A Machine Without People

Roberto Saviano admits that the drug markets of Secondigliano always amazed him with their flawless organisation. The drug trade, he writes, is like clockwork. People move like cogs, and every movement drives the next.

Here is how the mechanism works. Wages are paid every week, at a fixed rate for every job: the lookouts, the cashiers, the dealers, the people who hide the goods in their own homes. There are two shifts. Everyone gets one day off. For every hour you’re late, fifty euros come off your weekly pay. On a single street, via Baku, they sell four hundred doses of cocaine a day and as many of marijuana, and the street brings in half a million euros a month.

The lookouts report by mobile phone. A supervisor sits at headquarters, watches a map and sees the police and the customers move in real time. When the police pull up, a car or a moped happens to get in their way, and while the road is clear the dealers are driven off on motorbikes. If a dealer does get arrested, another one steps in from the reserve: usually local addicts or regular customers who agree to work in an emergency. Business is business, Saviano writes. You can’t stop.

And this is the main thing. Thousands of people work without knowing who for. Every level answers to its own supervisor and never sees the whole scheme. When an arrested man decides to talk, there is very little he can tell.

It’s a machine that hardly needs any particular person. Any cog can be replaced within the hour. No cog can give the mechanism away, because none of them knows how it works.

I’m not telling you this so you’ll build one of your own. I’m telling you because it’s the clearest example there is of how any good procedure works—and of what it does to people.

Write Down Every Move

Anything that repeats can be written down. Who does what, in what order, and what to do when something breaks. That’s called a standard procedure, and any business needs one wherever the same thing happens more than twice.

A good procedure frees your head. The dealer in Secondigliano doesn’t have to decide where to run when the police arrive: he knows. The presser doesn’t have to decide in what order to iron a shirt: she was shown once. A head that doesn’t have to reinvent every move can notice what the procedure missed.

But a procedure has its danger too. It can be pushed to the point of absurdity.

In Casino—it’s a film, mind you—there’s a scene I consider one of the most frightening in the picture, though nobody gets killed in it. Sam Rothstein, who runs the casino, calls in the cook and demands that every blueberry muffin have the same number of berries. Not roughly the same. The same. The cook looks at him as if he were mad. The audience laughs.

Now think about it. In his way, Rothstein is right: a guest who gets a muffin with three berries while his neighbour’s has twelve feels cheated. The procedure is needed. The question is where to stop. A procedure should protect what matters to the client, not turn the work into counting berries. When a rule is kept for the rule’s sake and not the client’s, it’s no longer a procedure. It’s a ritual.

The Card by the Door

The simplest procedure is a list. A short one, on a single card, so you can check yourself.

You remember how, in the first winter, the first laundry nearly burned down, and how Don Vincenzo then paid double wages for a year to the presser who raised the alarm. The cause turned out to be simple. At the end of the shift an iron was left switched on on a table, the cloth under it began to smoulder, and the presser who had stayed behind with the last batch smelled it. Nobody was to blame: everyone was tired, and each of them thought someone else had switched the iron off.

The next day a card appeared by the door. Six lines. Press off. Irons off and on their stands. Gas shut off. No wet linen left in the bags. Till counted. Back door locked. The last one out checked every line and signed. For forty years the card hung by the door; they only copied it out again when it faded. There were no more fires.

That’s a checklist. It isn’t made for the stupid; it’s made for the tired. The most experienced people skip simple steps precisely because they’ve done them a thousand times and stopped noticing. A list doesn’t teach you the job. It keeps you from forgetting what you already know. The shorter the list, the more often it gets read. A six-line card lives forty years. A forty-page manual doesn’t last a week.

The Paradox

And now for what the machine does to people.

Gambetta tells a story that an Italian newspaper printed in 1990. A coffee wholesaler in Catania took on as a sales agent a man who had been sentenced to six years at the maxi-trial and whom a turncoat had named as a mafioso. The new agent made his rounds of the bars and restaurants with great diligence and got wonderful results: two hundred and eighty establishments out of four hundred and twenty-six started selling that particular coffee.

The police asked the wholesaler what was going on. He answered: what’s wrong with it? Isn’t there a law that encourages former prisoners to return to normal life? The agent himself took offence. When he had no job, he told the commissioner, the police were always on his back; now he had work, and they still wouldn’t leave him in peace. The bar owners explained why they had agreed so easily: his coffee was the best, and there were fewer robberies, life was quieter. All the commissioner could say was that it was all legal.

Gambetta explains: protection works even when the protector does nothing. It’s enough that everyone knows who protects whom. Thieves leave alone anyone under Don Peppe’s wing, and Don Peppe doesn’t even have to lift a finger. The machine runs on reputation alone.

And here is the paradox. The better the machine runs by itself, the harder it is to tell what the man who started it is worth. Don Peppe and his client, Gambetta writes, can’t work out for themselves what the protection is worth. If there are no robberies, who’s to say whether it’s thanks to the protection or just because? The bar owner starts to feel there’s nothing to pay for.

In an ordinary office this looks familiar. A department where everything runs smoothly and nothing breaks seems superfluous. A mechanic on whose watch the machines never stop seems a layabout. They let him go to save money, and six months later the machines start stopping. The less visible good work is, the more often people think it’s unnecessary.

The Irony

The machine has a second trap as well. The more work the procedure does, the more the person matters at the one moment the procedure fails.

Pistone describes the rules he lived by from 1976 to 1981. Every two or three days he called his contact agent on a dedicated line that the New York office had put in for his calls alone. Valuable information that could become evidence went into reports called “302s”, and when enough of them had piled up, the contact brought them to Pistone to sign. Once or twice a month they met for a couple of minutes in a museum, in front of the paintings, and the contact slipped an envelope of money into his pocket.

But Pistone never kept a wire on him. At any moment someone could break into his flat or search his car. When he needed one, he picked up the device before a meeting and handed it back straight after. And he carried it not on his body but in his jacket pocket or the top of his boot.

Everything written down. But notice that no procedure decided the main thing for Pistone: when to switch on the recorder, what to ask, what to answer when Lefty looked at him a little too long. The procedure protected him from stupid mistakes. From clever mistakes only his own head protected him.

That’s the irony. The machine takes over everything simple, and the person is left with only the hard part. And he has less and less practice at the hard part, because the machine has long been doing the simple part for him. So keep your people in shape. Let them sometimes do by hand what the procedure usually does. Let them know why every line on the card is there. When the machine stops, they’re the ones who’ll be working.

The Bottom Line

Well-run work is invisible: don’t mistake quiet for uselessness. In Secondigliano they keep a reserve for the day the machine stops. You too should have people who understand how the mechanism works.