In school, if you paid someone to write your paper or take your test, you got in trouble. A big F. “No soup for you!”

So naturally, when you get a job and you pay someone else to do the work for you, you should also get in trouble, right? Fired on the spot!

Not so fast.

Isn’t that what we call “business”? Don’t we do this in a law practice?

We have customers or clients who pay us but our employees do a lot of the work. Maybe most of the work, if you look at the hours. And our clients don’t care, as long as the work gets done and is of sufficient quality.

That’s how we earn a profit. We’re “working smart”. We have leverage.

So, let me ask you, if you found one of your employees was outsourcing his work, what would you do? If he hired someone else to do the work and earned a profit on the difference between what you paid him and what he paid to get the work done, would you have a problem with that?

Assuming the work was high quality and no confidential information was shared, of course.

A software developer at Verizon was just discovered doing this very thing. He earned six-figures in his job and paid a Chinese firm ,000 to do the work. He spent his day surfing the web, playing games, and posting on Facebook.

When his employer found out, they fired him.

Me? I would have given him a raise and a promotion.

The work done by the Chinese firm was considered first rate. Praised for it’s quality, in fact. And always on time. The fact that someone else did it is irrelevant.

The man was lazy but very clever. He should be praised for his cleverness, not punished for it.

During World War II, a brilliant German military strategist described his criteria for managing personnel:

“I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent — their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy — they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent — he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief.”

The author (there is some question as to which of two men actually said it) thought that someone who is “clever and lazy” is qualified for the highest leadership duties, “because he possessed the clarity and composure necessary for difficult decisions.” They are “natural delegators,” always looking for simpler, easier ways to do things. They “focus on essentials, and despise ‘busywork’.”

If the developer at Verizon worked for me, I’d slap him on the back and ask him to show me other ways I could get a six-figure job done for only $50,000.

But no, his boss was probably embarrassed by what he did. “Clever and diligent,” no doubt, and had to fire him.

All our lives, we’ve been told that laziness is a sin. We’re punished for it in school and on the job. We’re told that hard work is a virtue. But it’s not true. Hard work, for the sake of working hard, is the sin. If there’s an easier way to do something and we ignore it, we squander God’s gift of time.

You owe it to yourself, your family, your employees, and your God, to find the easier way, the better way, the more leveraged way to get things done. You’ll earn more and have plenty of time to play games and post on Facebook.

Leveraging time is one of the six keys in The Attorney Marketing Formula