Doing everything it takes to achieve some result, rather than just following the rules, creates perverse incentives for other people to slack off because they know that you will do whatever it takes.
It may still be a good idea when the consequences of not getting the result are so bad that even the negative effect of the perverse incentive isn’t as bad, but that usually happens only with superheroes and Harry Potter-like characters.
Also, Batman is not so much defined by taking action, but by plot armor.
It can also create unsustainable expectations, which can be just as bad.
I once worked for a company that got bitten badly by this. Just after it left the startup stage, it got slapped with a contract that it realistically couldn’t have met on time. Unwilling to accept this, the engineering team chose to do whatever it took to get the product out the door; one senior engineer in particular, a friend of mine, put in hundred-hour weeks to implement key features. And they succeeded. I probably wouldn’t have gotten hired if they hadn’t—I came in just after this went down—but that sparked a pattern of behavior that turned out to be the company’s downfall.
Management interpreted this success not as the act of heroic effort that it was, but as a demonstration of engineering’s regular capabilities. So the next few projects were scheduled just as tightly. We had some early successes, but burnout nipped at our heels throughout, and it finally caught up to my friend when work-related stress and lack of free time lost him his wife and his religion. (I’d been putting in crazy hours myself, but I was just out of college and didn’t have as much to lose.) That proved lethal to the project; two deadlines slipped before it (nominally) got out of beta. The next project turned out similarly. After that we were given saner schedules, but the damage had been done; engineering didn’t trust management, management didn’t trust engineering, and the whole product line had taken a serious credibility hit.
Doing everything it takes to achieve some result, rather than just following the rules, creates perverse incentives for other people to slack off because they know that you will do whatever it takes.
It may still be a good idea when the consequences of not getting the result are so bad that even the negative effect of the perverse incentive isn’t as bad, but that usually happens only with superheroes and Harry Potter-like characters.
Also, Batman is not so much defined by taking action, but by plot armor.
It can also create unsustainable expectations, which can be just as bad.
I once worked for a company that got bitten badly by this. Just after it left the startup stage, it got slapped with a contract that it realistically couldn’t have met on time. Unwilling to accept this, the engineering team chose to do whatever it took to get the product out the door; one senior engineer in particular, a friend of mine, put in hundred-hour weeks to implement key features. And they succeeded. I probably wouldn’t have gotten hired if they hadn’t—I came in just after this went down—but that sparked a pattern of behavior that turned out to be the company’s downfall.
Management interpreted this success not as the act of heroic effort that it was, but as a demonstration of engineering’s regular capabilities. So the next few projects were scheduled just as tightly. We had some early successes, but burnout nipped at our heels throughout, and it finally caught up to my friend when work-related stress and lack of free time lost him his wife and his religion. (I’d been putting in crazy hours myself, but I was just out of college and didn’t have as much to lose.) That proved lethal to the project; two deadlines slipped before it (nominally) got out of beta. The next project turned out similarly. After that we were given saner schedules, but the damage had been done; engineering didn’t trust management, management didn’t trust engineering, and the whole product line had taken a serious credibility hit.