A Million Zeroes Still Don’t Add Up to One

Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung once wrote something that should probably be posted in every headquarters, corporate boardroom, and executive office in America: “A million zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one.” Jung was writing about the individual and the dangers of mass organizations, not about military or business leadership specifically. But the observation translates remarkably well. Jung’s next sentence was even more important: “Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual.”

There is a leadership lesson in those two sentences that is easy to understand and surprisingly difficult to practice: more does not necessarily mean better. More people, more meetings, more emails, more PowerPoint slides, more metrics, more initiatives, more policies, and more activity do not automatically produce better results. Sometimes they simply produce more.

Leaders have to know the difference.

Activity Is Not Accomplishment

One of the easiest mistakes to make in a large organization is confusing activity with accomplishment. Busy organizations look productive. Calendars are full. Meetings overlap. Email inboxes are overflowing. Teams are constantly preparing briefings, updating trackers, responding to requests for information, and producing reports explaining what they are doing. Everyone appears exhausted, which somehow becomes additional evidence that important work must be occurring.

The military is particularly susceptible to this because activity is highly visible and therefore easy to measure. How many patrols did we conduct? How many soldiers completed the training? How many exercises did we execute? How many engagements did we conduct? How many rounds did we fire? How many hours did we fly? How many slides are in the briefing? These measurements can be useful, but only if they tell us something meaningful about whether we are accomplishing the mission.

Businesses have their own versions. How many calls did the sales team make? How many customers visited the website? How many employees attended the training? How many projects are underway? How many meetings did the team conduct? How many new initiatives did we launch this quarter?

All of those numbers might matter.

Or they might be zeroes.

The responsibility of the leader is knowing which is which.

Find the One

Every organization has a handful of things that actually determine whether it succeeds or fails. Usually, the list is considerably shorter than leaders think.

In a military unit, that might mean whether soldiers can shoot, move, communicate, maintain their equipment, operate under difficult conditions, and perform the mission they are actually expected to execute in combat. Everything else should ultimately contribute to those capabilities. Training calendars, inspections, maintenance meetings, administrative systems, readiness reports, and professional development programs all have value, but their value is derivative. They exist to make the organization better at accomplishing its purpose.

The same is true in business. A company ultimately has to create something people value, deliver it effectively, generate sufficient revenue to survive, and retain enough talented people to continue doing those things. There may be thousands of supporting activities surrounding those functions, particularly in a large corporation, but leaders cannot allow the machinery supporting the organization to become more important than the reason the organization exists.

This is where Jung’s million zeroes become useful.

A thousand activities that do not contribute meaningfully to the mission do not become valuable simply because there are a thousand of them. A hundred mediocre initiatives do not equal one excellent initiative. Fifty meetings about a problem do not equal solving the problem. Ten committees do not equal a decision.

And a hundred metrics that measure the wrong things do not equal understanding.

Leaders have to find the one.

Everything Cannot Be a Priority

One of the clearest indications that an organization has lost its way is when everything becomes a priority.

Leaders announce five priorities, then seven, then twelve. Headquarters publishes additional requirements. New initiatives are layered over old initiatives that nobody officially canceled. Every good idea becomes mandatory. Every problem generates a new policy. Every incident produces another training requirement. Eventually the organization accumulates so many “priorities” that the word loses any useful meaning.

People respond rationally. They learn which requirements are actually important, which ones the boss personally cares about, which ones can be delayed, and which ones merely need to look complete on a spreadsheet. Instead of accomplishing priorities, they begin managing requirements.

That is not necessarily because they are lazy or cynical. It may simply be because the organization has given them an impossible mathematical problem: make everything number one.

Good leaders make choices. They decide what matters most, and equally important, they decide what matters less. Prioritization without deprioritization is not prioritization at all. It is just accumulation.

That can be uncomfortable because saying something is less important requires accepting risk. Every task has an advocate. Every program exists because somebody once believed it was important. Every meeting has someone who thinks everyone needs to attend. Eliminating unnecessary work therefore requires something leaders sometimes struggle to provide: the willingness to say no.

