellow Lab, while Dad was a twelve pound miniature poodle. Conjures quite an image, don’it?

Anyway, as we walked along the muddy trails, enjoying the long-delayed rains, Cody finding an excuse to run through every puddle and temporary pond the storm left behind, it occurred to me that this could all be gone, perhaps even in my life time, and certainly in my kids’. Increasingly erratic weather, rising tides, new holes in the ozone, the death of commercial ocean fishing stocks, the loss of glaciers, the end of the polar bear, ice shelves releasing billions of pounds of CO2, the list goes on and on.

Cody doesn’t care about any of this. He is content, in fact he is frequently ecstatic, so long as he gets fed, played with and taken to one of his favorite places on a regular basis. He also likes to sleep right next to the heat vent in the kitchen. It doesn’t get much better than this — no worries.

Unfortunately, we all seem to be trying to emulate Cody: live for today. There is a shift afoot however. Al Gore’s work has made global warming a household word, and even George Bush can no longer deny it is happening. The purchase of TXU carries environmental conditions no leveraged buy out would have considered incorporating even two years ago. An Inconvenient Truth, basically a really fancy Powerpoint, won an Oscar, more a vote in favor of the environment than for the artistic merits of the film, I am sure.

But are we waking up fast enough? Scientists tell us we have very little time left to make the changes we need to make, or it will be too late. If we don’t act in the next 5-10 years, then twenty years from now we will start to see some of the major shifts in climate coming home to roost. And it will be too late.

I went home and gave Cody a bath, washing the scummy puddle water off of him as he squirmed and complained and tried to get away. Then I fed him and watched him curl up in front of the heat vent. He can sleep, but the rest of us have work to do.