The monkey laws and delegation

Tareq al-Suwaidan explains the 'monkey laws' — William Oncken's theory of delegation published in the Harvard Business Review and later issued with Ken Blanchard as the book The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey — defining the 'monkey' as the next step in any piece of work ^{1 2}.

Among the rules he gives: every task has one owner, never two, the rest are assistants; the monkey's owner is the lowest management level able to tend it — if a section head can do the work it is his, not the general manager's ^{3 4}. Delegation does not cancel responsibility: the leader remains responsible for the error even though he did not commit it himself ⁵. And a monkey is either fed, handed to whoever will feed it, or killed ⁶. His practical rule: do not take other people's monkeys — every open door or ringing phone brings one; whoever comes with a problem must first try himself, and only when all have failed does the chronic problem return to the leader ^{7 8}. He applies it even to raising children: he recounts that his daughter came to him with her maths homework and he refused to solve it for her until she tried — she solved seventy per cent correctly, then ninety per cent the next time, until she owned the task herself — against the story of a mother who wrote her daughter's homework with her left hand ^{9 10}.

Al-Suwaidan couples delegation with a life rule (his view): whoever cannot succeed alone should attach himself to a successful person for three to five years, then become independent; he advises the young never to accept lifelong employment and to make independence and ownership their goal — 'to own one per cent is better than to manage a hundred per cent' — describing prolonged employment as a modern image of servitude (the speaker's opinion, voiced as a rant) ^{11 12 13}.