Miles' Law

I have heard the phrase "Where you stand depends on where you sit" a number of times without ever knowing its origin. The obvious implication of the adage is that the policy positions you take depend on your responsibilities, circumstances, and context. To understand why someone is doing something that seems counter-intuitive to you, you have to understand what might be driving them to that position. People may do stupid things, but rarely are they being deliberately stupid. There is some construct which has led them to believe that the stupid thing they are doing is either the best thing to do, or perhaps optimal, or the least bad thing to do. To understand the policy, you have to understand the perceived context.

The adage was apparently originated by Rufus Miles, a senior federal civil servant. He wrote a paper outlining his argument The Origin and Meaning of Miles' Law by Rufus E. Miles, Jr., Public Administration Review, Vol. 38, No. 5 (Sep. - Oct., 1978), pp. 399-403.

Miles' Law says: "Where you stand depends on where you sit." The concept is probably as old as Plato, but this particular phraseology arose in the Bureau of the Budget as a result of events that occurred in late 1948 and early 1949. I was chief of the labor and welfare branch of the division of estimates of the Bureau, with responsibility for the budgets of the Federal Security Agency, the Veterans Administration, the Department of Labor, and several lesser agencies. One of my examiners came to me and said that he had been offered a position in the agency whose budget he reviewed, a job at a grade higher than he held in the Bureau. This examiner had been particularly critical. within the confines of the Bureau, of the agency that had offered him the job. It became clear that he would prefer not to accept the offer. Rather, he sought to use it as the basis for obtaining a grade raise where he was. He had three children, as I recall it, and laid understandable stress on the economics of the matter. But he emphasized his preference for work in the Bureau of the Budget, other things equal.

To have given him the raise would have upset the grade structure of the division. 1 told him that I appreciated his strong sense of loyalty to the Bureau, but that a raise was out of the question. He would have to make up his mind, I said, whether the job milieu or the salary was more important to him. He thought it over for a day and then, a hit ruefully, said he felt he owed it to his family to take the job offer. I told him I fully understood, wished him good luck, and said I hoped we would still he good friends after we cut his budget as he would have done.

A day or two after he departed, 1 said to one of my associates, "Just watch! Within three or four months he will be as critical of the Bureau of the Budget and as defensive of his agency as he has been the opposite within the Bureau." My associate was astonished at me. "Oh no!" he said, "he is much too objective and fair minded for that kind of a turnabout." My rejoinder was, "You should not dispute whether this will happen, but how long it will take." It took about two months longer than I estimated, as I recall it. When it did happen, I said to my associate, "You see, it depends on where you sit, how you stand." Wide-eyed, he said, "That deserves to be given the status of a law. You should call it "Miles' Law." And from then on, Miles' Law, later shortened to, "Where you stand depends on where you sit," spread by word of mouth among Washington's administrative cognoscenti.

I did not regard the behavior of my departed examiner as either surprising or reprehensible. Quite the contrary. If he had not turned into a strong advocate of his agency's financial needs, I would have been surprised and, quite frankly, disappointed. It was his function to do so. In order to be effective within his organization, he had to he its strong advocate in its external relationships.

I have not ever been aware that there were six additional Maxims which Miles framed to go with Miles' Law. They are:

• Maxim 1: The responsibility of every manager exceeds his authority, and if he tries to increase his authority to equal his responsibility, he is likely to diminish both.

• Maxim 2: Managers at any level think they can make better decisions than either their superiors or their subordinates; most managers therefore seek maximum delegations from their superiors and make minimum delegations to their subordinates.

• Maxim 3: Serving more than one master is neither improper nor unusually difficult if the servant can get a prompt resolution when the masters disagree.

• Maxim 4: Since managers are usually better talkers than listeners, subordinates need courage and tenacity to make their bosses hear what they do not want to hear.

• Maxim 5: Being two-faced—one face for superiors and one for subordinates—is not a vice but a virtue for a program manager if he or she presents his or her two faces open and candidly.

• Maxim 6: Dissatisfaction with services tends to rise rapidly when the provider of the services becomes bureaucratically bigger, more remote, and less flexible, even if costs are somewhat lower.

These are great. I would rank them in order of importance - Maxim 2, Maxim 4, Maxim 1, and Maxim 6.

I think Maxim 6 is a synopsis of the technology/customer satisfaction tension of the past decade where we have sought to disintermediate expensive customer service representatives and replace as many of their activities as possible with self-service technology. It is cheaper, and we are getting better at it.

But especially with complex customer service environments such as finance, health, and technology where the complexity of the service exceeds the capability of the average consumer, cheaper and better service is also met with rising dissatisfaction exactly because of Maxim 6. Self-service technology solutions make the service provider seem "bureaucratically bigger, more remote, and less flexible."