Measure What Matters

Modern organizations have access to extraordinary amounts of data. That should make leadership easier. Sometimes it does. But data creates its own temptation: if something can be measured, leaders begin assuming it must be important.

Not everything important is easily measurable, and not everything easily measurable is important.

A commander can count how many soldiers attended a leadership class much more easily than determining whether the unit has better leaders. A company can count how many employees completed an online training module much more easily than determining whether behavior actually changed. A headquarters can count training events more easily than determining whether a unit could perform under fire. A business can measure website clicks more easily than determining why customers trust its brand.

The danger comes when the measurement becomes the objective.

Once people understand what senior leaders are measuring, they naturally begin optimizing for the measurement. That is not necessarily dishonest. It is human behavior. If leaders repeatedly ask about a number, the organization will find ways to improve that number.

The question leaders must continually ask is whether improving the number actually improves the organization.

If not, it is another zero.

The Courage to Stop Doing Things

We tend to think leadership is about starting things. Leaders launch initiatives, establish programs, create task forces, reorganize departments, introduce new policies, and announce new priorities. Those actions are visible. They demonstrate energy and give the impression of progress.

Some of the best leadership decisions, however, involve stopping things.

Cancel the meeting.

Eliminate the report nobody reads.

Stop collecting the metric nobody uses.

End the initiative that sounded promising two years ago but never produced results.

Remove the approval layer that exists only because it has always existed.

Tell people they no longer need to prepare the weekly briefing because everyone already knows what it says.

There is an important distinction between organizational discipline and organizational bureaucracy. Discipline creates the conditions necessary for people to accomplish the mission. Bureaucracy frequently begins as discipline and then continues long after anyone remembers why the requirement existed in the first place.

Leaders should periodically walk through their organizations and ask a brutally simple question: If we stopped doing this tomorrow, what would happen?

Sometimes the answer will reveal that the activity is essential.

Sometimes the answer will be, “Nothing.”

That is useful information.

Quality Before Quantity

Jung’s original observation was not really about mathematics. His concern was the tendency of mass organizations to diminish the importance and responsibility of individuals. His broader argument emphasized individual quality over sheer organizational scale.

That idea has enormous relevance to leadership.

Ten mediocre people do not automatically outperform three excellent people. Adding another layer of headquarters does not necessarily improve command and control. Hiring more employees does not automatically increase productivity. Adding another staff section does not guarantee better planning. Creating another committee does not guarantee better decisions.

Sometimes scale solves problems. Sometimes scale simply makes problems larger.

The quality of the people matters. The quality of their training matters. The clarity of the mission matters. The authority given to subordinate leaders matters. The standards of the organization matter. Most importantly, the organization’s ability to distinguish between what is merely urgent and what is genuinely important matters.

Great organizations are not necessarily the ones doing the most things. Often, they are the ones that understand what they do not need to do.

Know What Counts

There will always be more things to do than time to do them. There will always be another meeting someone wants you to attend, another metric someone wants tracked, another initiative someone wants implemented, another briefing someone wants prepared, and another requirement somebody believes deserves to be a priority.

Leadership means making choices among them.

That requires understanding the organization’s purpose clearly enough to distinguish the essential from the merely desirable, the important from the interesting, and the signal from the noise. It means protecting subordinates from unnecessary work instead of simply forwarding every requirement that arrives from above. It means accepting that doing a few important things extraordinarily well is often better than doing dozens of things adequately.

Most of all, it means remembering that numbers can create the illusion of progress. A large organization can generate enormous amounts of activity without moving meaningfully toward its objective. A small organization can concentrate its people and resources on the handful of things that matter and accomplish extraordinary results.

The leader’s job is not to make everyone busy.

The leader’s job is to know what counts.

Because Jung was right.

A million zeroes still doesn’t add up to one.

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Charles Faint is the owner of The Havok Journal. He served more than 27 years in the U.S. Army, including seven combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan with various Special Operations Forces units, two assignments as an instructor at the United States Military Academy at West Point, and operational tours in Egypt, the Philippines, and the Republic of Korea. He holds a doctorate in business administration from Temple University and a master’s degree in international relations from Yale University. For The Havok Journal, he writes largely on leadership, military and veteran issues, and current affairs.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.